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Per­fect Skin: A Novel by Nick Earls

Clear Sur­face

Even today, so late in the game, on the 2012 sum­mer sol­stice, when you pic­ture vaca­tion­ers read­ing your book, do you find it hard to envision…a tablet?

In their hands. Your book. A tablet. An e-reader. A lap­top. A phone.

No swizzle-sticky paper­back under the towel. No Cop­per­toned dust­cover, as Brian O’Leary wrote this week, “DRM-free since Gutenberg.”

No, a tablet. This is why we pay atten­tion to the bright-shinies. And how ’bout that new Sur­face tablet/PC that Microsoft intro­duced Mon­day? When have both the snot-nerds and the fan­boys been so wel­com­ing to the Stuffy Ones from Redmond?

Microsoft Sur­face Just Made the Mac­Book Air and the iPad Look Obso­lete, chor­tled Jesus Diaz in his homily at Giz­modo.

Microsoft has guts. It’s what you get when you’re the under­dog; either that or you curl into a RIM and die…After yesterday’s Sur­face event—assuming they don’t fum­ble the execution—Gates’ chil­dren may have found the weapon to stop the heirs of Jobs and turn the tide.

 

At the Times, Sam Gro­bart was work­ing to get Diaz’s head-to-head assump­tion out of the way, in Microsoft’s Not Com­pet­ing With the iPad — Not Entirely:

There’s a sig­nif­i­cant pop­u­la­tion out there, peo­ple who look at an iPad and say, “I like it, but can I get one to replace my lap­top? Even for just some of the time?” And the hon­est answer has always been, “No.” The iPad has plenty of acces­sories, but it’s not a pro­duc­tiv­ity device.

Matt Rosoff at Busi­ness Insider went look­ing for the ratio­nale behind Why Microsoft Was Forced To Make a Tablet. In fact, two tablets:

At least two mod­els of a new prod­uct called Sur­face. Make no mis­take: these are PCs, not just “tablets.” Microsoft does not draw the dis­tinc­tion between PCs and tablets as Apple and other ven­dors have.

And that’s the point.

While the bright-shiny folks were wor­ry­ing along about the Surface’s great-looking cover key­boards — and pars­ing the RT ver­sion (lighter oper­a­tion) vs. the Pro ver­sion (to run legacy Win­dows apps and com­pete with Mac­Book Air and Ultra­books) — oth­ers were catch­ing on to a shape, if not the shape, of mar­kets to come.

 

Richard Waters of the Finan­cial Times in an inter­view on CNBC:

What’s hap­pen­ing is the entire per­sonal com­put­ing mar­ket …is being com­pletely rein­vented. The iPad has two-thirds of that mar­ket, and noth­ing has come even close to scratch­ing the (ahem) sur­face. Microsoft is mak­ing an incred­i­ble gamble.

CNET’s Scott Stein, also on CNBC:

They’re try­ing to do what Google has failed at and what Black­Berry and oth­ers have failed at, and that’s to cre­ate some­thing clear to go against Apple.

Waters:

They (Microsoft) are scared…The real prob­lem is that devel­op­ers cre­at­ing the most excit­ing new apps are not doing them for PCs…They (Microsoft) have to spend bil­lions of dol­lars to get into hardware…(And) when will Microsoft get into smartphones?

Still, it was easy to remain overly focused on the unveil­ing event.

The big screens, com­pany hon­chos dressed way down (some shirt­tails were out!) and pac­ing around the stage, live-bloggers from all our favorite tech-mania sites. My fave: Dana Woll­man for Engad­get.

And, sure enough, while Microsoft pulled some praise for updat­ing its announce­ment modus (the “kids” do love these big old CES-ish spec­ta­cles, you know), it was dicey to go out there with­out pric­ing or release dates.

Brett San­dusky wrote that UX marked the spot on which Red­mond fal­tered, in When will the Sur­face surface?

Yeah yeah yeah, specs. Good. Nice. USB. Ooh. Ahh. Cover. Ooh. Ahh. Price? When? Ooh. Cover. Cover. Cover. Typ­ing on the cover. Com­pete with iPad. Ooh. Ahh. Price? Ok… NOW! Price?

 

 

No, Steve Ballmer and cohorts didn’t name a price — leav­ing pun­dits to guess all week, which is tedious. And the best guesses at tim­ing seem to be fall-winter, the Win­dows 8 Pro Sur­face fol­low­ing the RT model by three months. In these areas, and in the pro­to­typic sense for the thing, the event was a bit like announc­ing your startup before it starts up.

But the user expe­ri­ence (that’s “UX,” you know) of the announce­ment event was less crit­i­cal than what’s to come when, as San­dusky puts it, the Sur­face surfaces.

As Quentin Hardy had it in his piece in the Times, Microsoft’s Sur­face Pro: Sorry, H.P.:

With Microsoft’s new tablet, called Sur­face, you can finally get Win­dows Office on some­thing like an iPad.

Catch that? Your Eth­er­nau­ti­cal UX goes like this:

• First, we want them sell­ing sun­screen with each unit for beach read­ing on that baby next sum­mer solstice.
• And sec­ond, yes, Vir­ginia, you can work your man­u­script on it. By the sea, by the sea, by the beau­ti­ful sea…

As Nick Bil­ton cinched it in Microsoft Sur­face Allows Peo­ple to Cre­ate:

The iPad, for all its glory, suf­fers from one very dis­tinct flaw: It’s very dif­fi­cult to use for cre­ation. The key­board on the screen, although pretty to look at, is abysmal for typ­ing any­thing over 140 char­ac­ters. There isn’t a built-in pen for note-taking, either…Apple doesn’t seem to want the iPad to be a cre­ator, but more of a con­sumer. Microsoft, and its new Sur­face tablet, wants to do both.

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.