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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

penny-arcade.com

517 pointsvxNsr244 comments

It's great to read that Gabe has had such a positive experience with a Microsoft product team - but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's because he's a somebody. His posts on penny-arcade reach an enormous audience, and so of course they're going to do their damn best to make sure he sings the product's praises.

My experience is very different. I've been working for an enormous organisation for the last 4 years, and we're a tier 1 client of Microsoft's. I've had numerous occasions where I've tried to get anyone on the product team for my specialisation at Microsoft, that my company literally drops millions of pounds on to pay any attention to our requirements. And every time I've had that conversation, with the same requirements, it's like this is the first time they've heard it. They make great promises that they'll go away and think about it, and then nothing happens. And that's because I'm a nobody. I don't have a blog with a massive audience, and so they really don't give a sh!t.

Interesting. In the enterprise I worked back then we had a problem that was not MS's fault rather the result of a specific implementation detail related to how we managed software on Windows-based PCs -- Microsoft basically extended the .Net framework because we needed it. (Extended means adding a few methods and events here and there, but they definitely listened -- this was many years ago, by the way.)

I've heard that one company screwed up the basic fundamental component of their mobile phone once - the antenna. It was basically short-circuiting when you were holding it during the call. Their answer to consumers? "You are holding it wrong".

While I don't disagree, it's also potentially due to Microsoft being a gigantic corporation with dozens of internal fiefdoms, which can each have wildly varying cultures. It's possible that the people working on consumer tech (or specifically on Surface) are open to user feedback where the people working on enterprise products just aren't.

(Not that I'd say that's acceptable if it's the case, just saying it wouldn't surprise me -- especially given how terrible at these things enterprise-focused people at big companies are in general. Listening to end users and then rapidly responding to their needs is just not part of their culture.)

They are fixing the problem for every user, not just him, based on his input. I want a drawing tablet, I have been reading every PA post about the surface with bated breath waiting for the "it's now perfect" announcement. As far as I'm concerned, their model is working. Maybe they just need to expand it to other products too.

Sure, this problem is fixed for every user. That's great, we're all in favor of MS fixing problems.

What GodEater is pointing out is that Gabe is getting attention due to his celebrity. Much more attention than Microsoft gives to companies that pay them millions of pounds for their products. Gabe gets that attention precisely because his opinion closely watched by people like you.

Consider what kind of product development this philosophy gives rise to. What if you don't want what Gabe wants? Do you have any chance of getting it when MS has the sort of development priorities they're displaying here. What if they were listening to someone whose opinion you did not respect? How would that affect your view of the product & the company?

> They make great promises that they'll go away and think about it, and then nothing happens.

but this is EXACTLY how they treated Gabe. They didnt fix ANYTHING, they just showed up some prototypes and talked about fixing some stuff.

It really really depends on which product team you deal with at MS. I had experience with the silverlight/winphone teams and they were pretty on the ball. We had major carrier backing at my last job though... so they usually listened to us and we usually had early access hardware.

Sorry your experience with them wasn't as spot on. They've really been trying to be more responsive to feedback (at least with windows phone).

While I assume you've probably done this, you can try going up the chain, telling the higher-level managers just what a shitty experience you've had, and that you're considering looking elsewhere to fill (some of) your needs as a result. You don't have to say you're considering moving everything, just that you're going to start experimenting with other providers where appropriate, and start breaking the MS stranglehold on your business.

Make someone important start genuinely worrying about your account. Get them to assign a permanent engineering contact point, since it's clear your account manager isn't doing it for you. If you're not a manager-level staffer, get managerial support in doing this, so you have their backing and they don't undermine you later (even accidentally). And while you don't have a blog of your own, if you get stonewalled again, you could reach out to a tech blog with a decent amount of penetration and have an interview with them - either about the shitty experience, or the thought of moving vendors and implying that MS is no longer the only game in town for your -foo-. It doesn't have to be perfectly true, it just has to generate visible bad press - it's an underhanded tactic, but if you're consistently being treated poorly, I think it's an option to consider.

Or, even better, move off MS where possible, and spend that money on staff to massage the changeover :)

They're not listening to him because he's a somebody, they're listening to him because they realize he's describing what every drawer needs.

