NEW YORK-With the un­veil­ing of the Sur­face tablet, Mi­crosoft is head­ing in­to un­usu­al ter­ri­to­ry: com­pet­ing with its part­ners, the very same com­pa­nies that make Win­dows PCs. But Mi­crosoft has lit­tle to lose, since PC man­u­fac­tur­ers have so far had very lit­tle suc­cess with their own tablets.

With the un­veil­ing of its tablet this week Mi­crosoft Corp is tak­ing up the com­pe­ti­tion with Ap­ple Inc and its iPad by bor­row­ing a page from Ap­ple's play­book. It is keep­ing both soft­ware and hard­ware de­vel­op­ment un­der the same roof. "If im­i­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery, the com­pli­ments from Mi­crosoft poured down like a tor­ren­tial storm on Ap­ple last night," said an­a­lyst Bri­an White at Tope­ka Cap­i­tal Mar­kets.

Even Steve Ballmer, Mi­crosoft's fa­mous­ly tough-talk­ing CEO sound­ed down­right Zen and Ap­ple-in­spired as he in­tro­duced the Sur­face. "We be­lieve that any in­ter­sec­tion be­tween hu­man and ma­chine can be made bet­ter when all as­pects of the ex­pe­ri­ence-hard­ware and soft­ware-are con­sid­ered and work­ing to­geth­er," he said at Mon­day's launch event in Los An­ge­les. That's a new phi­los­o­phy for Mi­crosoft, a com­pa­ny ac­cus­tomed to writ­ing soft­ware, charg­ing loads of mon­ey for it, and let­ting oth­ers de­sign the hard­ware.

AP