While much of the reporting surrounding Microsoft’s Surface line has been relatively consumer facing, the company has found its hardware focus pitching its computer hardware tailored for an educational and commercial audience.
More recently the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) made the broad switch to use Microsoft’s Surface Go as part of its new Digital LSAT platform for its 100,000 potential student pool yearly, while Future of StoryTelling (FoST) is making use of a combination of Surface devices and Office 365 to help transform their storytelling efforts.
Microsoft’s Surface Pro, Surface Laptops and Surface Go are slow making their way into classrooms and offices across North America, and behind that momentum, the company is looking to expand its offerings more broadly into 11 additional European markets.
Senior product manager for the Surface division David Alexander updated the Surface for Business blog today, March 11, 2019, with the news that the Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2 were chosen to participate in the company’s Surface for Business sales distribution.
As of May 1, 2019, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia will be among the regions that will receive localized versions of Microsoft’s signature computing line.
While separately sold Surface Pro Type Covers and operating systems will be offered as customization options, Microsoft is only now testing hardware configurations for commercial customers in the US and Canada.
There is also growing interest from commercial customers wanting to outfit mainstream productivity employees with devices containing 16GB memory. While 16GB memory options are already available on Intel Core i7 models of various Surface devices, we are now offering a configuration of 16GB memory on an Intel Core i5 model with 256GB storage for both Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2. We are offering these configurations in the U.S. and Canada this month and will evaluate opportunities to expand this configuration more broadly in the future.
By no means does Microsoft’s Surface line overshadow the work its partner OEM’s have been accomplishing over the years to make affordable and reliable hardware accessible to students and employees the world over, but there is something to be said for finally having peer-approved ‘North Star’ in terms of style and ambition for the PC market.
