Surface vs. ?

Regarding John Gruber’s Not Getting the iPad piece where he calls out Sam Grobart for:

jumping through hoops to justify his sensational “Microsoft’s new Surface tablet computer is not an iPad competitor” lead sentence

Is that a sensational lead sentence? Sure, but it isn’t like he buries what he means pages deep in the article. Here are the first three sentences:

Microsoft’s new Surface tablet computer is not an iPad competitor. It’s an ultrabook competitor.

I mean, of course it’s an iPad competitor, but it would appear Microsoft is going after other segments of portable computing as well.

Had he stopped right there, I might even agree with him. Unfortunately, Grobart does go on from there, and Gruber calls him out on some of what follows. However, let’s go back and focus on the first three sentences. I think they are actually pretty accurate.

First, a few points from Gruber:

  • Gruber frequently calls people out for dismissing the iPad as a device for consumption only.
  • Gruber has an iPad and a Macbook Air, but prefers to do most of his on-the-go content creation on the Air.
  • Gruber himself pointed out back in 2010 that in some ways the primary competitor of the MacBook Air is the iPad.

To me this gets at part of what is interesting, and part of what I think Grobart was trying to express, about the Surface announcement from Microsoft:

  • Apple has the MacBook Air and the iPad in competition with each other. In some sense this means that any product that competes with either the Air or the iPad must, by definition, compete with both of them.
  • At Apple the Air and the iPad learn from each other, but they aren’t on converging paths.
  • Microsoft seems to be aiming at a target in between the Air and the iPad. They are making a bet that the future isn’t tablets AND laptops, it is something in between.

Credit to Microsoft for taking a different position, and for being willing to jump into hardware to support that position. Of course, since they are still selling Windows to their (non-Apple) tablet and laptop competitors, it may be hard for Microsoft to lose, even if the Surface concept does.