"Enterprise" people. There's this whole other world of legacy enterprise software where people do things that run companies, write large-scale software with an ancient version of .NET, and run this software on Windows servers.

It’s in the first line of the article. It’s for people that make the world, obviously

I remember when they first pivoted from multiperson multitouch tables to tablets. It sounded like a really cool device - even got me to walk into a Microsoft store.

Then I realized that it used the same shitty Windows with the same shitty registry that I had mostly avoided for my whole life to that point. I certainly wasn't jumping in on that tablet.

creative industry/enterprise. similar to Asus ProArt line and high end ThinkPad workstations

I mean, I used to be - with the disclaimer that I worked at Microsoft for a while (left in 2019), there was a hot minute when Surface devices were good and on an upward trajectory to become great. Microsoft was doing interesting things with new form factors and interface devices-- the Surface Book, Studio and Dial weren't all hits, but they were some of the only noteworthy experiments in PCs-- and they actually cared about build quality in a way pretty much no other PC manufacturer did.

Then Panay left, Windows 11 has been a debacle, and Nadella seems to give zero fucks about anything which isn't Copilot or Azure, so the Surface momentum that they spent so much time building has just coasted to a complete stop. It's sad.