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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Its always frustrating to watch MS build solid devices with real use cases and then seemingly throw it away trying to market them like apple gadgets.

Its like watching Charlie Brown try to kick the football.

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Fully agreed. Microsoft has shown that boring business is big business and it's continued to generate great revenues for them. They should be marketing this towards business professionals, engineers, digital artists, etc. This isn't a device you lay on the couch with to read; it's meant to be something an analyst can take with him on a business trip. Time and time again I'm seeing Surface ads at bus stops that do not make any sense, like "click in", "thinner, faster", all with very artsy images clearly geared towards the young and hip demographic (even then, the ads poorly convey just how hip the product is).

They need to be more concrete and directed in their marketing. IMO, they should be running series of ads targeted to very specific professions.

The ad I've seen for it on Hulu focuses entirely on a variety of industry professionals using it for work, so I think they're starting to get the right idea.

Microsoft brought in a new ad agency for the Surface 2. If they did the Hulu ad, then this was a change for the better.

> Microsoft has shown that boring business is big business. They should be marketing this towards business professionals

They are (see video below). They just don't show these much, because boring business is... boring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N3NYWlahNU

You can't blame Microsoft's marketing here. The use case for Surface Pro 2 is pen computing. It's real, but it's also niche. To justify the expenditures on the product, Surface has to be more than niche, and that's why it's marketed the way it is.

Pen support should translate into large traction in the education market - any reasons why you think this is not happening?

Apple mindshare dominance?

(Apple has a very long history in the education space, and now that is paired up with some truly exceptional products. It's a potent mix, at least in theory. In practice, well, you get the LA school district iPad catastrophe...)

I was at uni in 2003-2006.

I had a tablet PC, convertable kind, Toshiba.

I was a 'freak' for having such a device, but doing an engineering degree, it was perfect. Equation I scribble down to LATEX yes!

One note is still my favourite note taking program, frankly puts evernote to shame.

I noticed I was the only one in a class of about 200 with one. 3 years later that had changed to eight, based on people asking me.

These things were expensive, I was lucky enough to get some grants for being dyslexic.

I honestly think they are great devices, battery life is now adequate, ultimately a Pro would be my go to university machine, enough power for any engineer that didn't require a rack. Great note taking.

However the price is objectionable. Most uni students I know would waste money on an iPad. Most people who buy iPads don't want a real computer, and RT offers little in apps they use. Outlook?! Why do they want that for their simple emails, its too complex.

Same here, I was the only one at my MBA school 2003-2005 with a pure slate tablet PC. Pen computing is awesome not just for note taking but also for business apps like excel and powerpoint. Anything that requires a lot of precise clicking across different areas of the screen works easier with a pen. Due to Microsoft's utter failure at marketing, nobody has any idea about this. Even web browsing is great with a pen. Actually much easier to browse the web and hit small links and buttons with a pen tablet than with fat fingers on an iPad or phone.

Should it? Outside STEM, a traditional laptop works better for taking notes. Inside STEM, well it's a crapshot whether any given professor will be okay with your bringing in a tablet to take notes on. $1,099 is a lot of money for a device that you can't necessarily bring with you to class.

I hate that I can't use my laptop for notes in most of my STEM classes- not because the professors disallow it, but because there's simply no equation editor that I can use quickly and efficiently enough to take notes with. I tried latex, but it just requires a few too many formatting keystrokes and isn't WSYISYG enough to do on the fly (at least for me).

I'd be pretty happy with a digitizer, I think, but I wouldn't be able to stand all of the other little quirks of the surface.

For typing equations quickly, I found that a quick (not so pretty) ascii-art notation was fastest. I would transcribe them to latex later.

I only did that for a year or two before I decided that laptops and note-taking in general were counterproductive and switched to never taking notes at all. I still occasionally took notes on my own time while reading the course material, but I found that paying closer attention instead of trying to write things down ultimately worked better.

windows has an app that's surprisingly not publicized a lot called math input panel which allows you to input equations quite easily in other programs like word or onenote.

Check this out:

http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/home.html#equation

I found Word's equation editor (2007 onwards, not the crippled MathType before) very good for real-time typing of math in class. It's quite close to LaTeX when it comes to symbols, smart enough to use / for fractions or convert ² to a superscript 2, etc. and generally requires far fewer braces because spaces or operators are used to separate tokens, e.g. a^15+4 yields 𝑎¹⁵ + 4 because it makes more sense than 𝑎¹ 5 + 4 (what LaTeX would make of it). It also features WYSIWYG build-up of the equation as you type.

Niche? I have a Pro 2 (in fact it's the 8Gb/256Gb model). I use it to take hand-witten notes in meetings. I draw diagrams on it, read and reply to mail using Outlook, and create documents and presentations.

Best of all, I have Visual Studio, SQL Server and everything else I need for my job. Oh, and Video, which is awesome. It's the best non-desktop device I've ever used.

So niche it may be, but definitely broader than just pen computing.

For the record, I have a MBA too. It hasn't been switched on since the Surface arrived last week.

For taking notes, reading and replying to email, and creating documents and presentations, Visual Studio, any Ultrabook with a bigger screen or better keyboard is a better tool (say a Vaio 11 with similar thickness/weight). That leaves drawing diagrams as the only think the Surface Pro is a better tool for. I call that niche.

"any Ultrabook with a bigger screen or better keyboard is a better tool"

Actually, the device that gets you creating in the way most comfortable for one's self is the better tool. You also skipped over the "take notes, and draw diagrams" -- pen computing there.

He mentioned drawing diagrams. And, for 99% of people, the handwriting recognition is not good enough to beat the effectiveness of just typing or dictating.

