Can Microsoft's Surface Book single-handedly revitalise the dwindling PC market? Because it may have to

Ongoing failure to innovate means vendors are failing to resurrect a market ripe for the taking

PCs and laptops are not selling anymore. It's official. Even analysts at Gartner and IDC are in tune on that point this time, with the past few days seeing Gartner pronounce a year-on-year decline of 7.7 per cent in PC shipments, and those tracker nerds at IDC revealing an even worse figure of 10.8 per cent.

As my colleague Graeme Burton has already pointed out, apparently not even the promise of a free upgrade on all those mouldering Windows 8 machines on the high street has been enough to sway the public into buying new machines.

Meanwhile, iOS and Android-based computing continues to grow in confidence, with both Apple and Google brazenly throwing productivity-based versions of their tried-and-true tablets out into the public.

Both the Apple iPad Pro and the Google Pixel C have been called, by some (including Microsoft, and me) imitations of a hardware model Microsoft largely pioneered with the Surface. But Gartner and IDC's figures make it look like any smugness Surface vice president Panos Panay may be feeling about his company's trailblazing with hybrids may mask a growing sense of panic in Redmond.

Because we're now looking at a future in which both Apple and Google are starting to realise the share of the IT market they're inheriting can easily be used for more than basic web browsing and Candy Crush. There are growing rumblings around both companies converging their PC and mobile environments - iOS combining with MacOS, and Chrome with Android.

Indeed, the Pixel C, running Android under the Chrome brand, is just another example of Google beginning to play fast and loose with both concepts. The Chrome browser in itself can almost be seen as an OS within an OS, so it's not such a far-fetched notion to imagine such an all-inclusive Android environment running on tablets very soon.

"Desktop like"

But where does this leave Microsoft? The company has no mobile or ARM-based OS to work its traditional Win32 into. Windows RT was a failure, as have been all the phone-based Windows builds of the past, relegating the expensive acquisition of Nokia to the level of budget handsets for unfussy consumers.

While the new Lumia 950 and 950 XL phones display "desktop-like" behaviour when plugged into a monitor, this appears (we've not had hands-on yet) not to be true Win32-based functionality, and nor should it be when it's a mobile device.

Basically, all Microsoft has left is Win32, and its best move if it wants to continue to make money is to keep selling Windows (it'll be seriously selling Windows 10 eventually, once the year-long upgrade Window has passed and people start - hopefully - buying new OEM hardware).

Thus the play we saw last week - launching two new hybrid tablets. The powerful Surface Book has caused a storm, as people see it as Microsoft's attempt to seriously take on the MacBook Pro. But Microsoft's not doing this because it's finally ‘come of age' as a hardware designer or because it wants a piece of that shiny lifestyle gadget hype that Apple's still dining-out on. No, Microsoft has made a big, sexy laptop because it's clearly noticed that nobody else is doing that anymore, and desperately wants to keep Windows relevant.

While the Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2 weren't great at capturing the public imagination, every single other hardware vendor resolutely failed in designing decent third-party hybrid tablets in the Windows 8 generation.

While Microsoft's tear-off keyboard and slim, light tablet design set a model for other vendors, we ended up mostly with middling efforts like the Lenovo Yoga or the HP Spectre x360 - huge, heavy laptops with keyboards that folded round the screen and were utterly unwieldy as tablet solutions. According to IDC's curves, the Yoga sold badly. As a result, ThinkPads and bland, lightweight notebooks became the order of the day in the later days of Windows 8's lifespan.

Small change

Now, margins are of course slim in the commoditised PC market, and everybody is going to keep doing what everybody else does, just to keep the ball rolling and hopefully hold onto their jobs - designing genuinely innovative, new machines is costly and fraught with the risk that the resulting devices will flop. That's all understandable. But if every Windows partner keeps spitting out the same old machine, Apple and Google - now armed with their own hybrid solutions - are going to keep eating into a market they're already perilously close to completely swallowing.

And that's bad news for the enterprise and bad news for anyone running legacy Win 32 software (i.e. everybody).

The wider effect of the blandness of Windows 8 partner device design is just manifesting now, as CIOs beginning the latest five-year hardware refresh show me their new hardware rollouts in their IT departments and I spot technology barely stylistically evolved from the 1990s. I witness employees carrying opened laptops around from meeting to meeting, some even still having mini towers employed for "design work".

Tablets and hybrids are still something the CTO tinkers with in a back office, dreaming of a genuine application "one day" when they're cheap enough or their uses are fully understood.

From Microsoft's decision to go big with hardware, you can make two conclusions: One, it's still not given up and has built both the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book as a two-pronged attack on the cowardice and lack of imagination shown by Lenovo, Dell, Acer and all its other partners. A plea to listen, as the success of the Surface Pro 3 - which hit £1bn of revenue back in January 2015 - keeps echoing.

The second take-away, however, could be that Microsoft has finally given up on its partners, and gone the way of - as a direct example - James Dyson (of vacuum cleaner fame). Nobody wanted his fancy cleaning equipment because they just wanted to sell over-priced bags for their £50 vacuum cleaners, which had barely advanced since the 1950s. So Dyson went it alone, to great success.

Microsoft's got a chance to succeed in the same way - maybe - but it would seem a much more positive state of affairs if OEMs put their hands in their pockets, began a decent R&D process, and begin to take the industry forward in the way it's meant to go.

The alternative is to grub around for the last crumbs on the plate before - like it appears Dell is now considering - having to drop a reliance on the comatose PC market altogether, and buy its way into the top of another industry entirely.

PC hardware vendors: please get building! The industry depends on you.