If it wants traction for Surface and Windows 8, Microsoft has to embrace how it got popular in the first place

The results are in, and they are not good: Microsoft took a $900M write-down on unsold Surface inventory, and the overall reception from consumers to Windows 8 in general has been lukewarm - to be generous.

For the record, I have a Windows 8 PC, and I’m a fan of the Metro interface. It’s visually slick and pretty intuitive after 1 minute of messing around with it if you enter with an open mind. But to get mindshare in a market where Android and Apple effectively have a duopoly, Microsoft has to be radical in order to breakthrough.

Here’s what I would do if I led MSFT: I would give away, for free, Surface tablets to any corporate customer who wants them.

Here’s why: Windows 8 is pretty much at parity with iOS and Android - if it lacks, it does so in the breadth of apps available. But it’s not orders of magnitude better. Given that it is simply at parity, and has a weaker app marketplace, there is absolutely no incentive to switch.

They have to get trial. Just give away the tablets that they’re planning to take a massive write-down on anyway.

Why focus on corporate customers? I think Microsoft is myopic as to how they got into every home PC in the 80s and 90s. They didn’t have the best product - Windows 95 was still leaps and bounds behind what Apple was doing years prior to that. What got consumers to buy Microsoft was that they used Microsoft at work, got used to it, then bought a computer with Microsoft’s OS for their home only after feeling comfortable and getting exposure through work.

I think this is the only way to get in the game for Microsoft. If they go directly at consumers, they’re likely only able to match Android and iOS on features, and their marketing certainly would never be creative enough to change their stodgy positioning. Instead, get corporate employees messing around with their free new tablet, and convert a proportion of those to people who use it in their personal lives, who may then be more inclined to get a Windows Phone the next time they upgrade....and try to gain momentum that way.

An alternative: Give away a Microsoft tablet to anyone who buys a Xbox One. I’m more bearish on this though because at least with corporate clients, there is a productivity angle with Microsoft Office that a corporate employee could immediately engage with, and the bar to “impress” a consumer is going to be much, much higher.....