I have to jump in here because I'm a software developer and I have worked for MS in the past. You people really have no idea what your talking about. Of all the companies I've worked for (Microsoft, ATI, AMD, S3, 3dfx, Intel, and McAfee), Microsoft did FAR more testing than anyone else. Code is frozen for months and changes require several signoffs.
You all act like MS is some fly by night companies with 3 guys in a garage that purposely don't test their stuff because they don't give a crap about anything or anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have personally been involved in the death march of 60-70 hour weeks leading up to releases. Every night, every engineers test machines (usually there are 3 or 4 of them) run "stress" on nightly builds of the OS which is a test matrix of hundreds of different programs all run at the same time with the sole purpose of trying to kill a machine. Their first job every morning is to debug and find the root cause of any failure from the night before...anywhere within MS. Stress is run on the network. For example, any machine anywhere at MS that crashed with ati2mtag.sys on the stack is held in its broken state until an ATI developer debugs it and finds out EXACTLY what happened.
MS is not careless or negligent. The problems introduced with the last firmware are unfortunate and will be fixed. The fact that it is taking so long means it is not a trivial change. EVERY other computer/tablet/phone/gadget has has the same kind of thing in the past. You are not guaranteed a perfect device by buying Apple of Lenovo etc. There are temporary work arounds such as disabling sleep and using Airplane mode at night etc. Worst case scenario, you restore your factory image which doesn't include any of the updates.
No, you couldn't be more wrong if you said the Earth is also flat and that Obama is the best President ever.
1. The source code on the development branch for this firmware was not frozen for a month, probably not even for a week. If it was and if they were doing extensive testing on a frozen build for over a week then this issue would have been found. Clearly 2 things went wrong in the deployment of the botched firmware: 1) the code review process was severely overlooked and 2) either not enough test cases were looked at or the period of testing was too short. Microsoft has a long history of releasing buggy software because their process is severely flawed. Just look at how companies like alcatel-lucent operate with similar situations. They have products with 3 tiers of troubleshooting (the final tier being a team dedicated to a single product and uncovering and replicating issues for that product) and that's only their troubleshooting network, they also have the regular development team for the product which is likely all Microsoft even has for the Surface.
2. Even if you want me not to blame Microsoft for the bad firmware update, it doesn't change the fact that their response has been SLOW. Microsoft should have either: 1) Immediately had a team working as hard as possible to release a patch to REVERT the state of our firmware to that of the October update OR they should have 2) Immediately and directly have contacted ALL consumers with this product and told us we're all eligible for a free device exchange. NEITHER of these things happened and we were put in a corner to sit with our broken $1500 machines for OVER A MONTH.
3. Why the hell are there so many other bugs in Windows 8 if Microsoft is so damn careful? The on screen keyboard often doesn't pop up in ***METRO*** mode, and many of us get BSODs when trying to turn the surface on from sleep. These problems have been existent for MONTHS. Ever since the Surface Pro 1. Microsoft is a freaking slug and they don't give a crap about us. The Windows 8 development team isn't a regular development team, they're a team of displaced software engineers who have no idea what the hell they're doing and clearly have too little guidance and support from the rest of the company.
Microsoft is incredibly careless and negligent. They are careless for failing to test their software before deploying it, and I can almost forgive them of this if it doesn't happen again. But I simply cannot forgive the negligence and neglect they've shown to consumers. Microsoft knows damn well that we all took a chance on buying the unpopular Surface over the iPad or an Android tablet, and they release buggy software and completely fail extremely hard to release a rollback, inform consumers of an exchange program, release a fix and whats worse there has been ZERO compensation.
No. This is unacceptable, and this is to be expected from Microsoft. I am a frequent Windows and OS X user and Apple would never, *NEVER* pull crap off like this and expect users to go along with it for such a long period of time. Apple has recalled iPods over 5 years old when they find problems. I don't even think Apple has had a firmware disaster even close to this scale on any product before.
And just to put the cherry on top of this epic Microsoft fail: I can't even exchange my broken Surface or broken touch cover because the Microsoft exchange website does not work. The server is slow and their frontend is broken because they're not executing jQuery dependent code before including jQuery.
What the heck, Microsoft. Apple's too busy milking money off watered down iOS, and you're just prancing around, trying plug holes in the sinking RT ship and pissing off your OEMs and consumers with your controversial, expensive and riddled with bugs Surface Pro.
(p.s. in writing this post, my Surface rebooted once, my touch cover stopped responding twice, and then the on screen keyboard refused to automatically open, so I had to go into desktop IE and hit the keyboard button in my task bar. This experience is not worth $100 let alone $1500)