Why don't you try contacting Gabe directly and get a few contact emails off him, might well be worthwhile!

> It's great to read that Gabe has had such a positive experience with a Microsoft product team - but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's because he's a somebody.

Yes, the article had a bit of a Chaos Manor feel to it.

"You hear a lot about MS being this massive company that doesn’t listen but that’s really not fair in this case."

Every large company is made up of thousands of individual people, many of which really care about making a good product and making customers happy. The whole question in managing a big company is how to get out of the way of that natural process, while still coordinating all the disparate groups so that the final product works.

What natural process?

Actually MS has always listened. The problem has been (a) whom they listened to (the user has usually not been their customer) and (b) lack of "taste".

MS Office is, for good and ill, exactly what you get when you give users what they ask for and have no taste.

Office 2013, specifically Excel and Word are fantastic.

Except for my use case, which is when you have a 1,200 page document with hundreds of tables, lists, and pictures. The thing grinds to a halt and has all sorts of problems. Yes, I know that MS Word is not the best choice for documents that big, but it's not up to me.

Honest question, why can't you split the document and work on individual chapters?

Have you tried the 64-bit version? People still normally install the 32-bit version (mainly for add-on supportability), but if you're working with very large documents, the 64-bit version should work better for you.

A document that large must have some kind of a structure that you and your team can use to break it apart into smaller, more manageable chunks. One thing to consider is to place the content into a content management system of kind (a wiki comes to mind) to allow the content to more easily be maintained and grow without the limitations Word creates.

The decision may not have been up to you to keep it all in one Word document but making the case to either break apart the document or find a better system in which to maintain it ought to be easy in the face of the usability issues you mention.

That's weird you can't break it down into smaller parts? I worked on a big book, about that size with several people and the major, mainstream publishing company wanted it in individual documents mapping to individual chapters.

We actually did break it up into several parts when making and editing it, but for the "official release" of the document (It's a big-ass test procedure document), they wanted it in one file. And of course there's always some changes you find after you release something.

"which is when you have a 1,200 page document with hundreds of tables, lists, and pictures"

This is like saying that SQLite is not a good product because you are using it on a Terabyte database having 1,000,000 hits at the same time... It might work but it would have problems because wasn't designed for that scenario.

I sympathize with you though... since it is not your decision :/

I like Excel as much as the next guy, but even in 2013 when you open a delimited text file it makes you manually tell it what the delimiters are. A computer should be able to guess whether a large text file is CSV, TSV, etc. This is an example of something Apple would get right, but Microsoft does not, even after more than a decade with this heavily-used feature. A tasteful implementer would make it do something reasonable by default, rather than making thousands of users click "Next" repeatedly and get presented with nonsensical defaults.

You might be vastly overestimating the correctness of files being imported.

Some coworkers of mine have to deal with CSV/TSV imports from enterprise customers, and the amount of clearly broken scripts is pretty bad.

That excel import preview dialog helps non-programmers try to fix these issues beforehand. If that wasn't there, it'd likely be impossible for these people to know where to begin trying to fix the import.

The preview dialog is useful, but the default option for the delimiter could be guessed and the preview dialog used to confirm it.

When I open a CSV file in Excel 2013, it correctly delimits the file.

You may have non-standard CSV files (or at least delimited files that are not properly escaped)

It's important to point out that there is no standard for CSV files, only conventions.

There is RFC4180, but that came way after people were using it in lots or ways incompatible with the spec, so it isn't a huge help when paraing arbitrary files. I'd recommend following it if you're generating files though.

There are no standard CSV files. There's even no "Excel standard": Excel uses different delimiters in different locales. It's a huge pain.

My rage point recently- Why for the love of plain text can Excel not bother to encode csv exports as UTF-8? You can up and then download with google sheets to "hack" around this but I bought numbers.app out of spite since you can specify output encoding there.

