Current and former Microsoft employees reacted to Apple’s iPhone Duo, and Mat Velloso, who spent four years as Satya Nadella’s technical advisor, joked that Surface Duo’s team was screaming into their pillows. Apple’s foldable arrived six years after Microsoft launched the Surface Duo, and three years after Microsoft cancelled its successor.
It’s been almost three weeks since the iPhone Duo was announced, and I still see at least three to five viral posts about it every day. Most of them are developers showing off creative apps built around the new form factor.
Yes, I’m aware of the love developers have for iOS and macOS, but there’s a company as large as Apple that developers famously avoided when it came to native, creative apps. Obviously, I’m talking about Microsoft.
Developer support was one of Surface Duo’s biggest problems, and understandably so, because even Microsoft couldn’t get Android to run smoothly on the Duo!
So, watching them build for the iPhone Duo before it even reaches stores stings, because Microsoft had a years-long head start with the hardware, software, developer tools and research. I feel the foldable iPhone Duo is the Surface Duo Microsoft gave up on in 2023.
But most importantly, many of the iPhone Duo marketing material is a too similar to the Microsoft Surface Duo ads from 2020. Naturally, I wondered what the people who built Surface Duo were thinking.
Microsoft people couldn’t ignore the iPhone Duo
Scott Hanselman, a Microsoft vice president known for his developer community work, kept it short, and tragic:
“RIP Surface Duo. Always a bridesmaid…”
To a fan, it does feel that the original Surface Duo never got to be the bride!
Microsoft’s CTO for Energy, Lewis Richards’ reply was funny enough to take away the twinge: “i just shared the launch video with my friend who said ‘give it a week Apple will have invented the word duo…’”
I may sound like a broken record when I say that Microsoft was too early with a lot of things. They kept getting close to the spotlight but didn’t become the star. Surface Duo was early, but Apple gets the attention.
When Mat Velloso said, “Somewhere a thousand voices who worked on Surface Duo screamed into their pillows,” I can’t help but imagine what the Surface Duo could’ve been today.
Velloso spent over 12 years at Microsoft, including four as Technical Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella, and later led developer platform products at Google DeepMind and Meta. He’s also the former executive who said Microsoft missed the AI wave earlier this year, so he’s not shy about criticizing his old employer.
The name hurt the most. “The fact they too called this Duo was too painful…” he wrote, followed by “I can’t believe they called it Duo.” I bet everybody loves their MacBook Neo (if you know, you know).
When SwiftOnSecurity said everyone who worked on Surface Duo knew Apple would do this six years later “and be called geniuses,” Velloso replied that there was “0 doubt this day would come”.
The reaction that made me ponder hard came from Hadjar Homaei, who wrote that she might have published her research if she were still at Microsoft.
“**Screaming into a pillow**
maybe if I was still at Microsoft I could’ve finally published the really fun psychophysics experiments I did on the dual screen’s effects on attention and multitasking… 7 years ago but couldn’t talk about anywhere!”
Microsoft wasn’t building a weird phone with two screens on a whim. When Surface Duo went up for preorder, Panos Panay said Microsoft’s internal research showed “three out of four people report struggling to complete complex tasks while away from their computer,” and that dual-screen devices “require less cognitive effort.”
It courted developers early, too. Microsoft explained how apps would run on the Surface Duo before launch, pitched it to creators, worked on stylus support improvements and pushed Duo-optimized apps. Velloso recalled “running Linux and VS Code locally on Surface Duo” five years ago.
But even Nadella’s former advisor says the CEO didn’t kill Surface Duo
It’s natural for people to blame Microsoft’s leadership for killing the Duo too early. Velloso didn’t agree.
“Satya didn’t block anything, I don’t get why he’s to blame here. The product was launched, it didn’t take off.”
When another user argued that Nadella’s reshuffles shifted Microsoft’s focus, Velloso doubled down.
“I think you are conflating him driving priorities vs the whole market voting with their feet, which is what sadly happened. Nobody blocked this product, that’s why many of us still have it.”
Former Microsoft employee Jeff Fritz sees it differently. In his opinion, “Microsoft doesn’t have the patience to play the long game. If a product isn’t turning around high ROI in less than 2 years it’s done.”
Even our own post got a reply from Velloso. When we tweeted that Apple can get away with anything and call it innovation, he wrote back, “You can choose to keep calling the world unfair and refuse to take a hard look at where one went wrong and where the other went right.”
The record backs up both sides. Surface Duo shipped in 2020 with Android plagued by critical issues; Microsoft spent months fixing its buggy software, and an April 2021 update caused a black screen bug in book mode. Microsoft hinted at a Surface Duo 2 with 5G and a better camera, and it launched later in 2021.
Then, in 2023, Microsoft scrapped the Duo 3 and the foldable that replaced it. Surface Duo’s updates ended in September 2023, and Surface Duo 2 followed in October 2024.
Hanselman also reposted the Surface Duo launch video from September 10, 2020, saying, “2020, a crazy year.” Ironically, Apple announced the iPhone Duo on September 9, 2026, a day short of six years later. When someone asked if Apple stole the idea, Hanselman replied, “Borrowed?”
The people who worked on Surface Duo don’t seem shocked that Apple went in this direction. They seem more annoyed that Microsoft stopped.
I think that’s a more interesting criticism than saying Apple copied Microsoft. Apple is doing it with a single folding display, its own hinge mechanism, and iOS. What Microsoft explored first was the idea that a phone becomes a far better productivity machine when you give it more screen and build the software complementing it.
Microsoft had that idea in 2020 and even shipped a second generation. Then it walked away.
Six years later, Apple gets to call it iPhone Duo.
