Microsoft has really been excelling when it comes to their own hardware offerings. Whilst some may look at their failed attempts in the phone arena, they seem to be punching above their weight class in the domain of ultraportables and even when it comes to design and creatives.
Yesterday, news of the new Surface Pro surfaced.
On paper, it seems extremely great, offering the new Kaby Lake processors from Intel (although they are the core M processors) but also boasting extended battery life. This is one of the key requirements especially for business folks who travel a lot and need that additional battery boost. Design wise, it hasn’t changed much since the original Surface was launched but Microsoft did what they needed to do, iterative improvements to what was a successful line of products.
I have been seeing more and more of these Surfaces being used in the corporate world, in a world where office productivity tools are mostly used, the Surface Pro makes all the sense. Corporate IT doesn’t have to have another team to maintain a different set of operating system laptops and being able to just utilise all of that expensive corporate licenses for Microsoft products just make sense. The only thing holding most people back is the price.
Sadly the powers that be that I have seen and dealt with have always extremely short-sightedness when it comes to choosing the right device for the corporate environment as well as the bloatware they install into them, forcing most laptops to crawl at speeds that an old Pentium might laugh at.
I think it is about time that corporates don’t look at the IT as just a cost but in this world of digital, devices provided to employees are meant to empower them in their jobs, not hold them back and make them unproductive.
The recent ransomware which has been going around the globe, triggering a lot of responses from security teams in many companies shows that well thought out digital security strategies have never been in their mindset and every action done by most cases are a reactionary action. Nothing is planned or even thought out which at the end of the day, causes the most harm to the employees as well as hindering productivity.
In a recent podcast I listened, the kind folks at the CIA were interviewed about digital security and the one thing which struck out to me was that, whenever a corporation makes it difficult for an employee to work due to digital security limitations (most of the time, poorly thought-out solutions), the higher chances are there will be security lapses. I find that to be very true.
