The Surface project, which started in a small, windowless room on the ground floor, has now spread to take over nearly the entire, heavily secured building. The beeps of ID badge scanners and the clunks of heavy doors punctuate the daily routines of a team that, once a dozen employees, now numbers some 500 in Redmond alone and more than 1,000 internationally.
History
It was Julie Larson-Green, executive vice-president of the Devices and Studios group at Microsoft and a potential heir to the Microsoft throne. Back then, the Surface was a big, smart table-shaped computercontrolled by touch -- not today's thin laptop replacement. That Surface wowed nearly everyone who tried it, but its consumer applications were limited, to say the least.
When it came time to build the flagship, touch-based platform for Windows 8, Larson-Green knew who to call. Her pitch was simple and ultimately effective: "We're going to reinvent Windows and we need a showcase for the product. We need to do our own hardware to do that. You should come to Windows and build the Surface PC."
Even in the Microsoft tablet's infancy, the team called the project "Surface," though the group would cycle through many other options before finally deciding to keep the name and rebrand the smart tables as "PixelSense." (The leading Surface alternate, by the way, was "One." That title would go on to make a comfortable living at HTC.)
During the birth of the Surface, Steven Sinofsky was boss of Windows and a major Surface proponent. (He was also the man who brilliantly suggested putting a USB port on the Surface's AC adapter.) Sinofsky left Microsoft in November 2012, almost immediately after the tablet's debut. The public's initially cool response to the tablets and the sudden nature of his departuregave rise to no shortage of speculation, but the official word was that of an amicable parting of ways. "Steven did an awesome job of setting up our team," a Surface designer told us. "He's responsible for a lot of what we look like and how we work here. His presence is still felt."
Larson-Green now heads up the group that owns the Surface, also overseeing the launch of the Xbox One and every other piece of hardware that Microsoft makes -- and will make. If there's one thing the Surface team loves to tease but hates to discuss, it's future devices. "Surface 2 was being developed before the launch of Surface RT. That's something to frame,"
Those first 2012 Surfaces were impressive, the premiere efforts of a fledgling hardware team, designed under the watchful, steel-rimmed eyes of Microsoft's Wolfsburg-raised and Bauhaus-minded creative director Ralf Groene. No one could find many faults in the design of those slates, nor in the spot-on concept of a productivity-focused tablet.
But the execution suffered shortcomings. Battery life on the Surface Pro disappointed. Many wanted more screen pixels and more apps for the RT. And then there was the kickstand and its critical flaw: you could hardly call the Surface a laptop replacement if you couldn't comfortably use it in your lap.
Battery life? Improved by up to 100 percent on the new Pro. Screen resolution? 1080p on the Surface 2. Lap-friendly kickstand? Fingerprint-resistant exterior? Better cameras? Check, check, and double-check.
In the corners of the Edison lab, in various states of disassembly, there are prototypes and production versions of the PixelSense table, a device covered by numerous patents in which Bathiche is named. A big, truly different product like that is easy to get excited about, but he's just as happy to talk about the many improvements he and his team contributed to the next-gen Surfaces.
First among Bathiche's fixes is the new Touch Cover, barely distinguishable from the previous version externally, yet vastly different on the inside. What was basically one sensor per key, about 80 total, is now an array of 1,100 discrete sensors that can detect exactly how hard your finger is pressing and where it landed -- even if it landed between keys. This enables gestures and a new level of accuracy that the original Surface lacked. Along the way, his team added backlit keys and increased the rigidity of the typing surface. "We went from 80 sensors to 1,100, we added a light guide, and it's thinner. And it's stiffer. That's cool," Bathiche says.
That is cool, and indeed many of the most interesting innovations in this new line of Surface tablets lie not in the devices themselves but in their accessories. But just as with the first Surface, these innovations run the risk of receiving a giant collective shrug from the public. People just don't get excited about accessories, regardless of how innovative. Microsoft doesn't include any of the keyboards in the price of either tablet. This lets users choose whether and which keyboard cover to purchase, but it also has the side-effect of relegating these devices to footnote status.
But the new Surface Pro's biggest improvement, battery life that lasts twice as long, also risks going unacknowledged. Double the battery life in a new machine would be a stunning development under normal circumstances, but Intel's Haswell CPUs have essentially made such improvements mandatory for x86 systems launched in 2013. We've come to expect it.
The Surface team insists it owes only half the new Surface's battery life improvement to the latest silicon from Intel. According to the team, Microsoft engineers toiled for months to optimize every driver and every internal component, measuring current to the closest microamp, reducing the number of low-power DDR3 chips, and making countless other tweaks. One thing they didn't change: the size of the batteries. They remain the same as before.
The critical question
One by one, the Microsoft team has checked off almost every upgrade dropped from the initial version of Surface because of cost or complexity. If you had a complaint about the original Surface hardware, chances are your concern has now been addressed. The new Surface devices are world-class; the Surface 2 sparks with great performance and a bright, 1080p, calibrated display. It looks and feels fantastic in the hand, and, at $449 for 32GB, is priced quite competitively with the $599 32GB iPad. The new Pro, meanwhile, has all that battery life and more performance to boot. That Microsoft pulled all this off in a relatively short period of time certainly is an accomplishment.
However, there's another, vastly important aspect of the Surface success equation: the software. Some of the most critical problems with the original slates were core aspects of Windows 8. The operating system is far and away the most finger-friendly Windows yet, but the need to frequently drop into desktop mode on the Pro raised a host of troublesome scaling issues. Those issues were less of a problem on the RT, but only thanks to the incompatibility with legacy apps. New apps have since marched steadily into the Windows app store, climbing to over 100,000 choices, but major gaps (Pandora, Rdio, Firefox, Chrome, YouTube, HBO Go, Facebook, to name a few) remain.
The tablets that were meant to be a showcase for Windows are evolving more rapidly and more progressively than the operating systems they run.
Windows 8.1 helps the scaling issue somewhat by adding features like discrete settings for external displays, and it finally allows developers to better tailor their desktop apps for tablet use. However, there continues to be a huge difference between the new Microsoft Design Language apps (the tiled interface formerly known as "Metro") and the traditional desktop that's been around since Windows 95. Moving between the two will still feel clumsy and disjointed. It's clear that these devices, which were meant to be a showcase for Windows, are evolving more rapidly and more progressively than the operating systems they run.
So there it lingers -- the critical question: Will the quality of the new Surface hardware pave over the kinks and gaps in the software? The world will need more time to experience both the new device and new revision of Windows together at length to make that call, but I feel comfortable putting a related doubt to rest.
If you feared Microsoft might drop the Surface RT after its initial sales struggles, every indication points the opposite direction. After all, Microsoft calls the tablet simply "Surface 2" this time around. Larson-Green told that the Surface program is "incredibly important to the business."
"The team is overexcited. We have such a long road map ahead of us, and we know we're in this marathon. The team knows that. You start with your first generation of products, you put them out there, you know they're good. There are ways they can get better. Now the second generation comes, they only get more motivated and when you look at our road map to come."
A Surface designer confirmed that sentiment: "We're excited. Launch time is always a good time."
Still, this designer couldn't resist asking, multiple times and with a hint of unease, what I thought -- whether I was impressed by what I'd seen. I told her I was indeed impressed, impressed by the quality of the hardware and impressed by the dedication of the team. But in the end, of course, it's not whether I'm impressed. It's whether you are, dear reader.
