EN: An Apple fanboy's love letter to Microsoft's new Surface Duo
Credit: Microsoft Surface
Hey, I think I love you. And this is coming from an Apple Fanboy and Product Manager of an iOS app.
Or rather, I love the idea of you. How can this be, if we haven’t even met?
Because you’re the vision of a Product Manager. We could see that from the way that Panos Panay (the Chief Product Officer for Microsoft’s entire surface line) spoke about you.
You embody the idea of a device that becomes what the user needs, to do what they want.
While presenting, Panos wasn’t following a strictly rehearsed script, and the entire moment was conducted naturally. He is not a great speaker. But he is your biggest advocate.
He sounds like I did when I was ten years old, and was showing everyone the most incredible thing I had found — a pencil case full of secret compartment, a LEGO car that morphed into a hovercraft, the situations my Swiss army knife had saved me from…
Come to think of it, I still sound like that about a ton of stuff, usually my phone.
He loves the way you are, not the way a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft would, but the way a Product Manager would. He knows you’re meant to solve people’s problems.
Credit: Microsoft Surface
It’s refreshing to hear a product manager say “we had this conversation at the beginning of every meeting: […] we want the product to both be able to predict where you’re headed, and to be able to adapt to the way you use it […] at all times.”
When gestures feel intuitive, when actions have the imagined result, when you can tap a link on an app and it opens in the other screen, “keeping you in flow”… This is technology getting out of the user’s way.
And that is a Product team keeping their goal in sight.
This is what I love about Apple: a product is thought of in its entirety. The hardware heightens the software, and the software heightens the ecosystem. And Panos and his team at Microsoft set out to do just that: to make a product that becomes what the user needs — a bigger screen, a bigger keyboard, two spaces side by side or a huge slab of glass to scroll, or just a wide phone.
And that’s the thing: you can make and take calls. But you’re not a phone. And you’re evidently not a tablet… Definitely not a computer. You’re a foldable device that was thought of, to predict what you need and adapt to what you’re doing.
You’re the means to the user’s end.
I love the idea of you because Panos Panay is passionate about the idea of you. And this idea is revolutionary.
May so many whatever-devices come after you.
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