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"I'd like you to be here with me, Harry, so I can give you the products. These are really products that you have to feel – and I do not mean physically. I mean to see, use, touch. And then you have a feeling for that. "
Microsoft Product Manager Panos Panay gives me a glimpse of the company's new line of Surface devices. We speak by voice call, without visual associated, which seems to be the least faithful solution possible to know more about the gadgets whose ambitious industrial design is the principal argument of sale. But Panay, the designer synonymous with Surface since Microsoft unveiled its first tablets in 2012, breathes passion, as do few spokespersons for technology. It can do more with a brittle phone line that some presenters can not handle personally with the products in question in front of them.
While Panay is guiding me in the news from Microsoft – which he announced today at a news conference in New York – I learn that the new Surface models are not major deviations from their predecessors from the design point of view. Instead, Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2, and Surface Studio 2 aim to keep the line fresh, with component upgrades such as faster processors and (for Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2) a new option of black color. Microsoft is also applying the Surface brand and its aesthetics to a wireless headset, the company's first foray into this category of products.
These developments may be quite simple, but the fact that Microsoft unveils all these products at the same time is important in itself. Although Surface has become an important business for Microsoft – with sales of $ 1.1 billion in the last quarter – the pace of company product updates has sometimes been bumpy. Last year, an analyst even speculated that Surface could disappear in 2019, which Panay was forced to publicly reject as "tabloid rumor".
During our conversation, Panay confirms that Microsoft had to learn to design and distribute several products in parallel. "I'm exhausted just speaking about four of them at the same time, "he jokes. "It's amazing how humble we were able to grow both as a company and as a company. And be able to bring together so many different groups within the company to ship as many products. "
Panay points out that do not Editing the external components of a device is a major task when you make important changes to its internal components. Surface Pro 6, for example, does not alter the Surface's signature elements, including a 12.3-inch screen, a 165-degree stand, a pressure-sensitive stylus, and an optional click keyboard. But the more powerful the processor, the harder it is to keep this package portable. "You do not want to make it thicker – every micron was in the product," says Panay. "The weight had to be similar or lower, that's what we pushed. We were able to increase performance by adding a quad-core processor. Microsoft says the new model is 1.5 times faster than the Surface Pro 5, while maintaining a range of up to 13.5 hours for local video playback.
As usual, Panay explains that Microsoft is trying to design hardware that users will be proud to own and is not afraid to praise the results with praise. "You can feel his elegance – he feels almost timeless now," he says of the new black finish Surface Pro. But perhaps even more so than in the past, he also points out that the goal of Microsoft hardware is to allow the company's customers to fully utilize Microsoft software, namely Windows 10, as well as productivity tools such as Office, without interruption. He describes the Laptop Surface 2 as "silent and silent" and states that it aims to "become the essence of your entry into your stream. . . and he will never get out of it. "The full travel keyboard of the notebook, he adds, offers" one of the best typing experiences you have ever experienced. "(There is no need to mention its widespread dissatisfaction with recent keyboards.MacBook models to score a point against the competition.)
"The preciousness of time"
Of course, for decades, helping Microsoft focus on doing basic tasks is at the heart of its vision of itself. But how he expresses this aspiration is a moving target. Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of the Microsoft Society for Modern Living and Appliances, has witnessed much of this evolution during his 26 years with the company. Last year he took a sabbatical of three months. when he returned, his colleagues asked him what was the highlight of his leave. "Ironically, as I stopped and pondered, the important thing for me was to be able to live this moment with my family or friends and not be distracted by a ringing phone that said : "Hey, will get there," he said. or "go back to something else," he explains. "This has made me aware of the preciousness of time."
In other words, the increasing ability of technology to keep us connected, whenever and wherever, is not an absolute blessing. "We now have this blur of work in life," says Mehdi. "That's what made us feel always present, what our customers tell us and the pressure that comes with it."
Mehdi said that this interweaving of our professional and personal qualities – and their challenges – really began to count when the smartphone became a common productivity tool, and that big companies started allowing employees to use their own phones rather than presenting a model approved by the company. on them. "I guess it's like somewhere between three and five years ago, it happened seriously," he says. "Maybe a little earlier."
You can criticize this delay: many companies have begun to recalibrate themselves according to the age of the "bring your own device" system at the beginning of this decade. In addition, the demarcation of the limits of life has been eroded for centuries. In 1994, a classic AT & T ad in 1994 showed a guy using a tablet to send a fax from the beach – a scenario supposedly cool and futuristic.
Yet, Mehdi is far from the only technical leader to have concluded that products should increasingly recognize that there is too much connection. Notably, Google and Apple have added new features to their mobile platforms to counterbalance the smartphone's unprecedented ability to interfere with meaningful human interactions. Microsoft, which is no longer a player operating systems for smartphones, can do nothing comparable. What it can do is adopt its own approach to address some of the same fundamental problems by considering them in terms of productivity.
In May, during its Build Developer Conference, the company previewed Your Your, a new Windows 10 feature designed to give you access to certain features of your smartphone, such as the text messaging feature. photo storage, from a Windows computer. , allowing you to accomplish tasks without juggling devices. With this month's Windows 10 update, your phone is particularly robust if you have an Android phone because Google's mobile operating system gives Microsoft more access to system functions than the iOS system. more locked from Apple.
"On Android, we can do a lot of very rich things," says Mehdi. But he adds that Microsoft can also bring part of its vision of productivity without distraction to iPhone users, especially since the company offers widely used iPhone applications, such as Outlook Mobile and SwiftKey keyboard.
Making Windows work well with smartphones is not just about eliminating distractions; According to Mr. Panay, Microsoft can help Microsoft sell more hardware by eliminating the lingering feeling that a Microsoft tablet or laptop does not have to work very well with a phone using someone's operating system. one on the other. "Many of our clients tell us about it," he says. "They literally say," Hey, should I buy a surface? But I have an iPhone! 'I really want to dispel this myth.'
Microsoft would probably be happy to exchange our reality for another solution in which Windows is widely used on phones and offers a greater ability to assemble multiple devices in a single experiment. Once again, the current vitality of the PC as a productivity-centric device – long after the experts predicted its demise – offers society many opportunities to help people fight against technological distraction. Maybe even some companies do not have, since PCs still tend to capture our attention, without division, rather than being something we check 80 times a day, often one or two at a time . Mehdi even talks about the possibility of using notifications, not to distract users, but to help them engage, for example by encouraging users to deal with a trivial task, such as fixing typing errors in Word, which Microsoft research has demonstrated A good way to familiarize yourself with aspects of a writing project that require increased mental effort.
"We are really excited about this new era of personal productivity," he said. "What does it mean for people and what does it mean for us as a business."
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