With its new Surface Tablet, Microsoft didn’t just break the mold. It smashed it into a million little pieces, chucked them all into the furnace and set the temperature to obliterate. There really is no precedent for what Microsoft did this week. What was once recognizable is gone. The expected is no more. There are no rules, only supply and the possibility of demand. 

Now rumors are starting to coalesce around the thing being launched: a touchscreen tablet, manufactured by Microsoft itself, running on Windows RT (a version of Windows 8), intended to rival Apple’s iPad. Hollywood blog The Wrap cites “an individual with knowledge of the company”, who claims the software giant would be “making a foray into a new hardware category that would put the company in direct competition with rival Apple” — tablets.

This would hardly be the first time Microsoft has tried its hand at a tablet device. Indeed, its first tablet preceded the iPad by the better part of a decade. But it was a bulky laptop hybrid that required a stylus, to which it wasn’t very responsive. Between 2008 and 2010, the company was said to be working on a dual-touchscreen folding tablet — kind of like a book — called “Courier.