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It has to be really frustrating to be an engineer working on Surface and having to deal with the HN echo chamber, or MS bashing (some from Apple fanboys), or to

It has to be really frustrating to be an engineer working on Surface and having to deal with the HN echo chamber, or MS bashing (some from Apple fanboys), or totally unrelated comments. Maybe it should be a rule that these folks below post their own product for review. Hopefully they have something significant that can be open to critique. Of course, that would not be too much fun. - nivla: "Seriously, I am starting to believe that these tiny screwups are their signature." - rasz_pl: "...rock solid product.. notice the number 3 in the name of said product? and still not good enough. Not to mention UI lags. 2014 and GUI is lagging. Someone needs to get shot." - justin66 "> Windows 8 tries to be too many things at once That is a very, very generous description of Windows 8." - jodrellblank: "2014, Intel Core i5, SSD and stutters when 'browsing files' in PS. shakes head" - carlio: "I feel a little cynical by saying this, but does Microsoft really care about artists as much as they care about the audience they're reaching via Penny Arcade?" - enraged_camel: "It's the execution that is lacking significantly. I've always said that Microsoft is really, really good at engineering, and really, really bad at UX and usability. After reading Gabe's review, I'm disappointed that this is still the case." [EDIT: Software to "product" + line breaks]

HNJohnC 12y ago
In fairness, just the single fact that they put a button exactly where the hand needs to go when actually using the product in one of it's core use-cases is a pretty good excuse for some MS bashing. They could have taken 5 minutes, given the prototype to an artist and noticed the hand placement issue immediately. You can be an apologist if you wish, but I don't know how you can excuse such a glaring failure of design.
- shurcooL 12y ago
  Saying that it's a "failure of design" suggests there's an easy non-failure alternative. If so, can you tell us what it is? Are you sure that solution won't fail under some conditions? People like to take something that exists, take the problems it solves as a given, and act like all that's left is fixing the problems remaining. That's not how it works.
  - anonymfus 12y ago
    Solution could be the same as for palm rejection: disable start button when pen is near the screen.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  The issue is with the "fatalism" of the comments. For example, you refer to a "glaring failure" when this can be fixed with a simple "drawing mode" patch.
  - gisenberg 12y ago
    No such thing as a "simple" patch in the context of Windows: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/how-many-microsoft-employees-does-it-take-to-change-a-lightbulb.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/how-m...
    - hyperliner 12y ago
      Can we agree to get over anything that happened in computing more than 10 years ago?
      - gisenberg 12y ago
        I'm not sure how a reasonable person can see that article and think Microsoft doesn't have to worry about justifying features, project management, testing, documentation, group policies, localization, security, or anything else that makes a "simple" feature for Windows complicated because the source saying so happens to be more than ten years old. The process and consideration outlined is certainly in-line with my own experiences at Microsoft.
        pyre 12y ago
        The fact that the article is old doesn't meant we should ignore it, but on the other hand, you have to consider the possibility that things change over the course of a decade, and the article may be out-dated. You can't use 10-year-old evidence as 'proof' of anything currently happening at Microsoft, though you can use it as evidence to weigh probabilities.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  You'd be surprised at the number of "obvious" things you'll miss when shipping your product. The fact is, the people designing these things are human, with their own biases and blind spots. Furthermore, your beta test group will probably miss a few "glaring" problems with your product (even if you've shipped multiple versions before!) In the resulting bashing and crowd pleasing "this sux" comments, there will be a few people who WANT to love the product but just can't, and are willing to explain exactly why. Those are the people you latch on to, give free products to, and pick their brains for their insight so that you can iterate better on your next version. And that's exactly what Microsoft is doing. This is the correct strategy.
- mcintyre1994 12y ago
  I'm surprised they don't give test devices (under NDA presumably) way earlier to people like Gabe, using your evangelist bloggers to improve the product before they write their public review seems smart.
- shearnie 12y ago
  They should have tested on a right handed designer at least. Panos looks left handed, is he the only guy that has played with it?
- vacri 12y ago
  They may have done just that, but their artist was left-handed. Or a right handed artist whose hand position didn't touch that area. Or a test group made up of these kinds of people. Also, doing User Acceptance Testing certainly does not 'take 5 minutes'. It's far more difficult that people give it credit for - if it were as trivial as you imply, then there'd be no kudos for good design
ansimionescu 12y ago
Following your brilliant thoughts on criticism in general, I propose that we ban all tech reviews, literary critics, and all sorts of critical thinking, with the exception, of course, of people who have created flawless pieces of work. Roger Ebert should be dug up and then ceremoniously shot and stripped of all of his awards. Also, it goes without saying that if you want to submit any criticism to this comment, you'll have to submit a full resume, a short fugue, and run a marathon backwards. edit: Heh, I might have gone a bit over the top. On-topic: SP3 is a seriously impressive piece of work and I sense great things coming from Microsoft under Satya's reign (if only they would start properly leveraging their wonderful MSR).
