Although Microsoft always hedged its bets when it came to its positioning of the Surface Duo, part of the use case for the quirky device was 'productivity enhancements', to the detriment of consumer features, and the logical extension of this is that Microsoft has now seemingly gone big on 'business' as the target market. Not least because of the continued sky-high prices, more easily absorbed by enterprises. But a look through the rather impressive new 'Surface Duo for Business' page reveals enough attractive to an IT manager that maybe, just maybe, the Surface Duo might attract enough overall sales to keep Microsoft's design teams in pizza and continuing to develop the Surface Duo 2. Whether the latter also comes with a 'for Business' tag is anyone's guess.

Microsoft has announced that Surface Duo is expanding to 10 new European markets for business customers:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Denmark
• Finland
• Ireland
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland

These join the markets where Surface Duo is already available:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• France
• Germany

Although there's still a consumer-facing page (with the same price), this is from the relevant Surface Duo for Business page:

In case you can't read all the text in the screenshot:

Enterprise-level chip to cloud security

Surface Duo has protection built in at every layer with integrated hardware, firmware and software to keep your devices, identities and data secure.

Control with cloud-based management

Manage the entire Surface Duo experience for employees and protect work data with a variety of device management solutions, including Microsoft Intune.

Enhance existing apps for dual screens

Make your customer-facing and essential business apps work great for dual screens with the Surface Duo Software Development Kit (SDK) Preview.

Windows Virtual Desktop on Surface

Meet complex business and security requirements with broad device redirection support, endpoint protection and Microsoft 3651 virtualised in Azure.

In other words, all the right buzz words to appeal to the enterprise. And, given that the main costs of a computing device to a big business are in:

• the development of custom (in this case dual screen) apps
• training
• configuration
• management
• support

...the actual purchase price is fairly irrelevant. If it makes an employee more productive for a year or two then that's a 'win'.

Interesting positioning anyway, and it sounds like Microsoft is going for business more seriously than it went for the consumer market, where the Surface Duo stuck out like a sore thumb as being underspecced and over-priced. And with the side benefit that this time round the Duo has got almost a year of updates under its belt and should be more stable and reliable.