Nat shares the experiences of people at his Seattle area firm with the Microsoft Surface:

“Now Microsoft is the visionary. With the Surface they are leading the industry out of a world of limited and limiting devices, and into a new world where the device becomes a useful, integrated component of our lives.

(snip)

I run a boutique investment bank that sells software companies. Our clients expect us to stay on top of technology trends. Our staff, technology junkies all, are the earliest of early adopters, running the latest Android and Apple devices through their paces, then trading up to the newest shiny thing. Devices are so endemic that Exchange server, which initially limited to 10 the number of devices each user could connect and synchronize to, had to be reconfigured to raise the limit to 20. It was no surprise when the first Surfaces started popping up in the office on October 26th. We quickly realized, however, that this device is different.

(snip)

My view on the “bring your own device” movement is that the proliferation of devices has actually reduced productivity. Smart phones and tablets are great content consumption devices. People watch movies, check social status, listen to music, read a book. They also glance at email and then think to themselves, “Hmm. . . I better respond to that when I get to a desk.” Or “Hmm. . . . I will need to print that boarding pass when I get to a desk.” Or “Hmm. . . I should really get my vacation photos off the memory card in my phone. I will have to take care of that when I get to a desk, because there is no card slot or USB port on my tablet.” Or “Hmm. . . to respond to this message, I need to review a document that is on one of the file shares on the server, but I can’t access them from my tablet so I will have to take care of that when I get to a desk.” The list goes on.

(snip)

The solution would be a tablet that is smart about the tech ecosystem around it, can stand comfortably on a desk or function as a tablet, has a compact but usable keyboard, and is compatible with the document formats that we work in every day.

That pretty much sums up the Surface. Within 20 minutes of turning it on, we had mapped network drives, printed documents to network printers, edited Word and Excel documents, updated our Dynamics CRM system through the IE 10 browser, flipped through a book on Kindle, streamed music from a network share and from a Google music account and, yes, we also watched a YouTube video.

The hardware design is also worth a mention. A flip-out kickstand adds immensely to the utility of the device. I found it effective on a desk as well as in my lap. The touch cover is nowhere near as good as a traditional keyboard, but vastly more effective and usable than any other tablet input device that I have tried, including Bluetooth keyboards.

The new Surface brings utility and productivity to the tablet form factor. It has some rough edges and will definitely appeal more to tech-savvy, productivity-oriented early adopters than to people who are looking to a tablet primarily for entertainment value. But nonetheless it is a game changer. It breaks down the walled garden.“

Read more: Commentary: Microsoft Surface breaks out of the walled garden