With the Surface Tablet, Fist-Swinging Microsoft Jumps Back Into the Ring
Illustration: Sébastien Thibault — Microsoft's June unveiling of the remarkable Surface tablet came almost exactly a year after a much more important milestone. In May 2011, the nine years of legal sanctions …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Surface unveiling lands a year after the May 2011 expiry of Microsoft's nine years of antitrust sanctions — the legal framework that had effectively discouraged the company from building its own PCs against its OEM licensees. Freed of that constraint, Microsoft announced in June that it would sell the Surface itself, starting 26 October at Microsoft Stores, alongside Windows RT machines built with partners.
The reaction in the prior coverage splits cleanly: Monday Note framed the move as an open question of apostasy or head fake, Business Week argued the tablet should shame the PC industry into better design, and Gizmodo went further, calling Microsoft the most exciting company in tech. Daring Fireball — which had been writing about tablets since its January 2010 pre-iPad 'Original Tablet' piece — picked up this Wired essay along with a handful of prominent Twitter voices, giving the story a modest but notable echo beyond Wired itself.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's OEM partners — the PC makers who license Windows — now find themselves competing on retail shelves against their own operating-system supplier when Surface goes on sale on 26 October.
- Microsoft Stores become the launch channel for first-party hardware, giving the company direct control over pricing, merchandising, and the customer relationship for the first time in the modern PC era.
Second-order effects
- PC manufacturers must decide whether to double down on Windows RT devices built 'in collaboration' with Microsoft or hedge toward rival mobile platforms, since Microsoft has demonstrated it will fill any perceived gap in its ecosystem with its own hardware.
- Apple faces a competitor attacking the tablet market from the productivity angle rather than the consumption angle, while Intel and chip suppliers watch a major Windows device ship on ARM-class silicon.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry norm shifts from licensing software to partners toward vertically integrated hardware-software-services bundles — Microsoft's same-week SkyDrive app updates and store work show the services layer being built out to support the devices.
- Regulatory history cuts both ways: the sanctions that expired in May 2011 were designed to prevent exactly this kind of first-party competition, so the Surface gambit tests whether a decade of antitrust oversight permanently shaped — or merely delayed — Microsoft's structural instincts.
The trend: Platform companies are converging on Apple's vertically integrated model, with Microsoft's Surface marking the moment the largest software licensor chose to compete with its own hardware partners.