I usually just drag tab-sep files into an open Excel window, and it opens just fine. I only get the import wizard when I try to use file -> open. There are a couple of "gotchas" I regularly experience- the worst of which is the automatic formatting- which unfortunately converts a number of gene names into dates (I'm in Bioinformatics). It's enough of an issue that papers have been published about it [1]. For example MAR1 ends up formatted as 1-Mar. When you have a list of 20,000 identifiers, it's quite annoying to deal with. I see the transformed strings show up in biological databases all the time. I don't know why there isn't an easy way to disable autoformatting. Even if I avoid incorporating Excel into my own workflow, when I send documents to scientists, they're going to want to use it, and we end up with the same results then.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15214961

Deleting my long rant here. It’s not really on topic for this thread. Suffice to say, I think MS Word is a pile of junk. For the curious: http://pastie.org/9297613

> I could go on and on. In about 2005, I decided I’d never again use Word unless I absolutely had to.

So you're saying you haven't really used Word 2013 then?

I used Office 2010 for a while and it was crashing 4+ times a day, so I tried 2013 and easily recreated some of those crashes. I have not used it extensively but it does not take long to discover it's still trash.

PS: Office 2013 still has bugs from word 97, which is what happens when there is zero competition.

"There’s no good way to collaborate with multiple authors without hellish document synchronization effort."

Based on just that, I don't think you have used Office in a really long time.

[Sorry that this is all quite off topic for a conversation about surface.]

So imagine you have 4 authors: person A writes a document, and person B makes one set of changes, while person C makes a different set of changes, with person D working off of C’s version. Now person A wants to accept some but not all of C’s changes, and some but not all of B’s changes, and person D wants to “rebase” his document to add the changes that A approved from B and C, but not the changes that A did not approve...

How do you handle it? You’re saying MS word now has a solution for this that avoids conflicts? I guess I’m not enough of a power user to know about it.

Okay, now imagine that you want to both want to open and type on the same document at the same time, real-time-collaboration style. You’re saying Word has a solution for this one too?

Not sure about the first but for the second Office online does that now. Not sure if you can do it completely in the desktop app but the online UI isn't horrible from what I've used of it.

The first is basically a rather complicated workflow that is handled for instance with plain text documents in git. I doubt Word can do that (wouldn't know, haven't used it for a long time), after all it's core thing is being a word processor. Now I didn't read your rant, but ranting that something is a pile of junk and then using a rather far-fecthed missing feature as an example of why it is a pile of junk, as a counter-argument to someone questioning your reasoning, is not proper logic. Can't think of a proper analogy atm, but claiming git is a pile of junk and then coming up with git diff not being able to deal with Word files as one of the reasons would probably come close: it makes no sense.

No, actually, collaborating in office as compared to google docs or tex + git is hell.

Misleading troll is misleading.

Word has great co-authoring support if you use Word Online (free equivalent of Google Docs which the desktop/tablet/phone client can work with natively), SharePoint, or Office 365.

Whatever are you complaining about? Little as I am a fan of the WYSIWYG philosophy, Office is a genuinely spectacular product.

Office, like Excel, was mostly complete years ago. The iterations on file format and ribbon bar? Not so useful for most users.

As a casual user of the various Office apps, the ribbon bar is what made it usable. Before that, I'd make every attempt to keep out of Office.

Those who use it with any regularity likely know the keyboard shortcuts for things they use regularly, and the ribbon should work for finding the less common things in the same way it helps me as a casual user find everything.

The ribbon bar made it more usable? I just found it annoying. Word 2003 still seems like the best form factor to me.

It did. I couldn't find anything before the ribbon bar, frankly, and using tools took significantly more time because I had to search for them in overly long menus, or even submenus. Now they're mostly laid out directly in front of me, logically and visually ordered. I don't feel that menus are a good UI to anything.

It would seem that most UX people now agree with me, as traditional menu bars have been de-emphasised across nearly all the apps I use. Word was the only app which required me to delve into the menus in common use.

Why do you think the ribbon bar has a worse UX than a menu bar?

Don't you know that change frightens and confuses people?

For anyone for who changes do just that, check this out, which I think is the most impressive example of data-driven UI design ever documented even remotely this well: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-...

I love the ribbon. If you don't, try one of two things. One, try double-clicking on one of the headers - it'll make the ribbon hide unless you click it. This makes it effectively work like the old menus, except more horizontal and graphical instead of vertical.

