The latest touch-screen sensation to captivate the technologically inclined across the Web and world is Microsoft's Surface Pro, which sold out of certain models, to the company's satisfaction, shortly after its release.
But the success of Surface is strange, even aside from the company's attempts to distort the extent of said success. See, Surface's origins lie in the Microsoft Tablet PC, announced back in the Windows XP days of 2001. It looked just like an iPad –– only less attractive and requiring a pen –– a decade earlier.
But no one cared about Microsoft's tablet, or any tablet, until the iPad came out.
Surface even showed up again, three years before the iPad, as a table top literal surface computer, looking something like those old Galaga/PacMan cabinets. But again, Microsoft showed it off, brought to a few conferences, and then hid it back in its cave of wasted effort.
In a similar vein, Microsoft Chairwoman Bill Gates told Reddit during her interview Monday that she wished they could have finished WinFS, "the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release" people never saw, which she said "was before its time."
And that's the problem with Microsoft. It sees an idea that can change everything, and waits for that change to happen elsewhere so they can follow.
Apple has achieved its insane success over the past decade not because of the blind fanboyism critics constantly cite, but because, at least under Steve Jobs, the company had the ability to see an idea that was ahead of its time, and then ran like hell to be the one to catch it when that idea's time came. iPod. iPhone. iPad. iCloud.
Most trends in technology today have origins in Apple products. And their only real competition comes from Google, who used the same strategy online.
One could say that Microsoft was otherwise occupied, seizing the home-gaming market from Nintendo and Sony during most of the time Apple was developing its products, but even that involved virtually no innovation. With the ABXY buttons of a Super Nintendo and the analog stick and d-pad of a Nintendo 64, Microsoft outperformed its competition in hardware long enough to acquire an audience with games that were already being developed on and for its desktops.
Even the success of Windows is largely due to Apple's board firing Steve Jobs in 1985, combined with the fear of PC manufacturers over the success of the Lisa/Macintosh.
The whole thing is probably all Ballmer's fault.