14 DAY TRIAL // It’s official now: the Surface Phone has been nothing than a dream that’d never come true, as Microsoft has no intention to launch a new mobile phone.
Panos Panay, the head of devices at Microsoft, confirmed that a Surface Phone isn’t part of the company’s hardware vision for the reason that makes total sense: launching a regular phone at this point would produce no substantial gain in terms of revenue for the company, as customers already have a wide range of devices to choose from at this point.
Basically, Panay says that Microsoft wants to stick with the approach that the company used in the past and which proved successful: invent new product categories and be the pioneer of new form factors. This means a traditional phone, like the Surface Pen, doesn’t make any sense.
Speaking about the new form factors that the company envisions in the long term, Panay explained in an interview that the Surface Phone isn’t part of this push.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that includes a Surface Phone. You have to think about where is that unmet need when you’re thinking about your product roadmap, when you’re thinking about your lineup. Of course we’re always inventing, of course we’re thinking about new form factors,” he said.
“It doesn’t include a Surface Phone, but it includes the way to think about what it is that people want to accomplish and how they are going to accomplish it. What are those form factors?”
Microsoft has clearly learned from its own mistakes and knows that being late to the market with a certain product pretty much means that this product is very likely to fail. Unless you bring something totally unexpected, yet at the same time useful, and what better way to make sure this happens than inventing a new product category?
While today’s news isn’t surprising in any way given that Microsoft has long been rumored to be giving up on phones, what doesn’t make sense is abandoning the phone concept entirely.
Microsoft’s Surface Phone was supposed from the very beginning to come with an evolved approach as compared to the smartphones on the market, like a new form factor that would have allowed it to transform from a mobile device to a laptop. Concepts imagining this idea made the rounds several times in the past and it was even believed that this was a direction that Microsoft itself explored.
If this was the case, it’s pretty clear that the Surface Phone indeed aligned with this new effort to pioneer new product categories. In other words, Microsoft doesn’t necessarily need to give up on phones entirely to follow its dream of inventing new form factors, it just has to imagine how a smartphone can evolve in order to replace other devices, but at the same time retain its communications capabilities.
Microsoft itself says that the way people communicate will change as well, and devices that will launch in the coming years will adapt to this new trend. If this is the case, the company itself could reconsider the phone concept, possibly with a new form factor that would allow it to stick with this Surface culture.
But in the meantime, it looks like phones as we know them have absolutely no place in Microsoft’s long-term vision. As a Windows phone fan myself, this is frustrating, especially because this technically means that Windows 10 Mobile would finally go dark next year when it reaches the end of support, leaving us with no other option than to go either Android or iPhone.
But what do you think? Is Microsoft right to give up on the Surface Phone dream? Are there any ways for the company to maintain this direction of inventing new product categories without actually leaving the phone form factor behind?
Share your thoughts in the comment section below.