Hill+Knowlton Strategies

You may have seen it garnered quite a bit of media attention this past week, and rightly so.  The Microsoft Surface tablet that launched this week heralds a new era for the company.  Traditionally, Microsoft has been a BYO hardware vendor which relied on its partners for machines to power its operating system – so it’s not surprising that the world media has taken note of the fact that the company has gone in this new direction.

During the week I read a number of media articles, analyst reports and blog posts about Microsoft’s announcement.  I wanted to share with you all this blog post from Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps, who believes that the Surface tablet is good news for Microsoft, and could mark a critical turning point in the company’s product strategy.

Epps says that although Microsoft has been criticised for past ventures into the hardware space (for example, the Zune player), it has had some real product successes like the Xbox.  She also comments that the Surface is the first example of Microsoft using the hardware combined with software ecosystem model, which Apple employs.  It also now allows the Windows brand to directly compete with Apple.

It’ll be an interesting six months or so in watching how consumers respond to the Surface, and of course, how its competitors respond.