How far does $400 million go?

[jnjroach]

You are allowed your opinion, 98% of the issues with the Gen 6 devices were caused by the Intel Silicon and are common across all SkyLake SoCs that support S0iX. Some of the OEMs after the nature of the bug, released their products (HP, Lenovo) to use non Intel SoCs and they use traditional/legacy S3 Sleep and abandoned their SoC designs. But every OEM (including those that re-designed at the last minute) released other systems using the SkyLake SoCs (mostly Core M).

Microsoft brought the Intel Driver team to Redmond to work directly with the Surface Team and with each fix, these were sent out to the OEMs who were having the same issues. You'll notice that in the last set of updates almost every Intel Component received a driver update.

Personally knowing the Surface Marketing and Engineering team, I know they deem the relationship with the NFL as a resounding success.

 

[Nuspieds]

Microsoft paid the NFL $400 million to promote the Surface. The campaign was, by every account, a complete and utter failure...

I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at this conclusion.

Every account? Really? Whose?

As a consumer and admitted fan, I see it as astoundingly successful and am happy to see the product not just on the field, but on the Fox NFL Studio desk.

What I find "interesting" (foolish, to be more accurate) is when journalists take the episode of Manziel hitting it into his forehead as a reflection of the product itself and, therefore, concluding that it represents failure and disdain for the product.

What utter nonsense!

Had Manziel done the same thing with the binder containing paper printouts, would they have come to the same conclusion? Of course not--and rightfully so! But, no, because it is the Surface, of course Manziel is upset at the product as opposed to being upset at the content he is viewing on the product. Oh, brother!

Week in, week out you see all sorts of players, coaches and other staff who are technology-embracing using the Surface but, of course, that is not newsworthy. Rather, an incident like Manziel's will be spun into a story to disparage the product.

What some people may not know is that the original format of a binder of paper printouts is still available. The point is that if the technology fails or if personnel are not interested in embracing the technology, they can continue to use the paper format. Indeed, you do see some players and coaches who still prefer to use the printouts--and that's their choice; however, you see far more players, coaches and staff using the Surface, so this tells me that it is well-received and those who choose not to use it are not as technology-embracing as those who do.

But, anyway, even when there are technology glitches, so what? Nothing human-made is perfect. That's why they continue to have the printouts available. Again, it is foolish to conclude that the product is a failure just because of a rare glitch/outage. As an example, look at what happens every now and then when airlines have to completely ground their fleet because their computer system crashed or has some bug. Terrible? Yes. Unfortunate? Yes. Disruptive? Yes. But by and large, the system works--far, far more than it fails--and the same can be said of the Surface Pro on the NFL sidelines.

 

[sharpuser]

And another thread outlives its usefulness to Surface owners looking for support.
Locked.