The second is to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the ribbon.

Change does frighten and confuse people which is why the principle of least surprise is part of the human interface guidelines, but nobody seems to care about that anymore.

I don't know if I'd really say it's worse, except for that it breaks the standard expectation and user interfaces are supposed to follow a uniform design on one environment, but it's a change and I prefer interfaces not to change.

I said for "good and ill". If you can't see the problems in Office then you aren't looking very hard.

What exactly are these problems? My only problem has been difficulty forcing it to get down to "advanced options" on certain parts where something needs a minor adjustment that doesn't work through the normal channels

Indeed, apart from that WYSIWYG. If Word were focused only on text editing (at which it is peerless) and not at all on design and typesetting (at which it is execrable), it would be a nearly perfect product.

I've learned there is one rule when it comes to design in Word: Thou shall only use styles.

Once someone tries to muck with settings for individual pieces external of the style then it just goes to hell. I wish they'd take all the formatting tools out of toolbar and only have them accessible via the style formatter.

"Actually MS has always listened." Really? http://www.jax184.com/projects/filenames/filenames.html

Your one link to demonstrate Microsoft "don't listen" is where the person refuses to report it through the proper channels, gets it reported via an unofficial channel then after Microsoft have listened, doesn't like their answer therefore pretends it didn't happen?

Convincing.

Indeed. Also, I thought for sure that 8.3 file name creation was off by default starting in either Win8 or Win7. Maybe it depends on whether you upgraded from an older version or which SKU you install?

"You hear a lot about MS being this massive company that doesn’t listen but that’s really not fair in this case."

Yeah it's easy to get listened to by Microsoft, just go create the most popular web-comic in the world and they'll get in touch. Anyone can do it.

> I could see some of them shaking their heads and looking at each other. They were very obviously bothered that they had not seen this before.

To me this looks like engineers that had foreseen the problem but were promptly ignored by UX people. Or maybe the other way around.

IMO, this is a great example of why show me don't tell me is vital in product creation. Here, the folks empowered to make the change saw the problem with their own eyes. They may indeed have heard or speculated about this issue previously. But there's a fundamental difference between someone saying something, filtered through language, organizational priorities, etc. and making that realization on your own.

Related, this is a part of why good data viz is so powerful: it allows others to quickly and independently reach the same associations and conclusions. A real-world example: a data viz of game beta test user data shows player deaths in an area with no enemies. Curious. Linking over to video from an affected player just before the death reveals a level design error: a tunnel wall wasn't made solid. This allowed players to "fall out" of the level, causing the game to kill them. The development team relayed that before they had these tools, there would often be a back-and-forth with the level designers ("no, that can't be right!"). But now they'd just call them over, show them, and the level designer would get a bit pale and run back to their desk ("brb, gotta fix that NOW!").

While I completely agree with your point that there are things that are better shown then described, it doesn't seem that difficult to say, "The home button is positioned such that it is too easy to accidentally hit it."

Plus all one would have to do is actually use the pen for drawing. It doesn't take an artist actually using it to understand how that's a problem.

I'm sure they did draw on it. But, there's a difference between drawing to make sure drawing works and drawing because that's your job. In the first, people would be more likely to say "oh I brushed the home button". In the second, they're much more likely to suffer a critical flow interruption.

They had plenty of feedback on numerous ms forums of people asking for a way to disable or rebind home button, they ignored all of it.

Currently the only way to influence it is to delete registry key

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SurfaceHomeButton]

and kill all physical buttons completely.

Stop saying they ignored it.

A) The product hasn't even shipped yet. That may be an option or made into one in an early update.

B) There may be a technical limitation to disabling or rebinding it (e.g. without impacting either other buttons, or the behavior of actual keyboard buttons).

Rather than single out engineer and UX guys, it would be more accurate to say that some person(s?) foresaw the problem, and their concerns were dismissed by someone above them.

yes, famous corporate 'mistakes were made, but not by me'

That's all baseless speculation. In fact in Microsoft's culture decisions like that are almost entirely made by individual contributors working with trios of front-line managers/leads (dev/test/pm).

