The Verge: “Microsoft Surface defined 10 years of Windows PCs — can it nail the next 10?”

Microsoft took a nearly $1 billion hit on Surface RT around six months after its launch because the company had simply built too many devices that it couldn’t sell. It was a near disaster for the entire Surface project.

Days after the news of the $1 billion write-down made headlines around the world, the Surface team of around 300 people was all standing in a lab they were still in the middle of building. Panay had called an all-hands meeting, and it was a tense moment for the team.

I just said, Everybody stand up and take a step forward. They did, we all did together, as a team, recounts Panay, his voice softening with emotion. I said, We have a plan, stay in the boat, keep rowing your oar. We’re going to get there. We have a plan, stick with it.

Tom Warren

The success of the Surface, dismissed by many at launch, is a testament to the value of steadiness, of having confidence in a product vision and improving the finished product with each iteration. A lesson other Silicon Valley companies could do well to learn, especially Google with their myriad of competing chat apps and constant resets of the Pixel smartphone line.

The 2022 Surface lineup includes the Surface Pro 9, Surface Studio 2 Plus, and Surface Laptop 5.

Its operating system, a new streamlined and lightweight version called Windows 10X designed specifically for dual-screen hardware, went on to become Windows 11 and offer the types of simplifications in Windows that we see today.

We were able to envision 10X through the lens of Surface Neo, which allowed us to not bring forward the 20 years of the Windows history and all the problems we’d tried to solve on a single-screen device, says Carmen Zlateff, who was the engineering lead on Windows 10X. Once the project was paused, we looked at it and said, This is what customers want anyway: simple, modern, calm.

As much as Microsoft’s hardware products have improved and diversified over the past decade, I can’t help but feel that its software design has gone the opposite direction, particularly on the Windows side. After the bold experiment of a touch-first OS with Windows 8, Microsoft has gradually scaled back the touch-friendly components – not to mention Windows 11, a step back on multiple fronts in my view.

There’s nothing simple about an OS that hides commands behind secondary context menus and obscures critical features such as Backup; there’s nothing modern about an OS mindlessly adopting mobile design choices in the name of ‘familiarity’, nothing calming about dumbing down experience and frustrating long-time users in the name of some nebulous ‘simplicity’. Despite its faults, Windows 8 genuinely felt modern and fresh, and it could have developed into a better OS with refinements over time – none of that can be said about Windows 11, with its baffling backtracking in areas no one ever complained about.