Starting about three years ago, Microsoft hardware chief Terry Myerson began to show a slide during meetings with the board, executives and his own team. It represented a classroom full of college kids, all of them with Apple products. Myerson's message was quite simple: the company needed to make drastic changes or run the risk of losing the next generation of customers to its long-term rival.
On Tuesday, Microsoft Corp. unveiled a stylish and lightweight laptop that looks as good as anything Apple has built. The machine, which boots in seconds and features a new version of Windows, is the latest product to appear under the Surface brand, which already sells a popular line of tablets and an all-in-one desktop. Myerson is betting on the new laptop goes a long way towards persuading Mac loyalists to give their company a try. Microsoft is targeting college students who believe they are eager for a $ 1,000 premium laptop that they can use for four years without worrying that it will become obsolete before they graduate.
The laptop will go on sale next month, and it is too early to predict how well it will sell. But that does not exist at all demonstrates to what extent Microsoft's hardware ambitions have come in the last five years. Before the revocation, the division had accumulated a depressing body count: nearly $ 10 billion in write-downs, tens of thousands of layoffs, enraged associates, frustrated investors, and the disintegration of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, 40. Part of your push into the hardware.
Under Myerson and CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has taken a disciplined approach to hardware, focusing heavily on uncrowded market segments or creating new categories, including the company's "mixed reality" HoloLens goggles that allow Users project 3D holograms into their environment and interact with them.
Everything else Microsoft leaves partners like Dell, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard. The Surface brand generated more than $ 4 billion in sales in the last fiscal year; Last month, for the first time, Microsoft passed the J.D. Power US Tablet Satisfaction. "We've grown so much in the last two years," says hardware marketing chief Yusuf Mehdi. It is night and day.Microsoft has not completely mastered the hardware.
Last week, quarterly sales fell as surface revenues declined 26 percent. The company was expecting a drop as its Surface Pro models are aging, but the fall was more drastic than expected by executives. It is a reminder that a relatively new company in the computer market still needs to learn how often to update the product line and how much to reduce prices to move old inventory. Executives are taking the setback in stride and say they remain committed to the surface brand and other gadgets.
The emergence of Microsoft as a hardware player coincides with the lack of innovation in Apple, where the Mac are taking a backing on the iPhone. It's been almost seven years since Apple redesigned Macbook Air, the computer more like Microsoft's laptop. The latest MacBook Pro, released more than 500 days after its predecessor, was criticized by professionals who considered it to be less powerful and too difficult to use. Apple, which once mocked Microsoft during developer conferences with the slogan "Redmond, start your photocopiers," recently acknowledged that it had alienated Mac loyalists and had committed to doing better. The result: Microsoft has the opportunity to steal Apple's customers and establish itself as a gadget power.When Nadella became CEO in February 2014, it was not clear that Microsoft should be in the hardware business at all. Fourteen months earlier, the surface RT tablet had floated. Successive products were not much better. Meanwhile, Microsoft could no longer rely on its Windows monopoly because consumers had left the PC for tablets and smartphones. Nadella needed to find a way to stay relevant.At that time, the hardware team was preparing two new tablets for a spring release: Surface Mini and an improved version of Surface Pro, a category overflow machine that included a keyboard and a detachable screen. Nadella told them that the next device was to make or break. "His point was" this product has to be large, "says Panos Panay, a vice president who oversees surface products." This is our entry or exit to the hardware business. "The team killed Surface Mini because it was not different enough from what was already there. Instead, they focused on the other tablet, which became hot sale Surface Pro 3. Nadella also ordered the team to accelerate the development of a secret project that eventually became HoloLens, a brand new category.
The new CEO also made major operational changes. First Nadella acknowledged the purchase of Microsoft 2014 Nokia's phone unit was a failure, fired more than 15,000 people, noted the acquisition and largely abandoned the phone business. He then handed over the remains of the hardware unit and its demoralized workers to Myerson, who was already accused of reviving Windows. Now, software and hardware engineers and designers will work in tandem to create a seamless user experience, a pioneering philosophy at Apple decades ago.
