Courier: the tablet Microsoft invented and then killed
Microsoft shelved its dual-screen Courier tablet weeks after the iPad launched
The market's verdict: -3.4% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
Courier was Microsoft's internal dual-screen tablet, a genuinely novel digital-notebook concept demoed publicly in 2009, and on April 29, 2010, weeks after the iPad shipped, Microsoft shelved it. Reporting since has described the decision as Ballmer's, after Bill Gates had what a witness called an allergic reaction to a device that did not run Windows. The two executives most associated with it left within months, and Microsoft entered the tablet market two years late with Windows 8 instead. A decade later the company cancelled a dual-screen OS again, and the category Courier pioneered was shipped by others. Killing the future to protect the present: a classic, executed twice.
This one is well documented.
They did it more than once
Killed the forward-looking tablet in 2010, killed the forward-looking OS in 2021.
Links
↳ caused by Courier cancellation (April 2010)
Timeline
- Apr 29, 2010 Stood by it Microsoft stood by it.