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More NFL Players Attack Microsoft's $400M Surface Deal With The NFL (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes;
"These tablets always malfunction," complained one NFL offensive lineman in January, foreshadowing a growing backlash to Microsoft's $400 million deal with the NFL to use Surface tablets. Friday the coach of the San Francisco 49ers and their controversial quarterback Colin Kaepernick both complained they've also experienced problems, with Kaepernick saying the screen freezes "every once in a while and they have to reboot it."
Friday Microsoft called their tablet "the center of the debate on the role of technology in the NFL," saying they deeply respect NFL teams "and the IT pro's who work tirelessly behind the scenes to help them succeed." It included quotes from NFL quarterbacks -- for example, "Every second counts and having Microsoft Surface technology on sidelines allows players and coaches to analyze what our opponents are trying to do in almost real time." But Yahoo Finance wrote that "The quotes read like they were written by the Microsoft public relations team," arguing that Microsoft's NFL deal "has been a disaster... The tablets failed to work during a crucial AFC Championship game last January -- again for the New England Patriots... sports media interpreted that the malfunction benefited the Broncos on the field, giving the team an unfair advantage -- the very last thing Microsoft's tablets, meant to aid coaches in their play calling, should be doing."
The NFL issued a statement calling Microsoft "an integral, strategic partner of the NFL," adding "Within our complex environment, many factors can affect the performance of a particular technology either related to or outside of our partner's solutions."
Friday Microsoft called their tablet "the center of the debate on the role of technology in the NFL," saying they deeply respect NFL teams "and the IT pro's who work tirelessly behind the scenes to help them succeed." It included quotes from NFL quarterbacks -- for example, "Every second counts and having Microsoft Surface technology on sidelines allows players and coaches to analyze what our opponents are trying to do in almost real time." But Yahoo Finance wrote that "The quotes read like they were written by the Microsoft public relations team," arguing that Microsoft's NFL deal "has been a disaster... The tablets failed to work during a crucial AFC Championship game last January -- again for the New England Patriots... sports media interpreted that the malfunction benefited the Broncos on the field, giving the team an unfair advantage -- the very last thing Microsoft's tablets, meant to aid coaches in their play calling, should be doing."
The NFL issued a statement calling Microsoft "an integral, strategic partner of the NFL," adding "Within our complex environment, many factors can affect the performance of a particular technology either related to or outside of our partner's solutions."
For us, it was only about eight-fold more often, but since we do medical billing software, it doesn't take long at all to pay for an entire replacement. Currently, we provide one spare for every four iPads. For our older software that runs on Windows, we proved one spare Surface for every Surface used. It's painful maintaining that many extra devices.
Therefore, no one cares what the end users and support staff think about it.
To the contrary, such a resounding failure shows that at least in some cases, end users' opinions do matter. I personally don't give a flying intercourse about National (ie, USian) Football (ie, handegg) League, nor of any other football (real or american) league, but plenty of people Microsoft would want to market Surface to do care.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Too bad most of the broadcasters covering the games refer to them as iPads.
I was watching the playoff game where the Surfaces weren't responding... the television crew correctly referred to them as "Microsoft Surface" multiple times while discussing the problems.
In the end, it doesn't really matter if this is an innate problem with the Surface, or if it's a problem with the supporting network infrastructure. Microsoft obviously pictured this as a huge PR opportunity, so they should've considered the possible issues and taken steps to deal with them ahead of time. Certainly stadium wifi congestion has been a known issue for quite a while - why didn't Microsoft think about it?
#DeleteChrome
I'd love to see a more thorough technical analysis done. Put a debug tool that monitors the system in real-time. Analyze every sports stadium and their network and equipment infrastructure. And put out a whitepaper that details everything.
Do we know if every NFL stadium has dedicated AP equipment with isolated and prioritized vLANs routing on-the-field device data directly to-and-from their supporting hardware infrastructure? Do we know if every device works with a clean OS install before every game? Are the servers consistent in every stadium? For all we know, someone may have patched two switches together across an old 100Mb link just to get things operational, or someone's running the hosting software on some old P4 server that can't handle the demand, or someone swapped the away team's AP with a cheapo D-Link unit they got at Target, or sixty thousand smartphones are choking the Surface tablet traffic.
