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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Warning, rant. Why the duck isn't there information on the Surface Pro 3 on the MS website? Apple has done this so well, for so long, I am pissed-off MS can't get its act together. You make an announcement, you need presence on the web. You need to start your customers expectations building, whet their appetite, and tease them. Their experience starts now and right now that experience is reading news articles and reading a press release. Pathetic. Where is the video of the announcement? Where are the beautiful images and specs. Where are the carefully and lovingly crafted pages that sell this hardware to me? Tomorrow isn't good enough. Next week is utter failure. You step off stage, your site is live. Period.

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I'm not sure why you were getting downvoted because the one thing that stuck out to me, after saying to myself "Huh, I'd love to get one of those to play around with." was that in the marketing page [1] it said "Go to microsoftstore.com/whatever" to preorder one yet when I poked around that site there was no reference whatsoever to the Surface Pro 3.

It just seems odd to go to so much trouble for the unveiling and then say, "but you can't check out the specs/look at accessories/drool over it" until 12:01am.

[1] http://blog.surface.com/2014/05/announcing-surface-pro-3/

http://surface.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/html/pbP... ?

If you go to microsoftstore.com it shows a giant countdown to when you can preorder the SP3 and a large banner mentioning the SP3 getting added to the Surface family. Clicking on that banner loads into the above link with all the details of the SP3 and pricing and everything.

Maybe because they're still selling Surface2's? But some cohesive story like Surface2 is now $X00 cheaper, or pre-order Surface3 today would be the level of messaging needed to match Apple.

> Apple has done this so well, for so long, I am pissed-off MS can't get its act together.

Apple doesn't pre-announce products at all, do they?

This was sloppy (Microsoft is going to have something up for preorders tomorrow, why not just put it up when the speech is finished?) but it's not something Apple even does.

As soon as Apple's press event is done, anything they've announced is up on their site to read about or often buy.

Is MS announces something, you should be able to go to microsoft.com to read about it.

You seem to be deliberately missing the point. Apple doesn't pre-announce products at all. Criticizing the way Microsoft did it is reasonable. Making a comparison to Apple while doing so is a little bit nonsensical.

If Apple were to get into the habit of pre-announcing products would they put detailed product data on the web? Would they allow for preorders, as Microsoft is apparently going to do tomorrow? Who knows? Not having to make decisions like that is part of the advantage of not pre-announcing products.

I'm not expecting it to be available for purchase/pre-order (although that's nice). But if you announce it, the information you announce should be on your website.

That just seems like common sense.

What if Amazon announced they were going to start selling houses and then decided not to put any information about it up on their site for a few hours? Plenty of people would go to Amazon.com to learn about it and they're only frustrating those people who have already shown themselves interested in the product.

I don't disagree. If it wasn't clear from what I wrote, I just think the comparison with Apple was gratuitous. Saying Apple gets this right when they don't do it at all makes no sense to me.

I guess as a consumer I have to ask which I'd prefer: this slightly broken Microsoft process, or not learning about products at all until they go on sale. I actually do prefer the Microsoft process.

Ah, that's what's going on. I'm not talking about announcing products before they ship, that doesn't matter to my point.

When a company makes an announcement, any announcement, they should put the information on their website. To leave a vacuum when you have that information ready is odd. I don't understand how a company could, in 2014, announce a product and not update their website.

Let's pick another company: Tesla. When they announced the model S and the model X they put the information on the site. The model X still isn't out (and won't be for what, a year+?) but they put the information they announced up on their site for interested people to see.

Sloppy, or simply "not evil"?

http://appleinsider.com/articles/09/12/15/apples_worldwide_l...

The lengths at which Apple goes to prevent leaks is straight up evil.

    According to the source, Apple takes leaks very 
    seriously. When a leak is suspected, a very specific 
    protocol is followed, involving the confiscation of all
    cell phones and a total blackout of all unmonitored 
    communication. "It is like a gag order, and if the 
    employee does not want to participate they are 
    basically asked to leave and never come back," says Tom.

    "The same Worldwide Loyalty Team does many other things 
    to keep everyone in check, from searching out the email 
    history of every employee, to seeding fake images to 
    catch potential leaks and diffuse the hype about some 
    product introductions."

I've got a couple friends who work for Apple, and they tell me that entire story is utter fiction, they've never heard of a "Worldwide Loyalty Team" - when they read that story they thought the entire things was written in the vein of an Onion like spoof and thought it was funny that people took it seriously.

People who leak things are fired, people have to sign pretty strict NDAs, certain areas are locked off, and certain projects are restricted as to who you can talk about them with - but, that's about it. (And none of those things are completely unheard of in other companies either)

it's now on their front page

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