A look at Microsoft's hardware design labs and how the company designed the Surface Hub 2S
Building 33 on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, houses a conference room unlike any you've ever seen. It includes an enormous glowing sphere, a buckyball for a boardroom.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Digital Trends tour of Building 33 lands one day after Microsoft's unveiling of the Surface Hub 2S, and it explains how the product got here: the line began with the 84-inch, $20K Surface Hub announced in 2015, pivoted with the 50.5-inch rotating Teams tablet teased as Hub 2 in 2018, and now ships in June at $9,000 for the 50-inch model.
Why it matters: the labs are the through-line. The same campus that prototyped projection tech, AI for meetings, and touchscreen desks at the Envisioning Center is where the Hub's form factor was iterated — and the Surface Hub 3's later smart rotation and portrait mode shows that pipeline kept producing generations.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the $9,000 50-inch Hub 2S get a device whose rotating, Teams-first design was developed in these Redmond labs — a sharp step down from the $20K 84-inch format the line launched with in 2015.
- The tour itself functions as positioning: Microsoft is framing the Hub not as a big screen but as the output of a dedicated hardware design organization.
Second-order effects
- Rival makers of large-format collaboration displays face pressure to match both the sub-$10K price point and the rotate-to-portrait form factor Microsoft previewed back in 2018.
- The prototype work housed alongside the Hub effort — AI for meetings, desks doubling as touchscreens — signals where Microsoft intends to take meeting-room hardware next, pulling competitors toward software-defined rooms rather than spec-sheet battles.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the conference-room display becomes an accessory to a collaboration platform: Microsoft's labs iterate hardware specifically to serve Teams, making the software stack the real product.
- Sustained multi-generation hardware design of this kind is exactly what a durable hardware talent moat looks like — an institutional capability in Redmond that component-buying rivals cannot replicate quickly.
The trend: Large-format meeting-room hardware is shifting from one-off expensive screens toward cheaper, software-tethered collaboration surfaces, with Microsoft's Redmond design labs setting the generational cadence.