- hyperliner 12y ago
  I am going to assume your comment is in good faith. My observation was that a single glitch is seen as some sort of disaster, when in reality is a simple issue in one scenario that clearly was not prioritized over many other scenarios. Anybody knows there are constraints in design, and clearly they decided one thing over another. We can all be arm chair generals, but my focus is on the engineers themselves who must be frustrated that their work is generalized as a global failure because "it's Microsoft."
  - MBCook 12y ago
    I don't know about other people but Ioway saw the built-in Wacom tablet as one the best features of the Surface. I know that having a great digitizers one of the few things that I wish my iPad had, and my brother seriously looked at buying a Surface because the built-in digitizer. In fact some of the best reviews I've seen of the Surface, such as Penny Arcade's, we're so happy with the precisely because of the ability to draw. Given that that's one of their standout features, it seems odd that they would make such a big mistake with it. From the description it sounds like something that anyone who used the Surface for drawing for more than a short amount of time would've run into. It also sounds frustrating enough that it might ruin the usefulness of the tablet for precisely the kind of people who might of bought it. That makes the regression seem very strange.
  - konstruktor 12y ago
higherpurpose 12y ago
Remember this is a review by a designer. There's little doubt the Surface Pro is pretty good for that. The problem Microsoft has is that it's not really a mainstream device. Most people would be better served by a laptop with more storage that works better (not lag, not touch-confusing interface, and so on). Also, Microsoft made a huge mistake keeping the 4400 GPU. It was already slow for the 1080p Surface Pro 2. And they kept it for Surface Pro 3, which has even higher resolution. By comparison, the Macbook Air comes with a much faster Intel HD 5000 GPU, and it has a much lower resolution.
- codeulike 12y ago
  The i7 Surfaces will have a better GPU than the 4400, I hear. edit: below: "Core i7 version is the i7-4650U model, with HD5000 graphics."
enraged_camel 12y ago
So you need to be a cook before you can criticize the food that the cook serves you? What a crock of bullshit.
- colmvp 12y ago
  So you need to be a coder before you can criticize the code that a programmer writes? What a crock of bullshit.
  - bluthru 12y ago
    Criticize the code? Yes. Criticize the product? No.
- randomfool 12y ago
  This appears to be hyperliner's first comment ever. Tough to tell how impartial they are.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    Your first comment ever as randomfool is below. Should we question your impartiality then? =================== I believe that Scott Jenson put it best in 'Why Mobile Apps Must Die'- http://vimeo.com/33692624 http://vimeo.com/33692624 Watch it. The problem with native apps is the installation barrier- if I had apps installed to do everything that I'd love my phone to do, I'd be overwhelmed with hundreds of apps installed. Web-based apps have the potential to slip in and out of use as necessary, with more applicable discovery mechanisms (geo, proximity, etc). ====================
rayiner 12y ago
This isn't elementary school where everyone gets an "A" for effort. Microsoft has demonstrated with the Surface line an institutional inability to execute. From Surface RT shipping with a buggy beta of Office to continuing major deficiencies in Windows Phone (no forward button in IE until 8.1?) to the schizo nature of Windows 8 that only makes sense if you look from the engineering side and realize that its schizo only because it would be too hard to make everything run in Metro. Yes, there are engineering compromises that have to be made, but they shouldn't result in what the user perceives to be a compromised product. Sometimes its better to not do something unless you can do it right. E.g. Surface RT shouldn't have shipped without a final version of Office. It featured prominently in every rewview, and almost nobody went back and updated theirs. E.g. Surface Pro shouldn't have shipped without Haswell. E.g. Surface Pro 2 shouldn't have shipped without the major firmware update that improved battery life by 20%. E.g. Apple has wisely avoided shipping a Retina MBA because they can't do it yet without regressing battery life. Microsoft is playing in Apple's price range, and is late to the game. What it lacks is Apple's ability to take on limited ambitious, but (usually) execute those without major flaws.
- Spearchucker 12y ago
  I'm reading this and thinking about the history of the iPhone. Starting with no copy/paste (something even available in elementary school) thru to maps. How is Apple's track record different to Microsoft/Surface? [Edit] My intent is not to be facetious. What I'm seeing (and I may well be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time) is consistency bias - our compulsive desire to be consistent with past decisions. If I have an iPad then the iPad must be good and the Surface must be bad.
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    "Starting with no copy/paste thru to maps." Not to mention the original intent to not support native 3rd party apps at all. Having said that, Microsoft really did fuck up with the Metro (or whatever it is called now) rollout in stupidly trying to apply the same basic UI to everything despite the fact that it only works really well on touch-centric devices. And they've been stumbling a bit with hardware.. I'm not a Surface user but I do have an Xbox One and it is pretty disappointing compared to the PS4 (YMMV if you care about the live tv stuff, but as a "cord-cutter" I don't). These slips really fucked up the user experience on desktops, laptops (via Windows 8) and consoles (the Xbox One console UX is in quite a lot of ways vastly inferior to the UX on the Xbox 360 and the primary reason seems to be to allow it to be yet another Metro platform). However, there are pretty strong signals that the new leadership realizes this was a mistake and they are now attempting to fix it. It is way too soon to write Microsoft off as a major platform player.
