TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Matt Buchanan:

If Windows 8 fails, it won’t kill the company, but it will raise some serious questions about what the future of Microsoft looks like. It could end up rich but invisible; important to businesses and computing and technology but not, in any immediate way, to normal people.

This is why it built Surface. It’s an “extension of Windows,” explains Panay. Windows 8 is too important to let other companies’ shitty PC hardware screw it up. Even though there are well over a billion PCs running Windows, Surface is the first PC that Microsoft has created itself in its nearly 40 years of existence.

Great piece by Buchanan that points to a problem for Microsoft: I don’t think it’s at all clear what the point of the Surface is. Is it just a more portable notebook that can be used like a tablet? Maybe that’s it, but the RT version won’t run existing Windows applications, so that doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps the Intel Surface will make good on this vision, but that version will be decidedly more expensive and will weigh 2 pounds.

Maybe a tablet device with Microsoft Office will be enough to make it a success. I don’t know. If I had to bet, though, it wouldn’t be for this release to be a huge success.