A former Microsoft executive reviews the MacBook Neo

Steven Sinofsky, former President of Microsoft’s Windows Division, published an interesting review of the MacBook Neo, in which he re-examined what went wrong with Microsoft’s early push for lightweight ARM-based PCs. Here is what he said.

The MacBook Neo may be Microsoft’s road not taken

If you don’t know Steven Sinofsky, he has worked at Microsoft since 1989, when he joined as a software design engineer, and left in 2012, having led many teams and divisions related to Office and Windows.

After leaving Microsoft, Sinofsky started a blog called Learning by Shipping, where he publishes “articles, thoughts, and negatives, about management, strategy, competition, and other aspects of the technology industry.”

His posts often offer a refreshing look at his time at Microsoft, and the industry as a whole, and don’t shy away from insightful criticism (and self-criticism) when appropriate.

In his new post, titled “Mac Neo and my afternoon of meditation and depression,” Sinofsky echoes the near-unanimous praise the MacBook Neo has received this week in other reviews (including ours).

However, he also looks at the success of what Apple was able to pull off with a new cheap laptop from the point of view of someone who tried to pull off the same game in the past, albeit with a very different result:

“So when I thought about Windows 8 a dozen years ago, I used to settle for fast AND wrong or too fast when I didn’t want to feel that bad.

But today I’m using a Neo and thinking about Windows 8 and Surface, and I have to admit I’m struggling with that conclusion. We had all the pieces and all the pieces worked at the time. […] The world as we lived could really use the device. It also costs $599 for keyboard/32GB, $699 for 64GB. […]

Where we went wrong was moving the ecosystem to a new application model fast enough that was safe, reliable, and very powerful. Many people rebelled against this. […] From the day we announced ARM we wanted to break the world of x86 Windows and make it new. I knew that any baby step into the Microsoft world was a lifelong commitment. You can see this in the way ARM is treated today, as an alternative to x86. We looked at it then and I still look at it that way as a replacement. There is no revisionist history here. It was our plan.”

Sinofsky compares that to Apple’s multi-year effort to move developers to new APIs and frameworks, something he argues has made the transition to ARM-based Macs much easier (and the MacBook Neo is possible) than Microsoft’s effort, hampered by the company’s commitment to constant backward compatibility.

While this is just the gist of Sinofsky’s theory as to why Microsoft’s attempt to build something like the MacBook Neo years ago didn’t pan out, the full post is full of interesting details, along with his usual no-PR-spin display on past projects, warts and all.

As for the original review of the MacBook Neo, he offers an interesting way of thinking about all the talk about the trade-offs Apple had to make to deliver this $599 laptop, and who it really is:

Neo doesn’t have to be better. It just has to stay pretty. If you need or want better, there are two more levels of laptops and two levels of desktops. And iPads. The Neo in 5 years will be more powerful than most of them and probably still cost $699. Moore’s Law is invincible.

To check out his full post, follow this link.

It’s worth checking out on Amazon