justin66 12y ago
If those are the sorts of comments that you view as over the top, I question your familiarity with tech criticism, or criticism in general. Making mistakes on a shipping product has consequences. Clownpenisdotfart on the internet spending a sentence emoting his dislike is the very, very least of them. The thing is, the engineers KNOW all the stuff we're talking about, and the products ship anyway. I bet they're frustrated for reasons a little deeper than an HN "shakes head" comment.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  A product needs to ship at some point. You can't expect a product to be polished 100% free of limitations or defects for 100% of the scenarios.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - justin66 12y ago
    So it's your view that the engineers are sanguine with the bugs and misfeatures they're shipping and they're just frustrated (your word) with criticism on the internet? I would note that your opinion of Microsoft's engineers is apparently a lot lower than most of us who are criticizing their product.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    Not with all criticism. My point is that the comments I copy-pasted reflect criticism that a) generalizes a feature limitation into some sort of macro failure and not priorities or other design restrictions, b) shifts the bar because "it's Microsoft" or c) is unrelated to the original comments from OP.
Crito 12y ago
I can't help but wonder if perhaps the perceived failings in Microsoft products could be the result of an internal attitude towards criticism that is similar to the attitude towards criticism that you are expressing here. Does Microsoft have an internal culture that discourages criticism, which results in criticism from the outside world catching Microsoft employees by surprise?
- hyperliner 12y ago
  I only would like to point out that all the comments I copy-pasted are gross generalizations, unrelated to the main points in OP comments. You do have a fair "design process" question.
- nivla 12y ago
  I doubt it, the surface team actually does regular AMA's after a product launches. They do listen to criticisms and manage to correct most of them in the next iteration. If you watched the keynote event, Panay talks about it, especially in regards to the trackpad issues. Not to mention the usual flurry of "M$" and "Who uses bing?" comments they have to deal with.
- bcbrown 12y ago
  No, there is plenty of criticism internally. It's just not criticism about the same sort of thing. It's more political than technical/product. Frankly, I don't think my friends who work on Windows Phone realize that it's a failure. When I last talked to former coworkers from Windows 8, they didn't think it was a failure.
gisenberg 12y ago
Comments like these genuinely make me wonder if a non-trivial chunk of the crowd here is paid marketers and/or folks not being honest about full disclosure. Touting the HN echo chamber in the context of the Surface is hard to take in good faith. Frustrated Surface engineers? As someone who waited in line on launch day and returned their Surface within a week, how about frustrated Surface customers? After reading a review where the device sounds like a strong step back and was developed in isolation without customer feedback, I think your sympathies are misplaced.
- itsboring 12y ago
  They do this on reddit too..
  - bluthru 12y ago
    It's way worse on reddit. No critical comment survived: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/261bvo/microsoft_announces_the_surface_pro_3/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/261bvo/microsoft...
- Gorkys 12y ago
  Are you reading the same HN as me? I'd say 70% of the comments here are disparaging towards the Surface.
nivla 12y ago
>nivla: "Seriously, I am starting to believe that these tiny screwups are their signature." >Maybe it should be a rule that these folks below post their own product for review. Umm... that is exactly what I am doing. I own a Surface Pro 1 and I had a genuine criticism about it. From my previous comments you can easily deduce that I am far from echo chambers of MS bashing. However that does not mean I can't criticize the products I own, like and have experience with. If I din't it will make me a blind fanboy and trust me I have been on that path before and it doesn't have any merits. MS like every other company has its strength and weaknesses and genuine criticisms will only help them improve their product line and keep them motivated.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  All companies make "tiny screwups" in all non-trivial efforts.
  - nivla 12y ago
    Yes all companies make "tiny screwups" but with MS its becoming a pattern with new lines. The gripe I have is because even after shelling out $1200 on a Surface Pro it din't have a GPS or a 4G that already all phones and low end tablets have, not to mention even in the flagship Nokia 2520 tablet. Its these trivial mistakes over and over again that makes their product go from near perfect to manageable. Most of the time they do have the right idea but it gives out the vibe that they rather do the trial and error than learn from their competitors success and mistakes.
    - jister 12y ago
      So you bought surface and didn't check its specs and you blame Microsoft for that?
      - nivla 12y ago
        No I brought the surface knowing the spec but hoping they would add it in the next few iterations, which they haven't so far. Not having a GPS and 4G is pretty much the only reason I am not going to upgrade to the Surface Pro 3. These two additions makes it the complete package for my travel.
