Microsoft forgot to solve a problem

It's easy to forget what the iPad looked like when it first came out.

It was roundly mocked for merely being a larger iPod touch, and the same criticism that is the thesis of this post was levied against it. Industry experts claimed it had no place, and posited that Apple was inventing a need simply to push a product into.

Over time, people found and invented new uses for their iPads, and they came to realize that they can serve legitimate needs and desires.

This article is as myopic as those experts once were. Perhaps the Surface will be complete failure. Perhaps it will catch on, and people will invent new uses that make them compelling. Reading tea leaves and slamming Microsoft are fun to do, but this is hardly convincing.

Nope. The problem with the Surface is not that "it doesn't solve a problem". The problem with the Surface is that it came into the market (1) late, (2) with little differentiation, and (3) without a substantial price advantage. It is Marketing 101. Change any of these factors and it would have been a success.

"Surface doesn't solve a problem, except for all the ones it does, and we're going to hand-wave those away."

Office, printing, a real filesystem, multitasking, mouse support, legacy app support (on the Intel version), USB connection, etc.

While I am more friendly to Microsoft than most (not difficult to do), I am perfectly willing to admit the real problems with the surface (screen resolution, price, etc). "Not solving a problem" isn't one of them. I asked my mother the other day (who has used windows 8 successfully to some degree) if she would ever use her computer if she could print from her iPad. She said no.

Problem solved.

I agree that Surface probably wasn't designed to solve a user's specific problem of fitting plug A into socket B.

What it does do is:

1. Run MS Office natively.

2. Allows you to touch your Windows 8 app store apps.

Disclosure: I recently accepted a position at MSFT but not anything related to Surface.