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Microsoft Blamed Intel For Its Own Bad Surface Drivers (thurrott.com)
Paul Thurrott reveals a new internal Microsoft memo from corporate vice president Panos Panay which acknowledges "some quality issues" with their launch of Surface Book and Surface Pro 4. But an anonymous reader quotes a darker story from Thurrott.com:
Multiple senior Microsoft officials told me at the time that the issues were all Intel's fault, and that the microprocessor giant had delivered its buggiest-ever product in the "Skylake" generation chipsets. Microsoft, first out of the gate with Skylake chips, thus got caught up by this unreliability, leading to a falling out with Intel... Since then, however, another trusted source at Microsoft has provided me with a different take on this story. Microsoft, I'm told, fabricated the story about Intel being at fault.
The real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team cooked up. The Skylake fiasco came to a head internally when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and asked the firm, then the world's biggest maker of PCs, how it was dealing with the Skylake reliability issues. Lenovo was confused. No one was having any issues, he was told. I assume this led to some interesting conversations between the members of the Microsoft senior leadership team. But the net result was that Microsoft had to push out some existing designs quickly to get ahead of the reliability issues.
The Surface Book ultimately had a 17% return rate after its late-2015 launch, while the Surface Pro 4's return rate was 16%. So though Microsoft later pushed to improve subsequent releases, Panay's memo claims that "These improvements were unfortunately not reflected in the results of this [Consumer Reports] survey." The memo also reiterates high customer-satisfaction metrics, which Thurrott says "supports the contention that I made two days ago... Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process."
"He also suggests that what Consumer Reports calls a 'failure' is perhaps overly-broad and that some incidents -- like a frozen screen or unresponsive touch -- are not 'failures' but are rather just minor incidents that are easily rectified by the user."
The real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team cooked up. The Skylake fiasco came to a head internally when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and asked the firm, then the world's biggest maker of PCs, how it was dealing with the Skylake reliability issues. Lenovo was confused. No one was having any issues, he was told. I assume this led to some interesting conversations between the members of the Microsoft senior leadership team. But the net result was that Microsoft had to push out some existing designs quickly to get ahead of the reliability issues.
The Surface Book ultimately had a 17% return rate after its late-2015 launch, while the Surface Pro 4's return rate was 16%. So though Microsoft later pushed to improve subsequent releases, Panay's memo claims that "These improvements were unfortunately not reflected in the results of this [Consumer Reports] survey." The memo also reiterates high customer-satisfaction metrics, which Thurrott says "supports the contention that I made two days ago... Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process."
"He also suggests that what Consumer Reports calls a 'failure' is perhaps overly-broad and that some incidents -- like a frozen screen or unresponsive touch -- are not 'failures' but are rather just minor incidents that are easily rectified by the user."
>like a frozen screen or unresponsive touch
Had I just bought a device worth a few grand, and the primary interaction interface spontaneously stopped working, I'd bloody well call that a failure.
Interesting insight into corp culture at microsoft, no surprises really though.
Period. What scumbags.
Not sure how true that is - my linux laptop is having all sorts of issues with skylake especially in the power department
Appsoft should have used modern appy app apps with Appdows 10 S on their Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, NOT LUDDITE drivers!
Apps!
"Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process."
Apple's business plan summed up in one line
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process.
Yep, this is a very well-known effect. I remember discussing this in a marketing class, and it's why you can find a lot of high-status consumer goods that are not very, umm, good.
Our instructor even quipped: if you that know your product is likely to have a high return rate, you're better off seriously overpricing it and spending extra attention on styling and marketing. People generally hate to admit to being taken and will keep it to themselves. They're more likely to act like the product is everything they expected it to be, sometimes even to the point of telling their friends how great it is. This tendency will lower your rate of returns and will reduce the amount of bad press and word-of-mouth you'll get.
Marketing is a sleazy business.
Yeah, 17% return rate is "high customer-satisfaction metrics" in MS language.
I would be fired for releasing a product with one tenth of that.
I wonder what this "customer-satisfaction metric" is onWin10...
aaaaaaa
for Surface, I knew the weren't even trying. If they were, they would have paid more.
Buy an iPad.
for their own problems. It's just sad how they act like five year-olds.
Silicon makers have a hard enough time writing drivers for their *own* products. MS thought they could make better drivers for third-party products, products that they didn't design, let alone manufacture? No wonder the Surface line has required esoteric firmware updates and has had heretofore head-scratching OS upgrade limitations. MS was trying to reinvent the wheel and failing with their home-grown idiosyncratic drivers.
I switched to Apple years ago b/c I was tired of putting up with buggy drivers and screwy behavior on Windows machines, after I made the switch pretty much all of the consultants I work with slowly did the same after seeing me "drink the kool-aid". An added benefit was the unibody Pros can take a surprising amount of punishment compared to most plastic bodied Windows laptops. Apple hardware has bugs, OSX has bugs... just like everything else. But I've never run into the problems I had with Windows and still see Windows users run into.
