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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."
the rate as our iPads, I believe that. Of course, they're real computers and more complicated, but sixty times more is just killing our IT department.
Trump has lost. His deplorable supporters have been exposed. Discuss...
Why not use something airline pilots are already using?
Good enough for commercial aviation, good enough for pro football?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's a product placement, not an actual solution.The NFL is counting it as advertising revenue. Therefore, no one cares what the end users and support staff think about it.
I always use Microsoft Windows 10. It never fails! Unlike the Patriots. They should have learned to use things like sign language so they can communicate with each other, and words.
Are the stability issues due to the Surface Pro hardware or Windows 10 software?
I am much more inclined to think that it is the latter.
these things should have zero problems. They're running a bunch of data driven apps, probably web apps. My cheapo LG phone crashes, sure. But it was $100 bucks. These are $1000+ tablets that are crashing enough for folks to complain. What the hell is going on?
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... It's as if we could almost read what they were doing on THEIR surface pros!
Wait...
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.
I'm forced to use Microsoft software at work. I encounter multiple bugs every hour, some quite serious.
At home, I have the luxury of using Linux. I can go literally years without encountering a software bug.
Why is this? MS software just serms riddled with problems.
Trump is a loser. Discuss.
Yep. they do. Not worth the full MSRP, but worth it used a year later for 50% the price as long as you understand the the things are as stable as a low end windows laptop.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Up until now everyone in the NFL and media has been referring to them as iPads. Microsoft has finally figured out how to get people to refer to their hardware by name.
What a revelation! And in other news, the sun rises in the east.
NFL doesn't care what tablet are used, they only care who will pay the most for the exclusive deal. a 1 hour game takes 3 1/2 hours to get done greed baby greed
Jack of all trades,master of none
Seriously, what the hell are they doing to these poor tablets that they would even "fail" ? Because they aren't defective and unless they installed a terrible software/driver on it, it shouldn't crash either.
Discuss while you gobble. To fight a troll, you have to troll the troll.
I used to be a football fan. I used to go to games. Then it slowly dawned on me that my favorite team wasn't owned by people who cared about winning. It was all about money.
Yeah, call me naive for not figuring that out sooner.
The labor disputes weren't enough for me, but when the owner started threatening to move to Florida I started getting turned off. They didn't move to Florida, but they did move to Tennessee.
The only good thing about sports in my opinion for the last 15-20 years is when there's a good scandal and NFL coaches turning on a major sponsor ranks right up there.
They can't give teams their choice of technology because of sponsors who bought the whole league. They can't give teams full control of their devices because there are too many cheaters. They make billions annually but even partnered with Microsoft they cannot satisfy their coaches with their technology.
Hearing stuff like the announcers referred to their Microsoft Surfaces as iPads for the first couple of seasons is just icing on the cake.
Some have said it's just problems with wireless connectivity and thousands of fans in the same place all using their cell phones but couldn't they overcome that if it is what the problem really is?
Let's ignore the debate about NFL players using their paid-for stage to protest our Constitution and our Country... and instead deflect that and try to get the country to focus on a tablet vendor that has underwhelmed a consumer that agreed to and paid for a technology.
Peace out.
Because their computers, you know, actually work.
Windows 10 is a disaster, the Surface is a disaster, yet their stock just hit an all-time high.
It sounded more to me like they were complaining about random hangs and reboots--not sure how better marketing is going to fix that.
...after my Surface Pro finishes installing updates... ...waiting... waitiiiiiiing... ...your Surface Pro has to restart to install updates. Restart now?
How about instead of handing out high-end laptops, which is what the Surface really is, spend the money on a simple app that does what the coaches want to have done? Instant video playback, make pictures available, whatever. Then they could use their phones....that I believe everyone in the stadium knows how to use.
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.
Maybe Kap should take a Knee to use it.
....for Linux. Full PC x86 hardware in a tablet form factor built rugged and feature-full enough for the mass market? Yes I'll run Linux on that! Now though reconsidering heavily.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
I wonder if Microsoft is the reason some football players wear pink? Real men don't wear pink.
First world problems.
It's just taking a knee for civil rights.
Based on my experience with WiFi, which is nowhere near a mature standard, I'd really expect to have problems with WiFi communication in a stadium with 50,000 people in it, regardless of what type of hardware is used. However, the problems they are describing don't sound like WiFi problems. I would expect communications with a server to be slow and perhaps stall for several seconds while the connection is reestablished. The software should be smart enough to recover without rebooting. Perhaps doing everything locally instead of over the network would help.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Of course they periodically have to reboot it. It runs WINDOWS! It's a piece of shit! By running Windows, the machine is guaranteed shitty. We've known this literally for decades now.
You have to be really brain damaged to use these unreliable, designed to fail and be as secure as a box locked with a wad of chewing gum.
When a company tells you, in the EULA, point-blank, not to use their shitty software anywhere where it matters, where anyones' lives may depend on it.
This behavior is very telling of what even Microsoft thinks of their shitty-by-design software.
Because they ported SQL to Linux, added Bash and APT to Windows 10 and use Ubuntu and CentOS in the cloud for their big clients. Linux - when it absolutely has to work to scale ...
