What if Microsoft had waited?

[Niterider4]

I agree with you to an extent. There would always be bugs regardless if they decided to wait or not. If they did internal testing they still wouldn't have tested more than what 100? 200? at most. By selling them they can gather data on thousands of devices and pin point the issue faster with more data.

Any amount of testing at all would have revealed serious issues with the Surface Book. Microsoft chose to market the Surface Book notwithstanding these serious issues, while Panos Panay publicly gushed about its performance. Then it took six months to "pin point the issues faster". Not cool in my book.

 

[eltos_lightfoot]

What was cut was SDETs that were overlap from merging Xbox, Phone and Client into one unit, also the Development teams at Microsoft have switched to a DevOps model from a traditional Waterfall model....

But the truth doesn't make for great clickbait....

Fair enough, so if it wasn't that, what was the reason for the early release failures?

 

[Bandito]

To me, it seems very clear that MS made the decision to release according to their pre-planned schedule and figured that they'd just deal with the remaining bugs/problems as time permitted. This goes for both the SB and the SP4. They wanted to hit the window of opportunity and figured that it was good enough as-is.

This was really a terrible mistake in my opinion. Anyone with even the tiniest bit of customer service experience knows that negative publicity is ten times worse that good publicity. In other words, someone who has had a bad experience is very likely to share that experience with others whenever the opportunity arises. Satisfied customers tend to be rather neutral and generally say nothing. People that have had an issue handled well and successfully resolved will sing your praises and become very loyal if they know that you stand behind your products come what may.

I think that with all of the negative reactions to the serious problems with the SB's and SP4's, MS has lost a lot of sales and I'd love to see the return rate on these machines vs. others on the market. My guess is that it would be a night and day difference in the rates. That and the fact that MS's tech support is next to useless leaves a very bad taste in most people's mouths

Not to tout that 'other' computer company, but on the rare occasions that I've needed to get support from them, not once have I ever been told to simply reinstall the O.S. and all will be fine, even though you'll spend hours doing this and then have to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications and settings afterwards. Yet, this seems to be MS's standard answer if they can't figure out the problem in under 15-30 minutes.

If MS didn't purposely release a known-to-be-faulty product, I think that the outlook for them is just about as bad. It would indicate that they either never really bothered to test the systems under real-world usage and never actually used them in their day-to-day computing lives or that they are simply completely incompetent and don't know how to test. Perhaps they're learning the hard lesson that their Windows product is actually very difficult to make work well on the hardware that it was supposedly designed for.

No matter what happened or why it happened, the whole situation is simply rather sad.

 

[eltos_lightfoot]

This is a really on point post. It would definitely have been better to wait. But also, I like that you point out that this should be the BEST of all experiences. MS controls both the hardware and the software. I am really hoping the SP5 changes my mind and is really good.


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[jnjroach]

Hindsight is always 20/20... My educated guess would that the Surface Team trusted their Intel Supplier to have fully functional drivers at launch...and that the first round or two of Firmware updates would have fixed the major issues. That was the plan....

 

[jnjroach]

To me, it seems very clear that MS made the decision to release according to their pre-planned schedule and figured that they'd just deal with the remaining bugs/problems as time permitted. This goes for both the SB and the SP4. They wanted to hit the window of opportunity and figured that it was good enough as-is.

This was really a terrible mistake in my opinion. Anyone with even the tiniest bit of customer service experience knows that negative publicity is ten times worse that good publicity. In other words, someone who has had a bad experience is very likely to share that experience with others whenever the opportunity arises. Satisfied customers tend to be rather neutral and generally say nothing. People that have had an issue handled well and successfully resolved will sing your praises and become very loyal if they know that you stand behind your products come what may.