>After I was done they told me they were going to take all the notes they had gathered and go to work on fixing the issues I had shown them.

Later

>To see them come back to me with fixes for my problems was really amazing. They are putting time and effort into making sure the Surface Pro 3 does what artists want it to do.

Well played to the MS Surface team, I hope these fixes make it to production and stay there on the Surface 4/Surface 5.

Where do you recommend I buy a Surface 3? I can buy online but is it better to get it from a brick and mortar shop?

I hope these fixes make it to production and stay there on the Surface 4/Surface 5.

The sooner the better. I'm looking at getting a Surface 3 when the beefier CPUs are available, and would love to get one that fixes the issues describe by the previous PA.

More like well player PR team, they failed to fix every single issue. They couldnt even let him have the home button fix, something that sounds like a simple script I could write in AutoHotkey in two minutes tops.

Surface team looks like a committee full of control freaks. cant give users control over home button, cant give users control over pressure curves (they brought two HARDWIRED tablets instead of writing configuration tool?).

Did you read the article? They're planning on distributing a pressure curve configuration tool.

"They're planning on distributing a pressure curve configuration tool," seems like a much stronger statement than the article's actual statement, "What they proved was that MS could release an app that let artists adjust the pressure curve to suit their style. They assured me this is something they want to do."

It may have been specifically coded as a "proof of concept" against a pre-release version of the OS, in which case it would have been very foolish to just chuck it on the machine he depends on for his livelihood.

Try not to be so arrogant in future. For Linux devices you could have developed this yourself (and assumed due responsibility) but under OSX/iOS the dev team wouldn't have been nearly as receptive to his issues.

Does your two minutes of effort also include regression testing? Did you verify that all aspects of the OS and applications which depend on the home button having a specific behavior continue to function within OS-guaranteed response times? Have you done user testing to ensure that the delay after lifting the stylus meets with user expectations and doesn't seem like the OS is frozen? Have you met with the hardware team and verified that the lift stylus event is 100% reliable so that temporarily disabling the home button doesn't run the risk of permanently disabling the button? Are there potential race conditions such that the stylus up/down events are received out of order? If in-order reliable events can't be guaranteed 100% of the time, have you implemented a suitable watchdog-style timer to catch the cases where the event isn't properly received? Has that been fully tested?

Did you update the specification documentation with your modifications so that future developers can consult the updated specs in order to understand the impact your home button changes may have on their area of the OS?

Or I guess you can slap in some two minute script and call it done, but I'm glad you're not building my operating system.

Translation: Want to beat Microsoft? This is how.

Process you described produced permanent hot corners that couldnt be disabled (lower right one still cant, even in W8.1) and hardcoded inconsistent WM_SYSKEY acting differently depending on application you run (ignores bindings when Task Manager has focus).

Less choice is never a good strategy when it comes to UI.

btw there is a way of killing home button altogether for surface, might be useful for Gabe http://www.surfaceforums.net/forum/microsoft-surface-faq-gui...

> Less choice is never a good strategy when it comes to UI.

Apple has made quite a lot of money disagreeing with you there.

Dont you mean despite? Look at gnome, look at W8. Targeting lowest common denominator is not something I would strive for.

It took apple two years to finally deliver cut&paste on a phone. Were you really happy about lack of it? Was it a good thing?

I bought my original Surface Pro from the Microsoft Store website[1], and have had fantastic service on the few occasions that I've taken advantage of it. No phone trees, no waiting times, and no bullshit (they took me at my word on what I had already troubleshooted and moved on from there).

At least from my single experience, I would say there is little incentive to buy from a retailer rather than direct.

[1] http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Surface-...

Theres so much vitriol toward Microsoft in this thread regarding them "using" Krahulik as a PR pawn in their nefarious marketing schemes. He has written extensively about his experience using the Surface as a tool for professional illustration work (and for recreation) in the past; his thoughts on the Surface Pro 3 are not his first rodeo.

As someone who has been looking to buy a Surface for illustration work, it's so encouraging to see Microsoft even engaging with Krahulik, since it indicates to me that 'Artist' is a group of people they are actively pursuing, and willing to cater their device toward. He is an accomplished artist, and was a good pick to get feedback on this particular use of the device. It is also great PR and goodwill for Microsoft, but Krahulik's concerns seemed very genuine, and the fixes to them will benefit everyone like me who are looking to use their Surface for the same purpose.