badman_ting 12y ago
Serious question: What makes them fanboys but not you?
- hyperliner 12y ago
  It's a fair question. I think a fanboy would have called out (listed) every single criticism in the thread, not just the ones I called out as not adding to the conversation, as defined by me somewhere else in this thread. I am looking into whether a Surface could extend my Mac, iMac, iPad, Windows Server and Windows 7 (no Android yet :( collection.
  - vacri 12y ago
    'Naming and shaming' the way you've done it is not really the way HN does things. Whether or not you are a fanboy, I find your behaviour to be more harmful than any of the comments you quoted. The "well, what have you done" tone of the comment is basically claiming that all of those you named are worthless people. Instead of being a tattletale (of dubious quality), respond to comments you find egregious and lead by example (unless they're trolls, then simply downvote and then ignore them).
peter-row 12y ago
Apple Fanboy and MS basher here. Seriously, the Surface is a great move. Aside from the whole Pro / RT naming thing, of course (confusing customers is not good). The Surface is, AFAIK, the only good tablet PC out there - it's a real flagship product for Wintel tablets. The OEMs will eventually beat MS on value, but I suspect Microsoft will be OK with that. Microsoft can afford to take a loss creating the market for Windows 8 tablets, and won't be upset if other OEMs start competing in the space - they'll then make money on software sales. MS needs tablet PCs to be a thing. Tablets are a thing - people love tablets. People will either choose between a laptop and a tablet, or just a tablet that can also run Office. If there's good Windows tablets, people will tend to go with that. As Intel improves mobile x86 chips, the choice will be even easier. Microsoft does not want everyone using Android / iOS tablet, because then the software ecosystem will move to iOS / Android apps (as it is already doing). Whether Microsoft should have made the hardware itself, or let OEMs do it is a good question, but I think they were right to do it themselves. Just look at what the competition has been like - every other Windows tablet I've seen (not a huge sample) has been pitiful - ugly and either not portable enough, or grossly underpowered. Also, making Surface probably gives them the institutional knowledge to make Windows better for tablets.
- codeulike 12y ago
  Yeah Surface is to Windows as Nexus is to Android. MS accept (now) that its going to be a niche product but are OK with that because it leaves space for the OEMs
- orionblastar 12y ago
  Actually when Microsoft had Windows XP based tablets in 2002 they worked better than these Surface tablets. I don't know how they got changed and how they aren't as good as the ones in 2002 that had slower processors and less RAM etc. I've been using tablets since the early 1990's when Toshiba had the Windows 3.1 based pen tablets using MS-DOS 5.0 with the option for MS-OS/2 1.21 if you wanted it.
nlawalker 12y ago
If I were on the Surface team, I'd be A) elated that the product is generating discussion, and B) watching this thread (and others like it) like a hawk and taking notes. From the right perspective, this thread looks like a room full of people all competing to be first in line to tell Microsoft that they'll buy their new product if they just fixed their one complaint. Negativity is wrapping paper on the gift of feedback - it is to be torn off and thrown away, because it has no value.
- bztzt 12y ago
  I once worked at Microsoft on a product that was actually getting almost entirely positive feedback (while still in preview) for once and ... it was kind of frustrating. I started scouring the internet for "<product name> hate" (and did find haters, some with interesting povs) :)
CamperBob2 12y ago
Well, when you play in the big leagues you need to bring your A game. They aren't doing that. Most of the negative comments in the article can be distilled into a single phrase: they don't use their own product. Otherwise, for instance, the button that dumps you back to the desktop wouldn't work the way it does, be placed where it is, or be so difficult to disable. (You could say much the same of Metro as a whole, but that's not germane here.) Failure to eat your own dog food is a mortal sin in this business.
balls187 12y ago
> It has to be really frustrating to be an engineer working on Surface and having to deal with the HN echo chamber, or MS bashing (some from Apple fanboys), or totally unrelated comments. Not really. In MSFT, engineers (and pretty much all other employees) are sheltered from the criticisms of the outside world. I think that is one of the reasons they struggle. They're not plugged into what the rest of the world thinks. MSFT is weird, they do something rad, like the Xbox and 360, and totally fuck it up with the XboxOne. They take a mediocre product like Excel, and make it rad (seriously I love Excel 2013). Then they take Office2013, and make it stupid with Office365 (You can't install a single Office 365 product. You have to install the entire fuggen suite...). Windows 8 was a really cool idea, but I'm not sure how they managed to get so many people pissed about it.
konstruktor 12y ago
One of the most uncomfortable moments of my career was talking to some guys in a pub during a conference, mentioning where I work, and seeing a flash of contempt in one of their faces. This person proceeded to make some disparaging comments about the company and the main product. That sucks, and it's easy to take personally. However, I once chose to work at that company, have continued to choose to work there, and I get paid for it every month. Who am I to tell anybody how to criticise my work? I'm a professional, and being able to tolerate even harsh criticism is part of what I think is professional integrity.

