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481105-surface-book

Last week, Consumer Reports yanked its recommendations on the iv Microsoft Surface products it had previously recommended. The organization then compounded the state of affairs past switching the entire Surface product line over to 'Not Recommended' status based on its findings that 25 percent of Surface owners experienced bug with the device by the terminate of their second yr of ownership. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, disputed these findings. Now there'due south further evidence that the company has non but had problems, it'southward 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 information on Microsoft'south return rates and how they differ between production families:

90-day-return-rate

These results are a 90-day moving boilerplate of the return rate, and they directly confirm rumors we reported last yr — namely, that both the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 had serious reliability problems when they launched. The spikes in Surface 3 Pro returns correlates to reporting on battery problems with the device. At that place were two spikes in the return charge per unit, as get-go one bombardment had bug and and so the other. The Surface Pro 4 had an extremely high rate of return at launch, as did the Surface Book. A 16-percentage return charge per unit is disastrous and a huge elevate on margins.

Lies and Obfuscation

Paul Thurrott reports that when he commencement talked to Microsoft nigh issues with Surface, the company insisted the bug were Intel's fault. 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 just a lie passed to external customers. Satya Nadella apparently contacted Lenovo at ane point to enquire how they were dealing with the Skylake problem. Lenovo, dislocated, stated there was no trouble they were aware of. Panay finishes the memo by conflating customer satisfaction with hardware reliability, in an attempt to demonstrate that Surface products are reliable. This is supposedly why Microsoft's product designs for 2017 take been and so disappointing, with a pocket-sized update to the Surface Pro four (Surface Pro) and a lousy laptop at an inflated price that you can never, ever, repair. The company knew information technology had reliability bug with current devices and launched new hardware to resolve the problem. It was Microsoft's driver teams, non Intel or any other vendor, that dropped the brawl on this.

The skillful news is, Microsoft has been improving its overall quality level, and Surface products are by and large better than they were ane-2 years ago. The bad news (or just the confirmed news) is that Microsoft has no problem masking its own return and reliability bug to make its products look better than they are.

Consumer Reports' data may be somewhat skewed towards earlier products, since information technology'due south a running two-year survey, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's ain data backs upward exactly what CR said. Return rates on Surface hardware have been quite high. And when yous consider that CR was surveying customers regarding problems, while MS is measuring how many people really bring the device back, the difference in their respective measurements makes sense. An intermittent touch screen, for instance, is a trouble a user might written report in a survey, only if the screen merely stops responding on occasion, they still may not return the device.

Either way, it'south clear Microsoft was perfectly aware of its own high failure rates and chose to claim the issue didn't be rather than resolve information technology.