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next round of the Surface instead of playing catch up after release.

all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious

It's the classic QA paradox. The typical hacker world view doesn't prioritize such feel issues enough. Even in today's UX focused world, stylus specific issues aren't widely understood. Combine the dynamics of the Asch conformity experiment, and it makes perfect sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnT2FcuZaYI

The typical hacker shouldn't be testing this device, then. I'm sure Microsoft has someone with the skills on their teams.

Yes, but did the management of the team realize the above, and did that manager make sure the team would work to produce good results in this area?

> The typical hacker shouldn't be testing this device, then.

Like, say, Gabe? :)

Yeah, I'm baffled as to how the button placement made it past any kind of initial hands-on testing. It's hard to imagine a person using the pen on the screen for ten or fifteen minutes not encountering that problem.

From the article, it sounds like the Microsoft folks were kicking themselves for that oversight.

To their credit, I've made similar mistakes in my career.

Yes, me too. However i'd hope that for a product as big and important to MS as this then there would be more checks and balances in place to make sure that such things don't get overlooked.

It's understandable for one engineer to overlook it, maybe even a whole team but for an entire division of design, engineering, QA, marketing etc? Something is rotten in their process.

People make mistakes. Every piece of software ever written has bugs: I don't think that means everyone's process is rotten. It just means they are human.

Ok, but large corporations are supposed to be able to avoid human centric mistakes with good operations workflows that provide checks and balances in their pipeline.

I would assume MS is not shipping products directly from the engineering lab to the factory, so for something glaring to get all the way to the customer then there is something wrong in their process that failed to correct for human error.

Ok, but large corporations are supposed to be able to avoid human centric mistakes

They are not supposed to be worse?

The developers were probably using non-final hardware and/or sharing engineering samples if they had samples at all rather than developing drivers to the datasheet. By the time the marketing team got their hands on them the advertising may be booked and pre-orders received from retailers (if they ever actually get their hands on products rather than just arranging final mock ups or production trial run results shipment for photo-shoots etc.).

QA should have had a short window to study this type of issue but is it something that they would delay shipment over?

Basically I would expect the product to ship on schedule unless there was a really critical problem and that there wouldn't be slack in the schedule for weeks of refinement. Component orders may be place 6 months ahead to secure supply so it is hard to flex the schedule without causing inventory problems not to mention messing customers about.

Based on my experience in a CE company that wasn't Microsoft.

Actually the beginning of the first paragraph (repeated below) really made me think 'wtf, apart from the number of people, this is exactly how some meetings with users work at our tiny startup'. Then I realized every engineer/designer/... probably makes such mistakes, maybe becasue of losing sight on the bigger picture, and MS is no different.

I ended up in a conference room with about half a dozen people from the Surface team. More rotated in and out as I worked. I drew and talked for two and half hours while they watched and took notes. Within the first thirty seconds they realised how frustrating the home button placement was.

> To their credit, I've made similar mistakes in my career.

What did you mean? You don't mean that if X makes a mistake that you made first, that mistake is a credit to X, do you?

Not at all. Just that mistakes happen to everyone, even the biggest corporations.

I could have phrased that a little better. Perhaps "I've made similar types of mistakes that were obvious in retrospect, so I have a hard time faulting them" might be a better way to say it.

Oh, OK. That makes sense.

A lot of QA departments these days put their effort behind automated testing, which is very valuable but will never replace actual human usage of a device.

Automation should catch one class of problems but real world usage is necessary to catch a whole different type of issue.

I've worked in a testing lab for a product somewhat like the Surface. They had an automated testing platform but it was pretty much useless. They didn't put enough effort into it to make it worthwhile. As a result basic sanity testing had to be done by hand. It took forever and as a result there was no real time for 'actual human usage'.

I found the experience invaluable in helping me to understand why I found virtually every hardware and the vast majority of software products extremely painful to use. And how much I appreciate Steve Jobs for showing us how it's done.

