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Bill Belichick is sticking to his old fashioned ways on one technological front. After the image of the New England Patriots coach slamming a Microsoft Surface tablet on the sidelines in a Week 4 game against the Buffalo Bills went viral, Belichick explained Tuesday why he is fed up with the product. "As you probably noticed, I'm done with the tablets," Belichick said. "They're just too undependable for me. I'm going to stick with pictures, which several of our other coaches do, as well, because there just isn't enough consistency in the performance of the tablets. I just can't take it anymore."
The normally reserved Belichick, who previously has expressed his frustration with tablets, explained his stance for more than five minutes, harping on the unreliable nature of technology. [https://twitter.com/ZackCoxNESN/status/788411998006603776/photo/1]
Microsoft has responded:
"We respect Coach Belichick's decision, but stand behind the reliability of Surface," the statement read. "We continue to receive positive feedback on having Surface devices on the sidelines from coaches, players and team personnel across the league. In the instances where sideline issues are reported in NFL games, we work closely with the NFL to quickly address and resolve."
Also at ESPN, NYT, TechCrunch, and The Seattle Times.
Previously:
Microsoft has Lost $1.73B on the Surface Since its Debut in 2012 (August 8, 2014)
MS Pays NFL $400M To Use Surface, Announcers Call Them iPads
Surface Pros Lose Wireless Connectivity in NFL Championship Game
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:21AM
Our executards have been clamouring for them of late. We eventually bought some, but they had to agree to a set of conditions before they could get them.
- something goes wrong, we only reimage it. We do not reload any apps you purchased.
- you drop it and break it, it's your personal credit card that pays for the repair
- only call us for network connectivity issues. Everything else, call Microsoft yourself (home Internet issues does not count as network issues)
- we're not buying extra chargers. Leave it somewhere, you can go buy a new one.
Some have complained about the lack of service, but the ones who rely on tech and trust those that have to support it, are more than happy to stick with the fully supported company laptops.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by iamjacksusername on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:00PM
I am curious why you not supporting Surface? I have gotten a few Surface Books for my clients and gotten it with the business support plan. I have not had any issues getting support but you have to make sure your reseller sells it with the business support SKU and not a consumer SKU - you want "Microsoft Complete
for Business". That seems to trip up resellers a lot.
One big thing is that we currently load LTSB on everything with Windows 10 deployed. We just inject the universal apps as needed into the deployment image. That solved the issue of the users asking about store apps... they treat their laptop like a boring piece of company equipment and not something shiny and exciting. Which is the point. As far as drop / broken / lost peripherals, we just treat it like any other laptop and charge the replacement cost back to the department of whomever dropped it.
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Friday October 21 2016, @12:24AM
We did a brief run with the SP3, and with how the users treated them as if it was a personal device, instead of a business device, we finally got sick of it and made up the rules.
90% of our users just wanted a funky tablet for personal use and expect IT to pay for it. They dont whinge when given a locked down laptop, but they whinge when given a locked down tablet.
Given that use case, why should we support it?
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Friday October 21 2016, @01:51PM
That's a fair judgement. I remember running into that perception when iPads came out as well. All of a sudden, so many people had an immediate "business need" for one and IT were a bunch of small-minded drones for not saying yes.
We never jumped onto the Surface early on. I am just beginning to do deployments with Surface Books the past 6 months. We usually lock them down pretty well and they look "laptop-like" enough compared to a tablet-only that most people do not treat them like toys. I have had a few people as about the Microsoft Store and I just give them "it's not supported at this time. What app would you like?". To be fair, all of them have personal iPads already so I presume they get their fill of tablet games on there and their isn't much in the Microsoft Store compared to iOS or Android.
Reading your experience, I guess I have been pretty lucky so far.