The Surface Book Has Launched – But is it cool?
A curious thing happened on the run-up to the Surface Book launch. At a meeting of folks in the Microsoft UK office, someone passed around a brand-new Surface Book, and the predominant sentiment around the table was – wow, this is really cool. Of all the superlatives we could have used – revolutionary, innovative, light – over and over again, a group of intelligent and articulate professionals kept coming back to the fact that Surface Book was cool. That point struck me as a bit odd, and I found myself asking why? What makes Surface Book cool?
As a piece of tech, it certainly hits all the right notes to make it cool if you’re into that sort of thing: it’s got the cool shiny bits and magnesiummy bits on the outside. It’s got really high end graphics, processing and storage on the inside. Don’t get me wrong, these are all really important features, and there are other posts and videos that do a much better job explaining what makes Surface Book the ultimate laptop. I’m more interested in figuring out what makes it cool.
The commodification of cool
Perhaps it’s the term itself that’s the sticking point. Cool. Is cool something to be marketed? It’s slightly disturbing to think of “cool” as some manufactured commodity. Some carefully extracted ingredient that gets sprinkled into the cars and watches and crisps we buy – or at least into the adverts that encourage us to buy them. So for instance, there’s a scene in The Devil Wears Prada when a fashion editor tells her intern that the choice to wear a particular (cerulean blue) sweater wasn’t the intern’s choice at all, but an unconscious response to the work of a handful of individuals who tell the rest of us what to wear.
There are entire industries dedicated to finding the next cool thing. Cool-hunters. Cultural anthropologists who embed themselves in burgeoning hipster communities (physical and online) in order to analyse and dissect the language of cool. They’re then able to overlay that language onto products and services – often targeting insecure teens and twenty-somethings. Often their impact is imperceptible. At other times, it can backfire quite badly. Like with the story of a famous scooter manufacturer that hired cool models to ride around Miami’s South Beach (hard to get cooler than South Beach) on their scooters being flirty. When they were approached for their phone numbers, though, the models provided would-be suitors the number of the scooter’s local dealerships. Not cool.
And this contrived idea of cool wasn’t remotely close to the feeling in the room when we first got our hands on a Surface Book.
In search of a different kind of cool
To get to the heart of the matter, I tried to go beyond the features of the Surface Book and beyond cool-hunting. I turned instead to the broader Surface community to get their take on what makes Surface cool. Not surprisingly, their thoughts were as diverse as they were – Surface users are artists and architects. Teachers and techies. But looking closer at some of their stories, particularly those of mobile professionals, there were some common threads. First many of them were pragmatic dreamers: while there was a common thread of creativity, there was also a drive to turn that imagination into action. Second, they were multi-dimensional – chasing multiple passions with equal enthusiasm: doctors who surf. Data analysts who DJ. They’re social entrepreneurs who are doing well by doing good.
They also thought the question of cool was a bit silly. The overall sentiment went something like this: “I didn’t buy a Surface because it was cool. I bought it because it meets my very demanding needs and very busy life. The fact that it’s cool is irrelevant…well, mostly irrelevant.”
For Surface users, cool wasn’t about how you looked. It’s about what you do. Not some adolescent outward show, but that inner voice that’s come into its own, driving you to achieve more. In short, it was cool grown up. So what does cool look like to a Surface user?
For them cool isn’t about having the shiniest toys, it’s about a busy sales executive having the right tools at their fingertips to crush their quarterly sales quota, get their bonus and take their fiancé on an unforgettable holiday in the Maldives. It’s the architect who gets to watch some random stranger stop and stare, transfixed, at an arched doorway he designed. It’s the knowledge that when two roads diverge in a yellow wood, with the right tools, you can take both. And that’s pretty cool.
So back to the original question: is Surface Book cool?
