This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

481105-surface-book

Last week, Consumer Reports yanked its recommendations on the iv Microsoft Surface products information technology had previously recommended. The arrangement and so compounded the situation by switching the entire Surface product line over to 'Not Recommended' status based on its findings that 25 per centum of Surface owners experienced problems with the device by the end of their second yr of ownership. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, disputed these findings. At present at that place's further evidence that the company has non only had issues, information technology's absolutely and fully aware of them.

Longtime Microsoft reporter Paul Thurrott has published excerpts from a leaked memo sent by Panos Panay, the head of Surface at MS. It included some interesting data on Microsoft's return rates and how they differ between product families:

90-day-return-rate

These results are a ninety-24-hour interval moving average of the return rate, and they directly confirm rumors we reported last yr — namely, that both the Surface Volume and Surface Pro 4 had serious reliability issues when they launched. The spikes in Surface 3 Pro returns correlates to reporting on battery problems with the device. There were two spikes in the return rate, as first 1 battery had bug and so the other. The Surface Pro 4 had an extremely high rate of return at launch, as did the Surface Book. A 16-percent return rate is disastrous and a huge elevate on margins.

Lies and Obfuscation

Paul Thurrott reports that when he outset talked to Microsoft about bug with Surface, the company insisted the issues were Intel'south mistake. Skylake, according to MS, was the buggiest launch Intel had pulled. Since Redmond led the pack in terms of launching Skylake products, it supposedly ate the difficulty of making those products functional.

According to Thurrott, this was complete codswallop. It wasn't but a lie passed to external customers. Satya Nadella apparently contacted Lenovo at one indicate to ask how they were dealing with the Skylake trouble. Lenovo, confused, stated there was no problem they were aware of. Panay finishes the memo by conflating customer satisfaction with hardware reliability, in an endeavour to demonstrate that Surface products are reliable. This is supposedly why Microsoft'due south production designs for 2022 have been then disappointing, with a minor update to the Surface Pro 4 (Surface Pro) and a lousy laptop at an inflated price that you can never, ever, repair. The company knew information technology had reliability problems with electric current devices and launched new hardware to resolve the trouble. It was Microsoft's driver teams, non Intel or any other vendor, that dropped the ball on this.

The good news is, Microsoft has been improving its overall quality level, and Surface products are generally better than they were 1-two years agone. The bad news (or merely the confirmed news) is that Microsoft has no problem masking its ain return and reliability bug to brand its products wait better than they are.

Consumer Reports' data may be somewhat skewed towards earlier products, since it's a running two-year survey, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's ain data backs up exactly what CR said. Render rates on Surface hardware have been quite high. And when you consider that CR was surveying customers regarding issues, while MS is measuring how many people actually bring the device back, the difference in their respective measurements makes sense. An intermittent touch screen, for example, is a problem a user might study in a survey, but if the screen only stops responding on occasion, they all the same may not return the device.

Either style, it'south clear Microsoft was perfectly enlightened of its own high failure rates and chose to merits the issue didn't exist rather than resolve information technology.