The Microsoft Surface series is a well-established line of premium mobile devices. How are its designers continuing to innovate?
This year marks ten years of the Microsoft Surface family of tablets, laptops, and hybrid computing devices. We caught up with Microsoft’s Ralf Groene, corporate vice president of Design, Windows and Devices, and Pete Kyriacou, corporate vice president of Devices, to talk about the milestone and what hardware means to a company that was born out of software.
That first device was a tablet, announced in June 2012 as the first PC ever to be designed and distributed by the Seattle-based monolith. It was soon joined by the Surface Pro. Both were hybrid devices, with detachable keyboard/screen covers that turned the tablet into a slender laptop. The key competitor was, of course, the iPad, which had already been on the market for a couple of years.
‘It’s like when famous architects design a chair,’ Groene notes. ‘Do they do something whimsical? Do they do something fancy? We had to think how our values would be represented by a laptop.’ Microsoft’s software background drove the innovation, although Groene says the Surface Pen was essentially developed at a time when no software really made great use of it. Nor did divisions like Microsoft Office really embrace the potential for the touch screen.
For Kyriacou, it was the Surface Pro 3 that marked the point the platform had really matured. ‘It was a full laptop, but also a pen tablet,’ he says, pointing out how long it took to refine the physical thinness of the devices. Neither designer can be drawn on what might come next. ‘A chair is designed through the behaviour of sitting, and a laptop through the behaviour of typing,’ Groene says. ‘It’s not the greatest experience for using a pointer, sketching or even note-taking.
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