Plug & touch

Microsoft has recently launched Microsoft Surface, a product that is a service itself. It consists on a solution that works as a personal computer but the interface is tactile and very friendly. Usability becomes key in such applications. By this way they can make technology more accessible to those people that don’t feel comfortable when interacting with computers and other gadgets. Anyway, although this application is being aimed to the business segment, with this application Microsoft is also tackling the home connectivity business (easy: no keyboard nor mouse).

As you could read in the previous paragraph, we have named several concepts at the same time: product, service and application. Product in this example with ‘Surface’ could be more understood as the hardware itself and its features, which are assembled and executed by different applications. While the service could be defined at a higher level, like something more abstract that explains the purpose or the outcomes of the technology applied. How would you define the distinction between these different words?