Panos Panay has always been the force behind Microsoft’s Surface line. He helped bring Surface to life as a secret project more than 10 years ago. He’s presented the new devices onstage at events, showed up at malls to promote Surface hardware, and has steered Microsoft’s Surface tablets to success in the years since.
Now, he’s leaving in a surprise departure announced just days before Microsoft’s next big Surface event. Panay will no longer be presenting at Microsoft’s showcase on Thursday but will remain at the company for another couple of weeks as part of a transition process. He’s reportedly joining Amazon to replace Dave Limp and lead Amazon’s Echo and Alexa push. Amazon is also holding its own hardware event on Wednesday.
This sure is an odd and rather abrupt departure – only a few days before Panay was supposed to be present Microsoft’s Surface event – and I wonder what the full story is, and if we’ll ever get to hear it.
I have mixed feelings about Panay’s tenure at Microsoft. As far as hardware goes, Surface devices are quite nice and pleasant, albeit often a tad bit out of date for the prices Microsoft is asking. Worse yet, Microsoft and Panay, despite halfhearted attempts, completely missed the boat on ARM, and Windows is still floundering there due to both poor ARM hardware (compared to Apple’s offerings) and Windows on ARM being an afterthought.
As far as software goes – well, Windows is in a worse state than it’s ever been in. It’s the clown car of operating systems, and two decades of layering one user interface and API above another has turned the operating system into a layer cake that makes Hisarlik seem like a thin sheet of single-ply toilet paper. The ways in which Microsoft has jerked Windows from left to right are numerous, and Panay was at the head of it all for a long time.
Maybe Microsoft’s relentless push for shoving AI down Windows’ users’ throats as the straw that broke Panay’s back?
Every surface device I’ve seen was underpowered, too few ports, need a keyboard and kinda sucked frankly as anything but a media consumption device. They most were too slow to do low latency pen input as well.
Too hard to repair or recover from catastrophic failure compared to most other things as well.
That said I do know some people that have surface *pro* that love them but those are $$$$$…. for a tablet with a trash tier keyboard.
Am I the only one wondering why this guy isn’t working for Palo Alto?
HP or Stanford?
Surface is probably dead and I say good riddance. They were always overpriced and underpowered, I had to support a doctor’s office that got the bright idea to switch to Surface…for 1 year. after all the slow downs and headaches they couldn’t jump to iPads fast enough.
If MSFT is going to stick with it let us hope they get a nice chip like one of those new low power Ryzen APU and a decent number of ports. Add in user expandable NVME and RAM and I could see a niche for these things, otherwise as long as Apple is making iPads they are kind of pointless.
Windows / Surface has been so incredibly mid. Where’s the answer to Google / Apple? Nothing. Windows on mobile failed, sure, but where’s Microsoft’s own Android distribution? The app support is already there, they could have gained marketshare rapidly by simply not being Google. Windows on ARM is no further along than it was in 2013 but now Apple have made the switch and have the better hardware. Does anybody in Microsoft know what they’re actually working towards??
I feel I should chime in to defend the surface. I owned 3 (v2, 3, 4) and they were some of the best utility systems we’ve ever owned as a family. It might be our use case ofc, needing to annotate a lot of PDFs, it was simply the perfect form factor.
The prices did escalate, and the ARM version Was left to flounder, but I think its easy to forget now how different the original surface was compared to what OEMs were making at the time. The original aim was to encourage the eco-system to innovate. In that its been a massive success. At this point though, Microsoft are more or less iterating, so my guess (only a guess) is the value add to MS as a whole is diminishing and they are looking to downscale the program. Panay’d skillset in hardware probably don’t transfer anywhere else for MS, so he’s jumped ship. (I can’t see him being allowed anywhere near the Xbox team and the keyboard/mouse type hardware is probably quite a step down in profile)
I still think back to BeOS, and how one of its principles was stripping away all the layers of legacy standards and backwards compatibility of Windows, with impressive results. And that was over 20 years ago.
And Haiku still uses GCC2 to keep BeOS compatibility. Pretty sure there’s a irony in there somewhere
Windows on ARM was crippled to start with. Microsoft announced it with a half-baked beta, with no real compatibility layer with x86 (a lesson taught to Microsoft many decades ago, with the NT4 ports). Had MS spent a bit of time at least attempting x86 compatibility (even if performance was to be desired) then Windows on ARM may have seen some take-up and adoption.
What has really hampered MS on the hardware front though, is the exclusivity deal that MS has with Broadcom. This has restricted MS from allowing WoA from running on anything other than Broadcom chips, and the ARM ecosystem has changed significantly from when the deal was penned.
Ultimately, poor management decisions have led to WoA being a flop. Had Microsoft spent some time in making WoA a decent product that still ran all your favourite apps, it would have certainly picked up adoption. And the exclusivity deal with Broadcom certainly hasn’t helped in the long run.
Qualcom, not Boradcom. My mistake.
The123king,
Is there a difference? Haha.