Apple is good at addressing design oversights. Will Microsoft be as adept?

The Retina iPad, for example, violated Apple's design creed: products should get thinner and lighter -- aka, cooler. Not thicker and heavier.

But Apple fixed this quickly (six month later) with the iPad Mini trifecta: thinner, lighter, cheaper. And the iPad, reinvented as the Mini, has been a runaway success.

Now that Microsoft is in the business of making tablets, can it act fast when it commits product-design sins?

Surface is not a success -- yet. The Surface Pro is too big and heavy (and expensive), according to IDC and plenty of other observers. (It is a tablet, after all, despite Microsoft's valiant attempt to categorize it as a PC).

And the RT model is hampered by performance and an unpopular operating system, and it's out of sync -- like the Pro -- with the market shift to smaller tablets.