It's easy to blame things on Microsoft, especially when your profession is football and not IT. But, in my experience, more often than not, someone screwed up the infrastructure side of the equation.
They run exactly one application. They are locked down to run nothing else. They boot into the application. What is it that this application does? It shows overhead pictures of plays so that players and coaches can review the on-field strategy.
Prior to the NFL's decision to use tablets, the pictures were printed in the team booth and delivered to the sidelines by runners. Why replace something that works with something new? Product placement $$.
In short it was a technical decision made by the marketing dept. ("Hey, Microsoft will pay us for product placement... Somebody crap out an app over the weekend!")
It included quotes from NFL quarterbacks -- for example, ". . . having Microsoft Surface technology on sidelines allows players and coaches to analyze what our opponents are trying to do in almost real time."
Yeah, the opponents were probably getting frustrated at theirs failing as well.
Jokes aside, I have a Surface Book which I haven't had any problems with so far, though I tend to use it more in notebook mode than as a tablet. I'm wondering if this has more to do with them using a poorly coded application that crashes or hangs all the time. iPads would probably make more sense though as there's probably less that can go wrong given how the OS tends to limit what apps can do and heavily restricts background processes.
I knew somebody involved in making specialized software for the NFL. Their company wanted to use iOS, but the Microsoft Surface deal got made and there was pressure from above to move everything to the Surface. (Apparently, individual teams still hold a certain degree of autonomy, so it wasn't absolutely required in all places.) The product was already pushing the technology bounds of what the iPhone could do and development for the Surface was still pretty raw back then. And the football teams that used the software much preferred iOS too. So there was a lot of unhappiness all around.
But a more interesting aspect was the monetary arrangements. The company was developing for peanuts, below their costs. The NFL really takes advantage of the fact that both everybody wants to work with them for the prestige, and that the NFL is a non-profit. When I asked why he was willing to do all this at a loss, he said was because other sports venues like Major League Baseball and the NBA are not non-profits and actually pay well. They take their cues from the NFL. So if you can get in with the NFL, you can make the big money later by selling to the others.
And he suspects the Microsoft Surface deal itself was structured along the lines of this thinking... Microsoft basically giving away Surfaces to the NFL wanting both publicity and hoping to later actually sell to markets that actually pay money.
The devices assume a certain amount of bandwidth. Stadiums don't have enough bandwidth because A) cheap stadium managers won't pay for it; and B) on game day you have thousands of fans using various devices using various frequency bands to do who knows what.
I've never used one of these devices but I'm gonna guess Microsoft doesn't handle bandwidth congestion issues well. That, and these millionaire football folks all have 1 gig bandwidth with 1 ms latency at home, and have never experienced network lag in their lives.
It doesn't work. A balloon states it is searching for a driver for the mouse. What for? Does Windows have different drivers for the same mouse if we plug it on different USBs? Why the f*? I do it at home in Linux all the time, I can connect the mouse to any of the USB ports. It works instantly. Why not in Windows (which idiots say it's easier)?
I can't speak to the Surface; but my work laptop, a Samsung RV511 running Win 7 Pro, has 3 USB ports. Two on the left side, and 1 on the right. I can plug something into either of the Left ports with no complaint; but if I plug that same device into the Right-hand Port, it acts like it has never seen it before. And vice-versa with something that was originally plugged into the Right-hand Port being moved over to the Left. It's a Brand New Day.
All I can think of is that those two sets of Ports are probably on two different USB Controllers (remember, this is a LAPTOP. It isn't like we're talking on-board-ports vs. ports-on-a-PCI-card), and Windows is too retarded to poke around in its own Current Configuration to see if the damned DRIVER is actually ALREADY INSTALLED. Even if it had to make a redundant copy of the Driver, at least it could do it SILENTLY, rather than acting like a horse that was approached from the wrong side (horses have no Corpus Callosum; so each hemisphere has its own visual-record and memory); IOW, it freaks out...
Say what you will about Macs and OS X, at least they don't do retarded shit like that! Glad to see Linux is also smart enough to recognize things that have been plugged in elsewhere before ON THE SAME COMPUTER.
The highest service Congress can perform with a bad president is to not pass stupid stuff the president wants just to look like they are achieving something. Our constitutiion has checks and balances to try to limit damage from one branch going off the rails.
Whichever candidate gets elected this time around, an obstructionist congress would be an excellent thing to have.