The Surface demo dazzles with its 3G goodness. But what's impressive and surprising is that somehow someone at Microsoft was allowed to create a user interface unburdened by "compatibility" with two decades of spaghetti code. What a concept! And no "Start" button!
Another hopeful sign is that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appears to agree that Surface is important - or, at least, urgent. He announced earlier this month that Microsoft is accelerating the development of a consumer version.
Here's what I believe Microsoft needs to do to save its vitally important operating systems business:
1. Never compromise on driver compatibility, not even for Intel.
2. Insist on the highest standards for compatibility stickers, then use your marketing millions to drive customers to partners that have earned those stickers. Drive the laggards, the cheaters and the inadequate vendors out of business. They're poisoning your swimming pool.
3. Make an operating system for each computer type - cell phone, UMPC, consumer desktop, enterprise desktop, enterprise server, supercomputer - optimized for that type, not as a dogmatic slave to the limitations of the generic desktop Windows vision.
4. Emphasize usability and simplicity over "feature rich" complexity. We don't need more options, features, capabilities, applications, peripherals and hardware vendors. We need better ones.
5. Emphasize usability and simplicity over backward compatibility for the consumer version of Windows. The 1990s are over. Don't sacrifice the future for customers and partner companies that are living in the past.
6. Throw everything they've got at getting the consumer version of Surface right. Surface is the future of the company. And Apple won't wait around. That company is aggressively patenting elements of the user interface of the future, and you know they'll build and market it successfully.
7. Be afraid of Apple, Google and Asus. Apple is eating your desktop marketshare because they succeed with simplicity and UI elegance. Google might do so with its cell phone UI. And Asus, a two-bit Taiwanese motherboard maker, was able to cobble together a quick-and-dirty UI for Linux that's way better than Windows Vista for UMPCs.
Microsoft: I'm rooting for you. I really am. But you've got to get your act together with your core business and ship an operating system that works, or this could be the beginning of the end of the company's leadership role in the industry.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. Contact Mike at mike.elgan@elgan.com or his blog, The Raw Feed.