[DaveNull]

HC: When I use "you" or "your" below I'm not necessarily talking about you personally. I'm talking about IT Management and using your words because they're illustrative of what I'm hearing in many other places. I'm sure you're a gentleman, scholar and a pillar of your community desrving in no way to be the direct target of such vitriol from someone who has the audacity to think that he knows the tools that would help him do his job better than the mid level IT manager who makes decisions based on "webinars" and meetings with their Microsoft rep.

I just get sick of putting up with management that doesn't want to take on the challenge of delivering the next generation of technolgy to their users.

They love their consumer platforms and want to use them at work; thus the rise in bring your own device (BYOD ) initiatives.

Here you're giving a line that's coming from Corporate IT worldwide. It's led to this terrible buzzword of "consumerization" which diminishes and deflects from the core problem. Employees started to want to bring their own devices because the ones that were provided for them by the drones in IT managmenet suck.

If you're one of these managers that keeps talking about stuff like iOS and OS X in these terms, as Fish pointed out, you're going to be left behind. You can sit there and wring your hands about how hard it's going to be, but if you can't deliver a platform to people that equals or exceeds what they're used to using at home you're going to be out of a job.

Business people are also consumers.

You're exactly right. The BYOD movement is a sign that the product that you're providing to the consumers of your IT services is failing. It's time to start figuring out why IT is almost as unpopular in your company than legal or HR and fix the problem.

Business exists for profit

That's right. It's also important to understand that the people that work for the company don't generate revenue to support IT and don't work at your behest. You can cite that OS X hardware is more expensive, but when you factor in decreased headcount from the Help Desk, anti-virus licenses, third party patching tools then it may not be all that much cheeper. Oh but there's a problem with actually admitting that, right? If you put in systems that require fewer add ons and less support than your kingdom is being diminished. Well here's the thing..

The people running businesses are looking at their cost centers and see IT as being a huge chunk of dollars with high head counts that still can't get the executives' brand new Dell laptop to be as stable and quick as their home computer. Whether you've got your reasons that it's slow or not, someone else is setting the curve that your'e now being judged against.

If you're not generating revenue then you're on the chopping block. Make the users happy or start looking for another job.

This is where the Surface comes in. It is a business device, running the desktop OS that runs all of the applications businesses already run, can be integrated and administrered like their existing platforms with no additional cost, AND provides the awesome form factor of the iPad.

Let me tell you what that sounds like to someone who pushes technology for a living but doesn't live in IT Managment. "This works with our current setup. If I give this to people, I don't have to change anything about what my job looks like. Every one of my software reps will buy me so many more shots next year because I'll be buying more of their crap. I don't have to learn anything new, and if anything I'll be able to increase the help desk staff and therefore continue to protect my kingdom. All this while looking totally cutting edge by telling people we're giving them tablets, even though they asked for iPads. The Surface really is the best of both worlds."

Is that probably off base? Sure it is. But that's the perception you're creating when you get so excited about something that fundamentally is no different than the crap you've been pushing for years that people started to rebel against.

The cool thing about Surface is it's not a different OS from the desktop. Apple has OSX and iOS; they are distinct. Surface, the PC, laptop, and Phone all run W8. Consistent experience + integrated functionality + ability to use as both a business and consumer device; I think it's a great idea.

No it isn't. It's a shitty idea. If people wanted the same OS on their laptop as on a touch screen device then the touchscreen edition of Windows XP on touchscreen laptops would have sold. They didn't. It was a failure.

The tragic thing for Microsoft is that by trying to merge these, they've ended up taking a pretty great touch interface in Metro and jammed it onto the desktop. Now people won't want to upgrade their traditional computers because Metro is best suited for tablets but the classic desktop is best suited for desktops.

The only thing the Surface is good for is IT Management.