If anything, I think the case for Apple is reverse... because of the cost and perception as a premium brand, people b*tch even louder when something goes wrong. Some of the "-gates" that have been pinned on Apple have been absolute crap.
With that said, I've switched to Linux in the past year b/c 1) Apple's hardware is crippled (a "Pro" laptop that only supports 16GB of RAM) 2) Apple charges to much for what hardware they do have. A 1TB SSD is a $600 upcharge from 256GB. A 1TB 960 Pro is $540 and it smokes even the news MacBook Pro drives. 3) Most of the equipment is no longer user serviceable. If I want to upgrade my RAM or SSD or replace my battery I have to buy a new laptop? F**k that, and I don't see how they can claim to care about the environment with a straight face.
Having had a few Surface devices there's something very consistent other than their failure rate: Shithouse MS drivers.
A few things I've experienced:
- Any attempt at changing MAC address of the wireless card causes bluescreen.
- Surface Pro 3 for the first 6 months of my ownership had bad posterising on the display attributed to horrible MS graphics drivers. You could download Intel Iris Pro drivers from their website and force it to be installed over the MS's garbage but that would reset whenever MS pushed out another update. It was whackamole until MS finally fixed it.
- Now the Surface Pro 4 Typecover lists Surface Pro 3 as a compatible device but due to a driver bug in the way it attempts to power up the typecover while folded back, waking the Surface Pro 3 from sleep takes ~15 seconds instead of the instant wake with the Surface in "laptop" orientation, or using a Pro 3 type cover. MS acknowledge the bug in Jan 2016 and promised a fix every month until they stopped promising.
The Surface clones are starting to look mighty interesting now that they are starting to be feature comparable to MS's original.
Silicon makers have a hard enough time writing drivers for their *own* products. MS thought they could make better drivers for third-party products, products that they didn't design,
Turn it around. MS has a hard enough time writing generic drivers on their own OS. Vendors thought they could make better drivers for Windows, a product they didn't design and don't have source code access to.
The reality is this goes both ways and both sides of the coin have never truly seen what the other side has offered.
Also your assertion that only "Silicon" makers write drivers is just silly. For the drivers we're talking about laptops rarely use the reference driver from the silicon vendor.
That's no excusing MS's garbage though considering Lenovo / HP don't have this problem with their drivers.
All I want is a touchscreen/stylus laptop that works without any reliability issues. Apple? Anyone?
I guess Apple isn't going to do it because they added a touch bar instead of just making the screen a touchscreen, so I guess it's up to microsoft to release a actually decent Surface Pro model.
I do wonder why Microsoft decided to reinvent the wheel in the first place instead of using the same BIOS, firmware and drivers every other vendor shipping Windows 10 on a system with those particular Intel parts has been using...
Intel does make shit software. They do. Drivers are crap. Toolkits are half-arsed. Some from Russia. Some from Israel. Some from China. All bad. One MAY work, but you can bet Bob's not going to be your uncle for long because Intel software types are not worth snot on a bulldog!
Whenever I think of the company that Dilbert works for, I think of Microsoft now. :D
My guess would be because of the detachable screen.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This is purely annedoctal and not to be taken as proof of anything, but all experiences I had with Microsoft devices would agree with Consumer Reports' standpoint and this piece.
Full disclosure: I'm a long time Windows user, I'm still on a Windows 10 machine, and most people I know uses Windows too. My gripes with Windows 10 lead me to install Ubuntu on secondary machines, keep learning more about them as I go, and keep a Windows 7 copy out there just in case Microsoft doesn't stop with the bullshit and I can't adapt to a purely Linux enviroment.
I did have a brush though with Microsoft fanatics. My first smartphone was a Lumia 1020, and while I was on it, I had to go to sources for stuff like app recommendations, communities for support and discussions and whatnot that were basically run by Microsoft fanatics... because no one else would. :P All of the major tech publications had little to nothing on Windows Phones.
It was a fine phone. Well built, great camera for the time, and the OS was plenty secure (Windows Mobile 7). Battery was shit, but I had no basis for comparison back then, so I just got used to it. But as most people know, apps were shit, dev support didn't exist, and even the brands that decided to put an app on the platform quickly abandoned it, left it in a state of disrepair, and/or were missing features, several versions behind Android or iOS. Most of the Windows Store is still like that to this day. I hear that there are still few exceptions, same story as back when I had the Lumia. And if you think discoverability is bad on the App Store or Play Store... Windows Store is saving a treat for ya! I have never seen anything with so much trash and so much stuff no one never heard of or can attest for.