That might be a great poll - what percentage of HN posts are done with a pen versus dictation (which I do a lot of mine with when I'm on a smart phone) versus keyboard (vast majority) versus pen.

Right now the Wacom tablet is the niche that justifies the high-price for the Pro. Bring it down another $200-$300 and it starts to make inroads into the mass market (where it most certainly is not a player right now)

Yer not getting it. The point is to take notes in a format useful the user, which frequently is not computer-friendly. I know at the office we frequently take smartphone photos of whiteboards. Same usecase.

Give me a bit of credit for knowing something about taking notes. Having notes immediately searchable and recallable is useful to the user. When I take notes in a meeting with evernote, they are available on my tablet, my smartphone, my laptop, and, when I head back to the office, on my desktop. They are collected in the appropriate notebook, and tagged. Searching for notes over the last few years based on their content is invaluable - and, my writing will never be good enough for handwriting recognition to do the job of understanding what I've written.

For those people with neat handwriting, that the recognition algorithms can pick up - I can understand how writing with a pen might be more cnovenient.

Your scenario is different to mine. I use meta data to find handwitten notes in OneNote. I tried EverNote and found it had bells and whistles but wasn't anywhere near as easy as OneNote for tap to open app, yap again for a new note, and write with a stylus.

Fair enough. I'm also the type of person who has a single inbox, and just searches for everything. No Tags/Folders.

Just to butt in regarding the handwriting recognition, I used OneNote extensively to take class notes during my Masters. It faired pretty well. The pen is godsend, just not for writing but other tasks too like software menu selection.

Ultrabook you can't use as a tablet. For me Surface Pro is a good enough tablet combined with a good enough ultrabook, so it saved me from buying two devices.

People underestimate the social construction of writing in meetings versus typing. I used a Newton MP2000 for several years as a replacement for paper notes (and calendar, etc.) and it was magnificent in that role -- pulling out a laptop, however tiny, and typing in meetings was and likely often still is socially unacceptable.

By contrast, an iPad won't replace a Newton in this context -- you can't write on it worth a damn, and typing on a glass keyboard is still typing.

I think Microsoft's vision for the Surface as a do-everything computer is admirable, but their execution has been fairly poor thus far, and I suspect it's because the hardware and software aren't there yet.

Does anyone doubt that Apple would release a Surface-like device if they thought it was good enough? I'm sure there are prototypes at Apple dating back years (in fact I saw a demo of a pen-based Duo back in the mid-90s -- between Jobs's first and second comings). Mac OS X already has handwriting recognition and all kinds of supporting infrastructure in it, the difference is that Apple doesn't release products it doesn't think it can sell; Microsoft is willing to experiment and kind of desperate.

> It hasn't been switched on since the Surface arrived last week

How's the handwriting recognition? Evernote integration? What do you use for diagrams? Drawing? Will Inkscape and Gimp run and work with the pen? How does handwriting work when there's no network connectivity?

Microsoft solved handwriting recognition over a decade ago with Tablet PC. (Disclaimer: I worked as a vendor on some Tablet PC goodness, and currently work for MS, though in an unrelated area.) My old Windows XP Tablet PC 2003 machine could recognize my chicken scratch with ease, and things have only gotten better since then. Handwriting recognition in Windows has never required a network connection.

As for notes, OneNote is by far the best note taking app out there (IMHO), I went an entire year in college without using a single sheet of paper. Though I understand Evernote's appeal as well. (It has always been a bit too heavyweight for me, I just want a really big piece of lined paper and some tabs for organization)

Can you recommend anywhere to learn about the capabilities of one note? I start to take a look at it and then get overwhelmed and vow to come back when I have more time to figure it out, but keep forgetting.

You can download OneNote and use it free for 30 days. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/

Best source: OneNote itself. Just open that thing and go throught the provided notebook. Pretty cool stuff

Can anyone comment on how is it with different languages? Or mixed languages?

For notes I use my native language, sometimes the language of the country I work in, and I mix in a lot of English as well. I think my android keyboard prediction (SwiftKey) hates me.

I haven't played with using different languages alongside handwriting recognition on a Tablet before, sorry. :(

In regards to just note taking though, I can tell you that OneNote doesn't have to auto convert your handwriting into text, rather it allows you to keep everything as Ink. OneNote then allows you to search your ink as if it was text, and that is the amazing part! Diagrams, sketches, math equations, etc, can all be searched as if they are a document. Really cool stuff. Again though, I am not sure how well it works across multiple languages. (Now I wish I had a proper Wacom enabled tablet so I could try it and find out!)

(You can of course choose to have everything auto converted into text, but for pure note taking I find leaving things as ink to be far more useful!)

Keep in mind that the consumer marketing of the Surface Pro is perhaps 10% or less of the total product marketing. The targets for most of Microsoft's products are giant corporations, and the marketing to them is both direct, because each of these companies spends millions of dollars with Microsoft each year, and indirect, by encouraging system integrators like Accenture to deploy multi-hundred-million dollar "solutions" incorporating Surface tablets.

If I could upvote this a million times, I would. I don't understand why they think people would rather have an iPad with USB ports than a laptop shaped like a tablet.

In a similar vein, it'd be perfect if it was 13". That would cement the "for creators" aspect of an "iPad Pro". Instead, the 10" form factor means it's just slightly too small to get work done nicely while slightly too big (or too small, depending on your orientation) to read on comfortably.

To be clear: if the Sony Vaio Duo 13 was using Wacom as the original did, I'd have bought it instead of the Retina 13 (and in addition to the first Surface).

The surface especially. This thing honestly sounds like the ultimate college notebook. I, like countless other students, preferred to write my notes by hand. Using a surface pro means that these notes can be digitized and accessible on any device at your convenience.

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