Trusting anything considered critical to a Microsoft platform is a joke. Nice idea getting some mobiles out there, but people with checkbooks should stop taking lunch with Microsoft executives because their OS is not reliable, the most vulnerable of any platform, and is the one that every IT person EVER laughs the hardest about when it comes to crashing, needing to reboot, and not being there when the pressure it on.
Buy them a chromeos tablet, an android build, or Linux built for mobile.
Given that the game has 1 hour of actual playing time and maybe 7 or 8 seconds of action per play and about 2 plays per minute that doesn't add up to much action in a game that drones on about 3 and a half hours.
"1 hour of actual playing time"? Try 11 minutes of actual football action. While the sport has some pretty amazing highlights there is a TON of waiting around while nothing actually happens.
Football isn't "slowed down". It was designed to support TV ads. It's a lazy spectator's sport. The whole ecosystem is designed from the ground up to be a show with branding, ads, and stuff to buy.
The "whole ecosystem"? No. The sport wasn't designed to support TV ads - it just happened to be a remarkably good fit with them and the folks in charge of the NFL and D1 college football recognized that and took full advantage. The rules of the sport were laid down long before TV revenue was a thing. That said, it obviously works since it is the most popular spectator sport in the USA.
No other sport fits the schedule of television as well as American Football. Nor has anything enjoyed its success. Comparatively, Pro Wrestling is a distant second.
"Pro wrestling" of the sort you see through the WWE and similar organizations is NOT a sport and never has been. They are actors in a live action scripted play. I have been a wrestler and coach of 35 years in the actual sport of wrestling (the sort they do in the Olympics and in colleges) so I speak with authority on this matter. Furthermore calling the WWE actors "pro wrestlers" is kind of a misnomer since they aren't actually wrestlers and there are actually real athletes like Jordan Burroughs who are competitive wrestlers and are pro athletes (they get paid to compete, primarily through endorsements).
Windows 10 is a disaster, the Surface is a disaster, yet their stock just hit an all-time high.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I guess they have updated to the latest anniversary update of windows 10. Since that update I also need to reboot almost everyday because it just locks up, never had any problems before that update.. And it doesn't seem to be fixed any time soon...
For a company like Microsoft to not only fail at its very core software Windows, but also fail at developing a almost perfect in house tablet is total failure. How many months did users of Surface products endure issues and waited weeks or months for fixes? One has to ask themselves does people at Microsoft even use their own products themselves? Everything has bugs, but it's how fast you address them that defines how good you are. Linux to me is a voluntary system of developers. Not only that but because it's open source, many times developers are trying to work around proprietary drivers, and software. Microsoft has plenty of third party help, paid developers, and a plenty of money to back all of it up. Actually for me, I think Steve Ballmer was running Microsoft better than it is now.
It's a sad day when a "tablet failure" gives the other team an "advantage". Horse****. Just play the damn game like everyone used to BEFORE tablets.
After more that two decades of spontaneous reboots and blue screens on desktops,
the NFL must really be dense to expect these problems not to surface on the surface.
Aww, that's so awful for the Patriots. While the tablets may be to blame, it's hard for me to feel too bad for a team with a history of "communication issues" for visiting teams.
My .02, get rid of tablets, photos, phone calls, headphones, and anything else other than the coaches and players on the playing field and sideline talking to each other in person. They can all carry around clipboards that have Microsoft Surface, Apple iPad, or whatever other brand sticker on the back if the advertising money is that important.
There are about 400 million rea$on$. FTFY
Nothing of value is lost if these don't work for the NFL. Now if it was Hockey, it would be a different story.
Maybe if they stop offshoring the programming to India they'd have software that actually works.
Considering most business will BUY technology they need rather than being paid to use sub-par garbage for advertising purposes.....
Remember when Apple sold massively discounted computers to school districts back in the day so kids would get used to using them and want something familiar at home? Then of course they were so crash-prone and awful that kids wanted anything other than what they used at school. It looks like MS is adopting the same strategy. I won't discount the lack of technical skills of players and coaches though.
Explaining someone's joke always makes it funnier.
Just wipe out Windows and install your favorite Linux distro. It's fix 99.9% of the issues you're having :)
Non-techies complaining about tech? Wow! Unprecedented.
Some have made this to be Surface vs iPad. It is not.
From what I have heard, the problems were with WIFI and not the tablets themselves. The device is almost always blamed for network issues.
From what I've read, the problem is "Tablet" vs "Paper" not type of tech.
Unless support wasn't part of the deal that was signed, then it clearly is Microsoft's fault. And the NFL's. They are the ones who agreed to the deal.
And these three words: User Acceptance Testing
I have a feeling this was technical people saying "it should work" and sales people saying "it's flawless" and the NFL saying "this will be great" and people getting bonuses and high-fiving each other.... and NOBODY actually trying it out in a real setting ahead of time.
Serves them right.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Just like the out of style furniture your Grandma won't throw out in her living room ("It's good as new, only gets sat on twice per year!") why not provide NFL teams slipcovers that make better tablets look like Surface tablets on TV?
Then the NFL can pocket their product placement money, Microsoft can continue to pretend the Surface is not a piece of shit, and teams can have gear that actually works when they need it to.
Problem solved.
Who did what now?
I think we can all agree the NFL isn't most businesses. Considering how much US tax dollars go to subsidize stadiums, their (until recently) tax-exempt status... Why pay for things when you can get paid for product placement?
How will the NFL blame this on the Patriots?