Microsoft Surface Table

» see surface.microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i never saw a surface table in person. they cost $10,000, they shipped to hotel lobbies and casinos in the us, and the closest one to ankara was probably a press demo somewhere in europe. what i had instead was a pcworld dergisi spread from 2008 with photos of bill gates putting his palm on the glass and a paragraph caption explaining ir cameras. that was the whole product as far as i was concerned, a magazine page about a coffee table i would never touch.

microsoft announced surface at the d5 conference on 29 may 2007. it shipped to at&t retail stores on 17 april 2008 as the first commercial deployment. the hardware was a 30-inch 4:3 rear-projection display with five near-infrared cameras under the glass, all driven by an integrated pc running a custom vista build. the price was around $10,000 per unit. the idea was that you could put a glass and your phone on the table and the table would know what was on it. tagged objects with little ir patterns underneath could be recognized by the cameras, and the table could react.

the original surface was discontinued in 2011. samsung and microsoft jointly built the sur40 as the second-generation hardware, thinner and lcd-based instead of rear-projection, still around $8,400 each. then on 18 june 2012 microsoft rebranded the entire product line as pixelsense, freeing up the surface name for the windows 8 tablet that would launch in october. the sur40 was discontinued in 2013 and that was the end of microsoft as a horizontal-touch hardware company.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was supposed to do ~

the use case microsoft kept showing in demos was the photo-sharing one. drop your phone on the table and the photos would fan out around it like cards on a poker felt, drag them around with your fingers, put them on another phone to copy. the casino use case was real money. harrah's deployed surface tables for digital concierge work at caesars palace around 2010, and msnbc had one at 30 rock that david gregory used for election-night maps in 2008. at&t put them in retail stores to let customers compare phones side by side, which is where most people who saw a surface in person actually saw one. the consumer was never the target.

~ how the surface name got stolen ~

the windows 8 launch needed a hardware brand. panos panay's team had been building the tablet for two years under a working title nobody outside redmond used, and microsoft wanted a name that sounded like the ipad without being a copy. the surface name was sitting unused inside the company on a product almost no consumer had heard of (close enough), so they took it. on 18 june 2012 microsoft renamed the table to pixelsense and unveiled the windows 8 surface tablet a few days later. the table got the smaller name and the tablet got the bigger one, which is how brand strength works inside microsoft.

~ what remains ~

the team's actual research, computer vision through the table glass with ir cameras, became part of the kinect lineage and then mostly stopped being interesting in microsoft's roadmap. samsung kept selling the sur40 to commercial customers until 2013. after that microsoft was out of the horizontal-touch hardware business. the surface brand kept going on tablets for another decade, but the original surface, the thing the name was supposed to mean, was a 30-inch glass table in a las vegas casino that nobody under thirty remembered by 2015.

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