Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, visited a Microsoft Store to check out the Surface tablet. He wrote a blog post about it, which is both hilarious and insightful.

"The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable. In that world, this is a groundbreaking new tablet that you can finally use at work and leave your big creaky plastic Dell laptop behind when you go to the conference room to have a conference call on the starfish phone with all of the wires and dysfunctional communication."

It's sad how desperately Microsoft tries to copy Apple.

Apple’s products say, “You can’t do that because we think it would suck.” Microsoft’s products say, “We’ll let you try to do anything on anything if you really want to, even if it sucks.”

I think that sums up the difference in Apple's and Microsoft's philosophies.

Mosspuppet has a hilarious response to Marco:

"And because Marco Arment is John Gruber's right ass-cheek, he decided to be clever. Because on the Windows Surface launch day, on a day when even rabidly anti-PC folks like Cult of Mac are giving Microsoft props for creating interest in their product and posting long lines of people eager to buy Microsoft's new tablet, he describes a very sad looking setup in front of the store, along with a huge number of MS employees, who outnumbered the customers by a wide margin.

Get it, you guys? It's so sad, because even on launch day for a major new initiative, Microsoft can't drum up a crowd! What goddamn suckers!

Marco then points out, hey, it's nearly 4pm.

You go into an Apple store on a product launch day, that near to the end of the launch day, you won't see lines. Idiot. Because by that point all of the people in those lines have already bought the device they were waiting for, and have gone home to use it. Nice try, though, Arment. Nice try."