Industrial designers, once relegated to a corral of rooms in a garage, were moved to their own building on the Microsoft campus. In a 100,000-square-foot lab, they use state-of-the-art 3-D printers and computer-controlled machines to quickly build prototypes until everything is fine. In a wing, which resembles a biology classroom with skulls, a skeleton and a 36-camera scanning equipment, the team tests the artifact's ergonomics on heads, wrists, and bodies of various sizes. Microsoft perfects audio in an "anechoic" camera that absorbs sound so effectively that the Guinness book called it Earth's quietest place. The new surface laptop required extensive testing because it dispenses holes into the speaker and instead transmits the sound through the keyboard.
At first, a colleague recommended that Myerson see a Ted talk given in 2009 by author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek. The issue was what makes leaders great. Sinek postulated that good companies know what they do and how they do it, but big companies know why. Watching the video online, Myerson wondered why Microsoft builds Windows. It was a hell of a question for the individual who ran a division that had been the main benefit of the company and engine revenue for over two decades. But with sales and erosion market share, Myerson was determined to figure out how to make Windows devices unique.
His team learned by observing how customers use the products, guessing their needs and trying to mesh them with paint programs and a stylus designed to work with Surface (an innovation followed later by Apple). While Apple long ago fell in love with the creative community (albeit less lately), Microsoft is now trying to forge its own relationship with artists, designers and architects with surface study. "There's so much human creativity springing up in Windows," says Myerson. That approach helped team design. "It is so wonderful from the perspective of crafts," he says. "It inspires so many new ideas and things we can do."In a short time, a company whose hardware mainly consisted of peripherals such as keyboards and mice (and briefly a line of cuddly toys and interactive wrists by Barney and Teletubbies) was deploying elegant brushed metal machines that, if not revolutionary, were inventive and friendly to the consumer .The surface book had a fulcrum hinge designed as a watchband that allows a laptop to remain open at any angle, and a screen that separates to use as a tablet. The Surface Dial, a $ 100 stand-alone wireless knob that went on sale last fall, lets users do a variety of things, from turning sound to changing colors and zooming in and out of planes. The Surface Studio is an all-in-one high-end computer with a massive screen that can be folded down on a digital drawing table. With the $ 3000 HoloLens, Microsoft is further afield among big companies trying their luck in augmented reality, even if it is now too expensive to become a mass market phenomenon. And Microsoft's work on new categories such as tablet combo tablets has opened the door to partners such as Lenovo, helping boost the market share of Windows. There is a big hole in the line of gadgets Microsoft: a mobile phone. But while it is estimated that more than 1.5 billion smartphones will be sold this year, the company says it is happy to stay on the sidelines unless it has something really different to offer. "We're not going to go out with another device that someone else has done," says marketing chief Mehdi. Anyway, smartphones are the news of yesterday, says the inventor of HoloLens and the futurist of the house Alex Kipman. "The phone is already dead," he says. "People just do not realize it." Kipman is convinced that some kind of mixed-mode device like the HoloLens will replace the phone, a theory that is repeated in Apple.
Microsoft has hesitated here and there. Killed a fitness band after two versions never got the adjustment or the pricing and the right performance, despite all the work in the measurement of wrists in the hardware lab. The first high-end Surface Book notebook had too much space between the screen and the keyboard when it was closed, causing complaints that allowed dust and dirt to enter. Quarterly revenue came after a drop in Surface tablet sales last year, according to IDC, while Apple withdrew part of its stake and Microsoft opted not to upgrade the Surface Pro line last Christmas. Meanwhile, says Myerson, Nadella is pushing for the business to generate more sales and profits.
Microsoft's hardware team is cautiously optimistic. The new products "are loved," says Panay. But "I tell you humbly, remember that I am also the person who went through the liquidation, I am also the person who was on stage and launched Surface RT".
Microsoft's hardware team is cautiously optimistic. The new products "are loved," says Panay. But "I tell you humbly, remember that I am also the person who went through the liquidation, I am also the person who was on stage and launched Surface RT".
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