Microsoft’s Surface Pro ad backfires in spectacular fashion

If there's one thing that I find tiring about Satya Nadella's Microsoft, it's how poorly they treat their consumer businesses.

I wrote previously about how Surface, Xbox, and Windows are all suffering from underfunding and cut corners, as Microsoft sinks billions into chasing artificial intelligence fads to hype up its share price. Many of Microsoft's apps and services have become abandonware, such as Microsoft Authenticator, Launcher, and SwiftKey.

Microsoft has been working hard to destroy its image and consumer good will for some time, starting the fiscal year with thousands of layoffs. Microsoft has also killed its customer service teams and shuttered retail locations, too. And in recent years, Microsoft has also begun to gut its social media teams on top, and this weekend saw a pretty hilarious example of that.

Today on X (Twitter), Microsoft's official Surface account posted a photograph of its "ultimate research buddy," the Surface Pro. However, there was one problem ... Microsoft inexplicably showcased it running iPadOS, instead of Windows.

It wasn't long before the well-earned trolling began. As of writing, the post has been up for almost 24 hours, and was posted at 5PM on the dot, suggesting a social media staffer likely pre-scheduled the post then has gone AFK for the weekend.

"Read, highlight, summarize, repeat, all on Surface Pro, the ultimate research buddy," the post reads, showcasing a Surface Pro, Surface Pen ... and a poorly photoshopped screengrab of Word with iPadOS — complete with iPadOS status bar. If you're going to photoshop Word onto the screen anyway, you might as well have taken the extra 10 seconds to remove the status bar, I would have thought.

Chances are that the social team behind the posts have never actually used a Surface device, sadly. It reminds me of when Surface had the NFL contract and the commentators kept referring to them as iPads. For Microsoft itself to get confused is perhaps somewhat ironic and a bit sad.

The Surface account found itself ratioed from various corners. "How does a trillion dollar company mess up this bad?" One reply read. Another said "Even Microsoft can't bring themselves to use the Surface." Then, X's community notes feature, which crowd-sources fact checking, weighed in to explain that Microsoft was in fact using iPadOS in its marketing rather than Windows 11.

It's a pretty small and insignificant mistake in the grand scheme of things, but it does underpin Satya Nadella's brand of Microsoft, which feels lackadaisical in various regards. Microsoft had to defend itself from accusations that a Windows 11 update was killing SSDs this past week, spawning memes over previous Nadella claims that "up to 30%" of new Microsoft code was written by AI — implying that AI is to blame for the broken update. Microsoft has also been on the backfoot over security over the past year, with various layers of its systems breached by foreign actors leading to a variety of embarrassing incidents.

Microsoft's shareholders don't seem to care about its sloppiness in recent years, though, rewarding the company with the second biggest market capitalization in all corporate history — currently sitting at $3.6 trillion.

There are increasing calls and claims that the AI boom, driving Microsoft's share price, could simply be a giant bubble waiting to pop. If that's true, perhaps it would behove Microsoft to invest a little more in its more diversified, traditional businesses — instead of cutting them to chase up the latest tech fads.

Modern Microsoft simply doesn't seem to have an ethos or a mission anymore, and the fact it can't even get the bare basics of social media correct really underpins that in my view. It's a shame. Perhaps Microsoft should become a bank instead?