HNJohnC 12y ago

In fairness, just the single fact that they put a button exactly where the hand needs to go when actually using the product in one of it's core use-cases is a pretty good excuse for some MS bashing. They could have taken 5 minutes, given the prototype to an artist and noticed the hand placement issue immediately. You can be an apologist if you wish, but I don't know how you can excuse such a glaring failure of design.

shurcooL 12y ago
Saying that it's a "failure of design" suggests there's an easy non-failure alternative. If so, can you tell us what it is? Are you sure that solution won't fail under some conditions? People like to take something that exists, take the problems it solves as a given, and act like all that's left is fixing the problems remaining. That's not how it works.
- anonymfus 12y ago
  Solution could be the same as for palm rejection: disable start button when pen is near the screen.
hyperliner 12y ago
The issue is with the "fatalism" of the comments. For example, you refer to a "glaring failure" when this can be fixed with a simple "drawing mode" patch.
- gisenberg 12y ago
  No such thing as a "simple" patch in the context of Windows: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/how-many-microsoft-employees-does-it-take-to-change-a-lightbulb.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/how-m...
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    Can we agree to get over anything that happened in computing more than 10 years ago?
    - gisenberg 12y ago
      I'm not sure how a reasonable person can see that article and think Microsoft doesn't have to worry about justifying features, project management, testing, documentation, group policies, localization, security, or anything else that makes a "simple" feature for Windows complicated because the source saying so happens to be more than ten years old. The process and consideration outlined is certainly in-line with my own experiences at Microsoft.
      - pyre 12y ago
        The fact that the article is old doesn't meant we should ignore it, but on the other hand, you have to consider the possibility that things change over the course of a decade, and the article may be out-dated. You can't use 10-year-old evidence as 'proof' of anything currently happening at Microsoft, though you can use it as evidence to weigh probabilities.
kstenerud 12y ago
You'd be surprised at the number of "obvious" things you'll miss when shipping your product. The fact is, the people designing these things are human, with their own biases and blind spots. Furthermore, your beta test group will probably miss a few "glaring" problems with your product (even if you've shipped multiple versions before!) In the resulting bashing and crowd pleasing "this sux" comments, there will be a few people who WANT to love the product but just can't, and are willing to explain exactly why. Those are the people you latch on to, give free products to, and pick their brains for their insight so that you can iterate better on your next version. And that's exactly what Microsoft is doing. This is the correct strategy.
mcintyre1994 12y ago
I'm surprised they don't give test devices (under NDA presumably) way earlier to people like Gabe, using your evangelist bloggers to improve the product before they write their public review seems smart.
shearnie 12y ago
They should have tested on a right handed designer at least. Panos looks left handed, is he the only guy that has played with it?
vacri 12y ago
They may have done just that, but their artist was left-handed. Or a right handed artist whose hand position didn't touch that area. Or a test group made up of these kinds of people. Also, doing User Acceptance Testing certainly does not 'take 5 minutes'. It's far more difficult that people give it credit for - if it were as trivial as you imply, then there'd be no kudos for good design

ansimionescu 12y ago

Following your brilliant thoughts on criticism in general, I propose that we ban all tech reviews, literary critics, and all sorts of critical thinking, with the exception, of course, of people who have created flawless pieces of work. Roger Ebert should be dug up and then ceremoniously shot and stripped of all of his awards. Also, it goes without saying that if you want to submit any criticism to this comment, you'll have to submit a full resume, a short fugue, and run a marathon backwards. edit: Heh, I might have gone a bit over the top. On-topic: SP3 is a seriously impressive piece of work and I sense great things coming from Microsoft under Satya's reign (if only they would start properly leveraging their wonderful MSR).

