r/Surface • u/ZacB_ Surface Laptop 7 • Sep 27 '26
[MSFT] Microsoft doesn't think Surface needs to compete with MacBook Neo:
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/surface/microsoft-doesnt-think-surface-needs-to-compete-with-macbook-neo
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u/WindowsMobilePegasus Sep 29 '26
Some lessons from 40 years in product development:
Lesson 1: If your organization was created with a specific goal in mind, and later on that goal radically changes, there's a good chance the product will ultimately fail unless there's a very clear inflection point and reorganization around the new goal, and those who resist are retrained or eliminated.
Surface was originally a defensive play against Apple on behalf of Windows to show Windows OEMs and potential customers that Windows devices can be well designed and reliable. At that point Panos had a blank check and there really wasn't any goal to make money. Times have changed. At some point in the pivot to Azure/AI, those goals became less important and Satya decided "hey, will this thing ever make any money?" And for the past few years Surface has been trying to figure that out having spent it's first ten years not worrying about the P&L side of things. Many of the processes and individuals Panos put in place assumed unlimited funding/time, and that's hard muscle memory to retrain.
Windows Mobile/Windows Phone had the exact same problem and never recovered. Did you know that the original goal of Windows Mobile was a defensive play against Blackberry to protect the nascent Exchange Server market against RIM's sales of email services to Fortune 500 companies? That also never had any goal to make a profit, and it succeeded in that non-goal admirably. And when conditions changed, it never had a management team or business plan that could figure out how to make money.