I think that with all of the negative reactions to the serious problems with the SB's and SP4's, MS has lost a lot of sales and I'd love to see the return rate on these machines vs. others on the market. My guess is that it would be a night and day difference in the rates. That and the fact that MS's tech support is next to useless leaves a very bad taste in most people's mouths

Not to tout that 'other' computer company, but on the rare occasions that I've needed to get support from them, not once have I ever been told to simply reinstall the O.S. and all will be fine, even though you'll spend hours doing this and then have to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications and settings afterwards. Yet, this seems to be MS's standard answer if they can't figure out the problem in under 15-30 minutes.

If MS didn't purposely release a known-to-be-faulty product, I think that the outlook for them is just about as bad. It would indicate that they either never really bothered to test the systems under real-world usage and never actually used them in their day-to-day computing lives or that they are simply completely incompetent and don't know how to test. Perhaps they're learning the hard lesson that their Windows product is actually very difficult to make work well on the hardware that it was supposedly designed for.

No matter what happened or why it happened, the whole situation is simply rather sad.

My experience with MS support has always been stellar....

 

[nnthemperor]

My experience is that most people usually wait to get a product the first time it's launched because of problems like this. Also most of these people hardly read tech blogs or forums, so my guess is that the bad press may be somehow exaggerated.

Sent from my SC-01F using Tapatalk

 

[Kevin Cossaboon]

What was cut was SDETs that were overlap from merging Xbox, Phone and Client into one unit, also the Development teams at Microsoft have switched to a DevOps model from a traditional Waterfall model....

But the truth doesn't make for great clickbait....

QQ: how do you do DevOps on a non-cloud based solution. They are not Developing in my operation, they Develop, they publish patches, I download and apply. I am not a coder, but thought NetFlix was DevOp as they develop in the same cloud that they are serving the solution through. I 'FEEL' that this is a waterfall code of someone has a commit cycle and they are adding features (like the current previews) and they use devops as an excuse for sloppy code....

If someone is a programmer and can explain this I would love to understand it.

 

[jnjroach]

QQ: how do you do DevOps on a non-cloud based solution. They are not Developing in my operation, they Develop, they publish patches, I download and apply. I am not a coder, but thought NetFlix was DevOp as they develop in the same cloud that they are serving the solution through. I 'FEEL' that this is a waterfall code of someone has a commit cycle and they are adding features (like the current previews) and they use devops as an excuse for sloppy code....

If someone is a programmer and can explain this I would love to understand it.

Its DevOps on a very large scale, what we see is a branch that is further out:

Canary is daily builds - devs check in code - Build - Canary Test (including the devs themselves) This is DevOps Motion along with OSG. The Microsoft Ring takes the most stable builds of the week and "Dog food" this build and if there are no show-stoppers it will move to the Fast Ring.

 

[dstrauss]

Hindsight is always 20/20... My educated guess would that the Surface Team trusted their Intel Supplier to have fully functional drivers at launch...and that the first round or two of Firmware updates would have fixed the major issues. That was the plan....

I would agree, but for the part where they touted using it themselves - there is no way any of them did not experience the connected standby problems, battery drain, and/or overheating. They had to know that you couldn't close the lid and not lose a drop of battery power...

 

[Niterider4]

I would agree, but for the part where they touted using it themselves - there is no way any of them did not experience the connected standby problems, battery drain, and/or overheating. They had to know that you couldn't close the lid and not lose a drop of battery power...

That's the part that bothers me too. It's one thing to have a few bugs at launch. It's entirely something different to make boastful performance claims at launch that you know are false. That's just dishonesty and deception in order to generate sales.

I expect better of a company like Microsoft.

 

[swajames]

The SB was the machine that brought me as a long time Apple laptop purchaser to the platform. I got mine on launch day, and while it's pretty solid now and I really like the machine as it is today the early experience was definitely sub par. I'm going to be a little less likely to trust any of Panos' keynotes going forward. I get the challenge of maintaining a stable OS when there are multiple hardware vendors to support, but expected more from an in-house product where MS themselves controlled both the hardware and the software.