hyperliner 12y ago
I am going to assume your comment is in good faith. My observation was that a single glitch is seen as some sort of disaster, when in reality is a simple issue in one scenario that clearly was not prioritized over many other scenarios. Anybody knows there are constraints in design, and clearly they decided one thing over another. We can all be arm chair generals, but my focus is on the engineers themselves who must be frustrated that their work is generalized as a global failure because "it's Microsoft."
- MBCook 12y ago
  I don't know about other people but Ioway saw the built-in Wacom tablet as one the best features of the Surface. I know that having a great digitizers one of the few things that I wish my iPad had, and my brother seriously looked at buying a Surface because the built-in digitizer. In fact some of the best reviews I've seen of the Surface, such as Penny Arcade's, we're so happy with the precisely because of the ability to draw. Given that that's one of their standout features, it seems odd that they would make such a big mistake with it. From the description it sounds like something that anyone who used the Surface for drawing for more than a short amount of time would've run into. It also sounds frustrating enough that it might ruin the usefulness of the tablet for precisely the kind of people who might of bought it. That makes the regression seem very strange.
- konstruktor 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago

Remember this is a review by a designer. There's little doubt the Surface Pro is pretty good for that. The problem Microsoft has is that it's not really a mainstream device. Most people would be better served by a laptop with more storage that works better (not lag, not touch-confusing interface, and so on). Also, Microsoft made a huge mistake keeping the 4400 GPU. It was already slow for the 1080p Surface Pro 2. And they kept it for Surface Pro 3, which has even higher resolution. By comparison, the Macbook Air comes with a much faster Intel HD 5000 GPU, and it has a much lower resolution.

codeulike 12y ago
The i7 Surfaces will have a better GPU than the 4400, I hear. edit: below: "Core i7 version is the i7-4650U model, with HD5000 graphics."

enraged_camel 12y ago

So you need to be a cook before you can criticize the food that the cook serves you? What a crock of bullshit.

colmvp 12y ago
So you need to be a coder before you can criticize the code that a programmer writes? What a crock of bullshit.
- bluthru 12y ago
  Criticize the code? Yes. Criticize the product? No.
randomfool 12y ago
This appears to be hyperliner's first comment ever. Tough to tell how impartial they are.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Your first comment ever as randomfool is below. Should we question your impartiality then? =================== I believe that Scott Jenson put it best in 'Why Mobile Apps Must Die'- http://vimeo.com/33692624 http://vimeo.com/33692624 Watch it. The problem with native apps is the installation barrier- if I had apps installed to do everything that I'd love my phone to do, I'd be overwhelmed with hundreds of apps installed. Web-based apps have the potential to slip in and out of use as necessary, with more applicable discovery mechanisms (geo, proximity, etc). ====================

rayiner 12y ago

This isn't elementary school where everyone gets an "A" for effort. Microsoft has demonstrated with the Surface line an institutional inability to execute. From Surface RT shipping with a buggy beta of Office to continuing major deficiencies in Windows Phone (no forward button in IE until 8.1?) to the schizo nature of Windows 8 that only makes sense if you look from the engineering side and realize that its schizo only because it would be too hard to make everything run in Metro. Yes, there are engineering compromises that have to be made, but they shouldn't result in what the user perceives to be a compromised product. Sometimes its better to not do something unless you can do it right. E.g. Surface RT shouldn't have shipped without a final version of Office. It featured prominently in every rewview, and almost nobody went back and updated theirs. E.g. Surface Pro shouldn't have shipped without Haswell. E.g. Surface Pro 2 shouldn't have shipped without the major firmware update that improved battery life by 20%. E.g. Apple has wisely avoided shipping a Retina MBA because they can't do it yet without regressing battery life. Microsoft is playing in Apple's price range, and is late to the game. What it lacks is Apple's ability to take on limited ambitious, but (usually) execute those without major flaws.

Spearchucker 12y ago
I'm reading this and thinking about the history of the iPhone. Starting with no copy/paste (something even available in elementary school) thru to maps. How is Apple's track record different to Microsoft/Surface? [Edit] My intent is not to be facetious. What I'm seeing (and I may well be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time) is consistency bias - our compulsive desire to be consistent with past decisions. If I have an iPad then the iPad must be good and the Surface must be bad.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  "Starting with no copy/paste thru to maps." Not to mention the original intent to not support native 3rd party apps at all. Having said that, Microsoft really did fuck up with the Metro (or whatever it is called now) rollout in stupidly trying to apply the same basic UI to everything despite the fact that it only works really well on touch-centric devices. And they've been stumbling a bit with hardware.. I'm not a Surface user but I do have an Xbox One and it is pretty disappointing compared to the PS4 (YMMV if you care about the live tv stuff, but as a "cord-cutter" I don't). These slips really fucked up the user experience on desktops, laptops (via Windows 8) and consoles (the Xbox One console UX is in quite a lot of ways vastly inferior to the UX on the Xbox 360 and the primary reason seems to be to allow it to be yet another Metro platform). However, there are pretty strong signals that the new leadership realizes this was a mistake and they are now attempting to fix it. It is way too soon to write Microsoft off as a major platform player.