They probably didn't have an artist use the device prior to release. They were probably testing the app in OneNote where you could just move the page to center it if you needed more room.

There's a comment from another sketcher in here talking about how it might be a peculiar grip not used by all artists.

I have that problem with every laptop with the touch pad square in front of the keyboard. I am always brushing against it with my palm while typing that produces very unintended input.

I'm not the only one, I've noticed other people having the same problem.

I have no idea how this design became ubiquitous. It does not work for me at all.

>It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. N-Trig's pressure sensitive stylus technology is vastly inferior to Wacom. Sure, most people can't tell the difference, but most artists can. Sure, artists can still produce professional quality work with an N-Trig stylus, but the experience of using an N-Trig stylus is substandard.

Microsoft improved nearly every aspect of the Surface Pro 3, but their switch to N-Trig was extraordinarily stupid. I'd rather have a slightly thicker, slightly more expensive device than one with a less than perfect stylus. I hope they continue to improve things by switching back to Wacom in the future.

On the other hand, the N-trig stylus works accurately at the edge of the screen. You can't say the same about Wacom's, and the issue is made worse by the fact that most desktop software puts toolbars full of tiny mouse targets around the edge of the screen.

With their Bamboo/Intuos/Cintiq products, Wacom can avoid the accuracy falloff problems by including an enormous margin around the edge of the active area. On a portable device like the Surface Pro 2, they weren't able to do that and it showed.

There are certainly tradeoffs in going to N-trig, but I don't think it's fair to portray it as inferior to Wacom's tech in every area but cost.

The SP2 Wacom setup was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, in my experience -- accuracy was terrible in the corners / near the edges, and parallax was a serious issue, if you did not write/draw with the pen perpendicular to the surface of the screen, there was a significant offset from the tip of the pen to where the line was actually drawn. These were bad enough to turn me (and at least one professional artist that I know) off from buying one.

The move to N-Trig hypothetically fixes both of these. Early reviews/videos say that corner accuracy is greatly improved, and the lack of a separate digitizer layer allows a thinner optical stack, reducing parallax (and allowing the device overall to be thinner).

Driver support has historically been an issue, but msft seems to be improving things significantly.

There are fewer levels of sensitivity and hovering doesn't work quite as well, but I am overall reasonably optimistic about the switch.

Website is having some stylesheet trouble for me, but Surface Pro Artist says they have a decent handle on the driver compatibility. The update isn't generally released yet, but it's a significant fix.

http://surfaceproartist.com/blog/2014/6/9/n-trig-closing-win...

The possibility also remains that Wacom did not want the kind of business that the Surface brings to them. The surface is the first product that does a reasonably good job of cannibalizing cintiq sales. I would expect their margins on Cintiq to be higher than selling a digitizer component to Microsoft. I think Wacom is in a really tough place here - they have to balance between limiting access to their crown jewels while also making sure that ntrig doesnt make too many inroads as a legitimate alternative.

Absolutely nothing to do with that. Wacom would love to be in the SP3. But weight, thickness, cooling, display quality (and writing feel due to extra layers between the glass and display panel), and battery life all conspired against them. The N-Trig solution trades off some drawing precision (at a degree very few will notice) and the requirement of a battery in the pen for improvements to all of those things. Seems like a no-brainer.

When I was at MS folks were working super closely with Atmel (touch panel vendor for most early Win8/RT tablets) and really pushed the limits of their technology. There was a tight feedback loop there and I personally had found issues which eventually were solved via iterations of back-and-forth with Atmel and with software tweaks to work around hardware limitations.

It may not happen over night, but I suspect they're doing the same thing with N-Trig and pushing them to improve the experience in a way which other PC/tablet vendors never have or would. So don't assume that just because other OEMs haven't cared enough to get the most out of N-Trig's text that Surface doesn't have a shot at doing better.

>It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless.

Any Microsoft employees listening: Go ahead and pack it up. Someone on the internet has told you all you need to hear. It's fruitless. Literally nothing you do will work, as this post has clearly pointed out. Look to this non sequitor full of opinion presented as fact for all the info you need: Until you switch to the hardware that OP knows is superior, your work will be for naught. Sorry.

