Playing With Microsoft's Surface

It's a sturdy and fun device, but Surface will be a disaster for Microsoft. Here's why.
Unboxing the Microsoft Surface with Windows RT

I got to play with a Microsoft Surface tablet over the weekend and developed some unique opinions. I've concluded that the device will be a disaster for Microsoft but not for any obvious reasons. In fact, it is sturdy and fun and should sell well in the Microsoft stores once people begin to handle it.

The problem is not the quality of the device or the very functional Windows 8 experience you get on it. It didn't even dawn on me that this device will not run normal Windows software. In fact, I forgot that I was playing with Windows RT. That's the problem.


Windows 8I'm not sure what happened to the culture at Microsoft but somewhere along the line, someone in the executive suite forgot that most off-the-street buyers of computer technology don't know anything. Most do not read tech magazines, reviews, or even how-to books. They are idiots when it comes to computers and there are millions of them. If you are reading this article, by the way, you are not one of them.

Most users are not even sure how a computer works. So, they think they are buying a Windows laptop/tablet. It says "Windows," right? They expect these devices to be Windows compatible in every way, but you cannot even run Mozilla Firefox on it. (I tried, of course.)

Nothing anyone downloads for Windows will work.


Of course, their knowledge ends there.

I predict thousands of these Surfaces will be returned to the stores, accompanied by all sorts of questions fired at the folks at the Guru bar. They will have to explain exactly why this thing looks like the Windows 8 that everyone else uses but why it doesn't run all the same cool games or popular programs. Why? Why? Why?

It's a nightmare waiting to happen.

And what makes it worse is that the Surface tablet is very slick, polished, and attractive. It's compelling. It's a very pleasant computing experience, although alien to what I personally want in a PC or tablet. I've always preferred the feeling of personal control with DOS in the old days, then Windows.

There is an important psychological aspect to using these machines: When you save a file you hear a disk drive grinding and know where the file is located. You know details about the file and can move it or retrieve it effortlessly. It's not buried mysteriously someplace with weird or unknown attributes and is only retrievable via the program that created it or with some magic.

The Surface divorces itself from that ideal, as does Windows 8, to a large extent.

Perhaps I'm old-fashioned to complain about such things, but once you begin to dumb down the OS so the masses can use it effortlessly, you are just enlarging the base of ignorant users. These are the ones that will be lined up wondering why this Windows machine is not working right. This RT thing was not a good idea.

Related StoryCheck out our complete Windows 8 coverage.

You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.

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