justin66 12y ago

If those are the sorts of comments that you view as over the top, I question your familiarity with tech criticism, or criticism in general. Making mistakes on a shipping product has consequences. Clownpenisdotfart on the internet spending a sentence emoting his dislike is the very, very least of them. The thing is, the engineers KNOW all the stuff we're talking about, and the products ship anyway. I bet they're frustrated for reasons a little deeper than an HN "shakes head" comment.

hyperliner 12y ago
A product needs to ship at some point. You can't expect a product to be polished 100% free of limitations or defects for 100% of the scenarios.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- justin66 12y ago
  So it's your view that the engineers are sanguine with the bugs and misfeatures they're shipping and they're just frustrated (your word) with criticism on the internet? I would note that your opinion of Microsoft's engineers is apparently a lot lower than most of us who are criticizing their product.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Not with all criticism. My point is that the comments I copy-pasted reflect criticism that a) generalizes a feature limitation into some sort of macro failure and not priorities or other design restrictions, b) shifts the bar because "it's Microsoft" or c) is unrelated to the original comments from OP.

Crito 12y ago

I can't help but wonder if perhaps the perceived failings in Microsoft products could be the result of an internal attitude towards criticism that is similar to the attitude towards criticism that you are expressing here. Does Microsoft have an internal culture that discourages criticism, which results in criticism from the outside world catching Microsoft employees by surprise?

hyperliner 12y ago
I only would like to point out that all the comments I copy-pasted are gross generalizations, unrelated to the main points in OP comments. You do have a fair "design process" question.
nivla 12y ago
I doubt it, the surface team actually does regular AMA's after a product launches. They do listen to criticisms and manage to correct most of them in the next iteration. If you watched the keynote event, Panay talks about it, especially in regards to the trackpad issues. Not to mention the usual flurry of "M$" and "Who uses bing?" comments they have to deal with.
bcbrown 12y ago
No, there is plenty of criticism internally. It's just not criticism about the same sort of thing. It's more political than technical/product. Frankly, I don't think my friends who work on Windows Phone realize that it's a failure. When I last talked to former coworkers from Windows 8, they didn't think it was a failure.

gisenberg 12y ago

Comments like these genuinely make me wonder if a non-trivial chunk of the crowd here is paid marketers and/or folks not being honest about full disclosure. Touting the HN echo chamber in the context of the Surface is hard to take in good faith. Frustrated Surface engineers? As someone who waited in line on launch day and returned their Surface within a week, how about frustrated Surface customers? After reading a review where the device sounds like a strong step back and was developed in isolation without customer feedback, I think your sympathies are misplaced.

itsboring 12y ago
They do this on reddit too..
- bluthru 12y ago
  It's way worse on reddit. No critical comment survived: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/261bvo/microsoft_announces_the_surface_pro_3/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/261bvo/microsoft...
Gorkys 12y ago
Are you reading the same HN as me? I'd say 70% of the comments here are disparaging towards the Surface.

nivla 12y ago

>nivla: "Seriously, I am starting to believe that these tiny screwups are their signature." >Maybe it should be a rule that these folks below post their own product for review. Umm... that is exactly what I am doing. I own a Surface Pro 1 and I had a genuine criticism about it. From my previous comments you can easily deduce that I am far from echo chambers of MS bashing. However that does not mean I can't criticize the products I own, like and have experience with. If I din't it will make me a blind fanboy and trust me I have been on that path before and it doesn't have any merits. MS like every other company has its strength and weaknesses and genuine criticisms will only help them improve their product line and keep them motivated.

hyperliner 12y ago
All companies make "tiny screwups" in all non-trivial efforts.
- nivla 12y ago
  Yes all companies make "tiny screwups" but with MS its becoming a pattern with new lines. The gripe I have is because even after shelling out $1200 on a Surface Pro it din't have a GPS or a 4G that already all phones and low end tablets have, not to mention even in the flagship Nokia 2520 tablet. Its these trivial mistakes over and over again that makes their product go from near perfect to manageable. Most of the time they do have the right idea but it gives out the vibe that they rather do the trial and error than learn from their competitors success and mistakes.
  - jister 12y ago
    So you bought surface and didn't check its specs and you blame Microsoft for that?
    - nivla 12y ago
      No I brought the surface knowing the spec but hoping they would add it in the next few iterations, which they haven't so far. Not having a GPS and 4G is pretty much the only reason I am not going to upgrade to the Surface Pro 3. These two additions makes it the complete package for my travel.

badman_ting 12y ago

Serious question: What makes them fanboys but not you?

