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| It's not about fashion-conscious style. Pulling out the Surface in a nice cafe to work in feels... awkward. Out of place.

This is your own hangup and has nothing to do with the tablet.

Do you remember the Surface teaser advert? The design language of the device is about aggression, dominance, edge. This is socially out of place in some settings.

Also, I'm entitles to my social hangups. We live in a social environment, not a vacuum.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but even then, who are you to judge someone or something else? This is the exact problem with the computer ecosystem right now (and more often than not, the Apple cult). I understand that you care how it looks, but to go as far as to care how others might perceive the device you chose to accomplish your work? Why would you care - let alone let it influence your decision - on what to buy, what to wear, or what to use?

Be your own person, because half of your "critiques" are based on how you think other people perceive you.

>This is your own hangup and has nothing to do with the tablet.

A few things.

First, that's rude, especially to someone who's taken the time to express an honest view.

Second, he never claimed to be speaking on behalf of some objective viewpoint. This is clearly an opinion piece, and it's redundant to say, "Well, that's your opinion." Of course it is!

Third, and this bears repeating: his opinion is valid and useful in-and-of itself. It doesn't need to be "correct", and you don't need to agree with it for that to be so. What you did there was attempt to invalidate his viewpoint, his reaction. It is a form of control, of bullying, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying it.

What on earth are you ranting about ?

It IS his own hangup if he feels uncomfortable using a laptop in a cafe. Millions of people do it every single day and see no issue.

Word autosave isn't good enough...some stupid side bar pops up with a number of revisions of documents that I instincively ignore.

You are mixing up Auto Save with Auto Recover. In Word, your first line of defense is explicitly saving the document. Perhaps if clicking the button is too difficult you could hit Ctrl-S? That's what I do.

Failing explicitly saving your document, you could program Word to Auto Save your document every minute if you wanted to. This doesn't bring up (or even create) different revisions of the document. It literally is just as if you clicked the Save button (or hit Ctrl-S).

Failing the Auto Save - maybe you have it set to 10 minutes and you typed for 9 minutes when your computer crashed? You have Auto Recover. That's where Word automatically detects that Something Bad happened and shows you the last few times it made a copy of your Word environment for you (which includes your document).

So, three levels of protection that work pretty well for most people.

some stupid side bar pops up with a number of revisions of documents that I instincively ignore. Cancel, go away! I'm busy! Oh, now I've lost that work.

Perhaps you would be less busy if you weren't ignoring popups that were attempting to help you save your work.

My honest assessment is that you want your real work on Surface to be as easy and fun as your Subway Surfers on iPad.

I think you summed up exactly what's wrong with the Microsoft approach to documents here.

In Pages, or Google Docs, it's just a document. It's always saved, always up to date, it just works.

That's the future.

In Pages, or Google Docs, it's just a document. It's always saved, always up to date, it just works

I have a friend that uses Google Docs. He once sent me a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet.

I got lost in the user interface at one point and ended up seeing the list of all of his documents. I clicked on one thinking it was the correct one and loaded what appeared to be on quick notice a journal of various medical problems he's been having.

That's the future.

You're right. The future is people using technology that they don't want to be bothered to learn and thereby having it do things that nobody (especially them) intended. I'm sorry you lost a document but you fell through 3 failsafe levels and did it to yourself. Pretending things like that don't happen to Google Docs is ridiculous and shows your true bias.

"The future" also has half the power, speed and features too.

Also, it obviously doesn't "just work" for you because you couldn't even use Google Docs in your place of business.

That's pretty much why I avoid office. Just save, don't interrupt me, or reqire me to wet things up, just get out of my way.

There's no reason it can't be "easy and fun" like on an ipad apart from years of "this is how it's always been".

There's no reason you can't use non-Office programs on a Surface either.

Unfortunately for people who don't like Office - there'r no good alternatives if you want to conduct business in the environment where Office is most widely used.

"It's clearly a business device for office work, and doing office work in a cafe feels like an imposition."

Better tell my girlfriend. She's a nanny. I just knew she should have bought an iPad.