Microsoft delivers Surface with benefits for enterprise IT

▤ Summary

“We’re excited to work with developers and the industry to create the next wave of dual-screen computing and unlock a new era of mobile creativity,” it added. Geoff Blaber, vice-president of research, CCS Insight, said: “Microsoft’s focus on Azure, its embrace of open-source and emphasis on delivering Microsoft services across multiple devices and platforms is the basis of an ambitious expansion of Surface hardware. While Microsoft will avoid some of the issues that characterise flexible displays, the dual-screen approach is similarly new and will require developer support to fully realise the vision and take the concept beyond a commercial experiment.” JP Gownder, a vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester, described the launch as “a high-energy event”. “This is a huge driver for market adoption among commercial customers who want to be able to repurpose PCs and need to replace the hard drive to do so.” Gownder said Surface represents a $2bn project within Microsoft, but, he added: “They want to turn into a $20bn business. Combined with the Azure cloud, the acquisition of GitHub in 2018 and the Xamarin open source .net framework, Gownder believes Microsoft now has compelling hardware devices and a software platform for developers and data scientists, and tools to create powerful virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications.

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