hyperliner 12y ago
It's a fair question. I think a fanboy would have called out (listed) every single criticism in the thread, not just the ones I called out as not adding to the conversation, as defined by me somewhere else in this thread. I am looking into whether a Surface could extend my Mac, iMac, iPad, Windows Server and Windows 7 (no Android yet :( collection.
- vacri 12y ago
  'Naming and shaming' the way you've done it is not really the way HN does things. Whether or not you are a fanboy, I find your behaviour to be more harmful than any of the comments you quoted. The "well, what have you done" tone of the comment is basically claiming that all of those you named are worthless people. Instead of being a tattletale (of dubious quality), respond to comments you find egregious and lead by example (unless they're trolls, then simply downvote and then ignore them).

peter-row 12y ago

Apple Fanboy and MS basher here. Seriously, the Surface is a great move. Aside from the whole Pro / RT naming thing, of course (confusing customers is not good). The Surface is, AFAIK, the only good tablet PC out there - it's a real flagship product for Wintel tablets. The OEMs will eventually beat MS on value, but I suspect Microsoft will be OK with that. Microsoft can afford to take a loss creating the market for Windows 8 tablets, and won't be upset if other OEMs start competing in the space - they'll then make money on software sales. MS needs tablet PCs to be a thing. Tablets are a thing - people love tablets. People will either choose between a laptop and a tablet, or just a tablet that can also run Office. If there's good Windows tablets, people will tend to go with that. As Intel improves mobile x86 chips, the choice will be even easier. Microsoft does not want everyone using Android / iOS tablet, because then the software ecosystem will move to iOS / Android apps (as it is already doing). Whether Microsoft should have made the hardware itself, or let OEMs do it is a good question, but I think they were right to do it themselves. Just look at what the competition has been like - every other Windows tablet I've seen (not a huge sample) has been pitiful - ugly and either not portable enough, or grossly underpowered. Also, making Surface probably gives them the institutional knowledge to make Windows better for tablets.

codeulike 12y ago
Yeah Surface is to Windows as Nexus is to Android. MS accept (now) that its going to be a niche product but are OK with that because it leaves space for the OEMs
orionblastar 12y ago
Actually when Microsoft had Windows XP based tablets in 2002 they worked better than these Surface tablets. I don't know how they got changed and how they aren't as good as the ones in 2002 that had slower processors and less RAM etc. I've been using tablets since the early 1990's when Toshiba had the Windows 3.1 based pen tablets using MS-DOS 5.0 with the option for MS-OS/2 1.21 if you wanted it.

nlawalker 12y ago

If I were on the Surface team, I'd be A) elated that the product is generating discussion, and B) watching this thread (and others like it) like a hawk and taking notes. From the right perspective, this thread looks like a room full of people all competing to be first in line to tell Microsoft that they'll buy their new product if they just fixed their one complaint. Negativity is wrapping paper on the gift of feedback - it is to be torn off and thrown away, because it has no value.

bztzt 12y ago
I once worked at Microsoft on a product that was actually getting almost entirely positive feedback (while still in preview) for once and ... it was kind of frustrating. I started scouring the internet for "<product name> hate" (and did find haters, some with interesting povs) :)

CamperBob2 12y ago

Well, when you play in the big leagues you need to bring your A game. They aren't doing that. Most of the negative comments in the article can be distilled into a single phrase: they don't use their own product. Otherwise, for instance, the button that dumps you back to the desktop wouldn't work the way it does, be placed where it is, or be so difficult to disable. (You could say much the same of Metro as a whole, but that's not germane here.) Failure to eat your own dog food is a mortal sin in this business.

balls187 12y ago

> It has to be really frustrating to be an engineer working on Surface and having to deal with the HN echo chamber, or MS bashing (some from Apple fanboys), or totally unrelated comments. Not really. In MSFT, engineers (and pretty much all other employees) are sheltered from the criticisms of the outside world. I think that is one of the reasons they struggle. They're not plugged into what the rest of the world thinks. MSFT is weird, they do something rad, like the Xbox and 360, and totally fuck it up with the XboxOne. They take a mediocre product like Excel, and make it rad (seriously I love Excel 2013). Then they take Office2013, and make it stupid with Office365 (You can't install a single Office 365 product. You have to install the entire fuggen suite...). Windows 8 was a really cool idea, but I'm not sure how they managed to get so many people pissed about it.

konstruktor 12y ago

One of the most uncomfortable moments of my career was talking to some guys in a pub during a conference, mentioning where I work, and seeing a flash of contempt in one of their faces. This person proceeded to make some disparaging comments about the company and the main product. That sucks, and it's easy to take personally. However, I once chose to work at that company, have continued to choose to work there, and I get paid for it every month. Who am I to tell anybody how to criticise my work? I'm a professional, and being able to tolerate even harsh criticism is part of what I think is professional integrity.