Interview with Microsoft's Jon Friedman, now chief designer for Office 365, on its failed products: 2004 SPOT watches, KIN phone, Courier tablet, and more
Tom Warren / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview sits inside a running Verge series where Microsoft's design leadership publicly dissects its own misfires: Panos Panay and other executives walked through Surface's failures and category reinvention bets in a prior retrospective on creating the Surface lineup, and a former Windows Phone designer separately unpacked Modern UI mistakes. What makes Friedman's version notable is his trajectory — the same executive went on to lead Microsoft 365 design through the Copilot era, giving a later interview on Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing AI lessons framed explicitly around what past failures taught him.
First-order effects
- Friedman, then chief designer for Office 365, converts three dead products — 2004 SPOT watches, the KIN phone, and the Courier tablet — into public design doctrine, directly shaping how Microsoft's productivity design org justifies its current bets.
Second-order effects
- The retrospective feeds the 'open design' philosophy Microsoft formalized afterward, which integrates hardware and software for more inclusive designs — the failures become the evidence base for a repeatable methodology rather than one-off confessions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, failure post-mortems by named design executives become a standing genre for large platform companies — a way to build internal license for risky hardware-software bets like Surface and, later, AI-infused Office, while managing external expectations.
The trend: Microsoft's design leadership is institutionalizing its own product failures into an explicit, public design philosophy that now underpins everything from Surface to Microsoft 365 Copilot.