Still, you have to see the level of indoctrination of people commenting in these communities. It was almost like they were citizens of North Korea or something. Android wasn't even worth discussion because of course, Google, the most vile corporation of the planet was behind it. There are no comparisons to be made around features and apps available on Android because you don't look at the entrails of the Devil. iOS didn't come up much because people were pretty conscious how Microsoft tried to copy several of the worst Apple practices... like turning the mobile OS into a walled garden closed off to dev access and extremely inflexible. Yes, most people don't know about this, but weird as it may sound, Windows Phone had more similarities in the way it was build to iOS than Android. For a good portion of my Lumia ownership apps were completely isolated... they cannot talk to each other, they have little resources to use from the smartphone, all in the name of some crippling security standard.
There was this mantra that got repeated 'till the time I switched to Android... which was around a couple of years after I bought the Lumia. It's going to get better. Devs are coming. The platform has all the best apps needed. It's great for business. It's not Microsoft's fault, it's app developers fault. blah blah blah. Every Lumia/Windows Phone source you went, the discourse was the same. It puts even extreme Apple fanboys to shame.
And I have to wonder if this alternate reality Microsoft lives in, with these extreme fanboys going around in circles to show support, isn't why moronic decisions like Windows 10S and Surface Laptop came to be. After so many years of clear evidence that no one likes or wants a Windows Store, it boggles the mind that Microsoft still keeps insisting on it. The failure of Surface RT, the failure of Windows Phones, and how little people actually uses Windows Store in their Windows 8/10 machines wasn't enough. It's... the shit that keeps shitting, I dunno. It's incredible that there are still people inside Microsoft that sustains a fantasy that one day the Windows Store will thrive, that devs will come, that the Surface Laptop will ever be able to replace Chromebooks in some capacity, that Windows 10S is the future and whatnot. I was actuall
In my opinion Microsoft has completely lost trust between itself and users. You couldn't give me a Surface at this point in time. Or much of anything from Microsoft right now. I wouldn't be surprised to see more class action suites against Microsoft.
This doesn't surprise me at all. A few years ago, I found a pretty obvious bug in part of Internet Explorer that was reliably triggered by some admittedly unusual code we were about to send into production. Microsoft's "support" team did everything possible to get in our way and to direct the investigation away from IE. After virtually every email or meeting, they would try to archive the issue (i.e. lock it in a filing cabinet and throw away the key).
I told them in the first conference call that it looked like they were reusing a handle without clearing all of its values - something pretty basic and generally easy to fix - and that was later shown to be the case, with the reluctant agreement of one of their senior Obstruction Specialists.
Six months after the issue was opened, and long after our product launch, I left that job. The issue remained unresolved.
... Thurrott.com: Microsoft, I'm told, fabricated the story about Intel being at fault....
It appears that Microsoft is just as trustworthy as they have been in the past, i.e., not very trustworthy. This is the company that wants me to install Windows 10, apparently for the main purpose of harvesting personal data from my computer. Would you trust Microsoft with your personal data?
HP don't have this problem with their drivers.
Tell that to my wife whose new-model HP had an HDMI driver that wouldn't deliver sound for a year and a half until an upgrade delivered that feature. The bottom line is that driver support sucks for most manufacturers, Microsoft included.
That is all.
Any time this has come up, including last week on Slashdot but even in the chat rooms for Paul's shows (he's funny even for a non-MS fanboy) that other OEMs didn't seem to experience any issues. I always thought it was poor reporting that no one was questioning Microsoft's line given a half dozen other OEMs had no problems.
The problem may be related to this:
corporate vice president Panos Panay
Alma mater: Berklee College of Music
Known for: Founder & CEO of Sonicbids, Co-Founder Open Music Initiative
Vice President? This does not sound like a guy who should be sending "memos" on technical issues.
Yes, the Surface has fans -- if you leave it on long enough or launch a compute-bound program, you will hear this hissing noise that sounds like a bad speaker but is actually the fan.
Microsoft has been writing shitty software and blaming everyone else since its inception. By now it is so ingrained in their culture that they obviously don't bother to consider that their software is the reason the device doesn't work.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Whoever is Not Part of your warmonger Club must be à Nazi ?
Can't reveal who I am but I work at Intel. We worked our asses off with Skylake from stepping A0 onwards to debug and fix any outstanding problems with the CPU and the PCH, and when we were done with it there were either viable work-arounds or the design of the silicon itself was changed to fix any problems. Microsoft is blowing smoke, which apparently fits in with their overall behavioral pattern; they're trying to blame their shitty implementation of a mediocre product on Intel; don't fall for it.
...where is their trackball available again?..the only ones i can find for reasonable prices are used; as far as i can tell, new microsoft trackballs still run $300-400...
Yet only Microsoft gets the bad ones, right?
Why do you hate Microsoft so much, Intel? Why, oh, why?
[/sarcasm]