No one needs an iPad, that's for sure.
But when I was a student, I would have KILLED for the Surface RT. Included Office (especially Word with footnotes, Track Changes, TOC, etc.), all-day battery life, decent-enough browser to do everything, a few touch games to take a break. And only 2 lbs total including Type cover next to my ginormous textbooks. Eh, and no worries about malware. I spent over $2+k for different Japanese subnotebooks at the time instead, and they served me quite well, besides being head-turners.
I'm not a student anymore, but I still value mobility and longevity over raw power because I travel and write outside of home just enough for all of that to matter. (And I have a desktop.)
I don't agree about the general desktop mode criticism--as a smart power-user who knows the difference between tablet/desktop OSes--but I can see how it didn't help the confusion about software installation when MS itself failed on all marketing fronts. Desktop mode is still ideal for all the fine fiddling because there's only so much discrete information you can put in a small area (like lots of different files in "detailed view"). MS could have saved itself a lot of headaches if it made everything clearer from the outset and trained salespeople better. Or, the faster and cheaper way...instead of getting rid of the desktop mode, a much better solution is to HIDE/disable it by default, and smart people who know what they're doing can enable it. There, done. Let's move on.
As for the competition like the Atom tabs mentioned in the article, I get the feeling that the article writer and many others missed a big point. MS claimed that it was going into hardware to force their manufacturers to be more creative with the Windows platform. In that respect, it would seem they were 100% successful. Face it--the market for this type of device was dead until the Surface started making the news.
This reminds me of what happened between Transmeta and Intel. Intel was not seriously in the mobile CPU market, by the way, until Transmeta in the '90s started gaining traction in bleeding-edge ultramobile computing and forced Intel's hand in a previously underserved market (Intel spokespeople allegedly admitted this to press at a conference). Thus, everyone can thank Transmeta for forcing the Intel to create their first Centrino/Pentium M. And tah-dah, with the death of Transmeta, selling their IP to Intel, now we have the power-efficient mobile computing market. Then the short-lived netbook craze killed the niche subnotebook market but the popularity forced companies to rethink ultramobile computing, which lead to a repeat evolution to Intel Ultrabooks like I predicted in 2008, and then the iPad was released as the "netbook killer"...
But while I was watching all of that, all I wanted was a new, sleeker iteration of my subnotebooks imported from Japan. I didn't even consider touchscreen back then, but with the Surface RT, it feels natural to type on the keyboard and then touch the screen for interface interactions. In fact, after a long period of use and returning to my desktop, I find myself reaching for my 25" LCD screen sometimes!
The vast majority of the Surfaces' problems went like this:
(1) Shitty business decisions: "Let's release the Surface RT with slow and buggy preview Office despite the fact that Office is the single biggest killer app suite on the thing." No, really, you should've waited at least a month or something. The first impression is critical, and though I bought my SurRT after the major firmware patches and updates, a lot of other people stick by that hearsay impression.
(2) Shitty marketing. MS, your marketing sucks. Dancing people? WTF? You could take lessons from IBM and Mastercard for great, targeted marketing that makes sense and sticks with you. You should've talked to a lot of students first. You should've marketed to students first. (You should not have even mentioned business for Surface RT without clearly talking about umbrella licensing and putting Outlook in there.)
(3) Shitty information everywhere! I personally don't understand why people got confused that you can't install desktop applications on Windows RT, but clearly the ball was dropped in multiple places.
(4) Shitty reviews based on shitty information or incorrect use cases.
Is the product itself shitty? No. Neither Surface is a bad product--they fit particular use cases. And only when a person finds the combination of hardware and software fits their lifestyle does it become the perfect device. It kills me when idiots buy any product and find it doesn't fit their use case and then blames the product itself. Crap marketing had a lot to do with it here, sure, but really the only time you blame the product is when it genuinely fails what it should do--like a camping backpack's seams ripping. In the case of Surface, the common types of complaints are more like "I bought a Honda Fit, but it's a piece of crap because it's not a Subaru Forester."
