Reading through the tech news sites today, I see Microsoft has released a new model of their Surface tablet. And, even though I hate myself for doing this because it makes me hate the world, I read the comments on the articles. The comments that always got to me were the simple “Total Fail” posts. Some would back it up with something like, “No one’s talking about this. It’s dead on arrival.” or “Look at how little press this is getting. Microsoft can’t even get the word out.”
I think I’ve finally come to understand this. When you’re dealing with an ultra-powerful tablet – one that is on par with business-class laptops – quite simply, it’s not for you. I don’t mean you as in everybody, I mean you, as in the person who is spamming “Fail” all over blog article comments. This is an adult device. Let the adults handle this.
The people that are running companies and making purchasing decisions for their IT teams are going to evaluate this on a slightly different measure than how many denigrating posts the product receives or how many talk shows the product is mentioned on. This is not for you, mass consumer. But that’s not to say you can’t buy it or make great use of it. If you do, you’ll be using professional-grade hardware, and everyone will assume you are capable at handling it.
The problem is that tech blogs attract the wrong crowd, because they deal in consumer electronics. If you went on a true IT blog and they posted an article about the newest HP datacenter server or the newest Cisco core router, you’re not going to have a bunch of “This server is dead on arrival” posts. You will read valid critiques of the hardware’s shortcomings, in other words, intelligent discourse.
I guess it’s pretty typical of the modern, self-centered, never-satisfied, all-about-me mentality to think that if a product doesn’t do exactly what you want it to, it must be useless to everyone. And with that conclusion, you must speak with authority on the matter, because, well, it’s all about you.
But guess what? It’s not. It’s not for you so it’s not about you.
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