It is a fact that both Wacom and N-Trig digitizers have different sets of advantages and disadvantages. It is a fact that the Surface Pro 3 can't completely eliminate its chosen technology's disadvantages. I never claimed that the entire Surface product line was doomed to failure, after all, the world doesn't revolve around digital artists.

As a couple of people pointed out, Wacom has a major disadvantage as well. It really sucks that it loses its accuracy at the edges of the screen, but in spite of that I still find the experience far superior to using an N-Trig stylus. I have come to this conclusion after using many different devices with different kinds of digitizers over the last decade. I also frequent a few of the major online digital art communities, and they all seem to agree with me. Perhaps the N-Trig fans are just quiet, but I'm inclined to think the lack of representation is due to the fact that artists enjoy using Wacom products.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to be so childishly hostile. I wasn't aware that expressing an opinion in an anonymous online community where people gather to have casual conversations was frowned upon.

I want to applaud MS but this whole thing stinks of a PR move. Wacom has always had a customizable pressure curve in their software. This should be a bedrock standard but instead this catch-up is spun as MS' dedication to artists. To think they are just getting around to doing this (not even a user adjustable slider scale but just a few presets) speaks volume of how much they actually care about artists -- it wasn't goal they had in mind until they sent out their demo units.

Personally, I think the SP3 is probably the best PC for digital artists, but I'm disappointed in how little they worked on making the stylus user friendly.

Would you have preferred they did not address the concerns of Krahulik?

SP2 is likely the best portable computer for digital illustrators. You can still have an SP2, but if you're like me, you're bummed out that SP3 means that the accessory ecosystem is stuck as-is for the SP2.

Seemingly pedantic point, but this is a UX design problem not a QA problem. QA is largely something that you want to automate, minimize, and reduce the cost of. QA is making sure things work as designed. UX design is something that you want to maximize. That's figuring out what you want to make.

The tools of the UX design trade are very different. I think the best UX is done with mockups that go into customer feedback sessions. The middle ground is lots of static drawings of UX, which leads to a lot of bikeshedding and not a lot of real data. Obviously the worst is no UX design at all.

I somewhat disagree, it depends on how QA fits into your organization and how you scope its role. UX needs Quality Assurance too, and sometimes things get past the UX team and into a product - at that point new issues come to light during testing and should be fed back up to the responsible teams.

In general I view QA as the last line of defense before the customer, if your QA doesn't speak up about ANY issues with the product, technical, UX or otherwise then who will?

Of course, my view of the role of QA in product design may be different from others.

The best QA people I've worked with have all had this view.

>QA is making sure things work as designed.

That is why I don't like describing the Test discipline as QA. It's not QA. When I worked in Test, I viewed my role as making sure things work well for the user, which includes 'testing' the specs to make sure there's no scenarios with glaring pain points. I think there's some parallels with the Obmudsman role in acting as the internal customer advocate.

> It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

It is, but it isn't some trade secret, they could open source this and have 1,000s of people converging toward the solution. Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?

money? "optimal experience"

I'm all for supporting open source. But seriously, it took me about 20-30 hours to get my FreeNAS setup working (the way I wanted) (getting the hardware together, configuring... lots and lots of configuring). And I'm definitely not going to say that that project is "end user friendly".

I really really love open source projects but I'm willing to put down that they don't always meet the end user in an appreciable way without a serious and committed company behind the product making it end user applicable (android, et all). Otherwise the open source project will fit the needs of the people that work on it (engineers) and that's about it.

Pretty sure chillingeffect's idea is to have Microsoft behind it, so I'm not sure how that applies.

Sorry, I didn't really understand the parents as that. I guess a more on topic reason might be:

They can barely manage a team of their own engineers to get this product out. Throwing more guys at it isn't going to help necessarily. Not without significantly more overhead and more managers. I think mystical man month definitely still applies to open source projects as well.

that and microsoft is just not good at managing open source. And I can't imagine anyone would want to work on the windows kernel without being paid to do so >_>

> Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?

For the same reason that Ubuntu and Firefox are?

Firefox isn't delivering the hardware. And the software is open source.

It’s very hard to take something like how the device “feels” to draw on and convert that into something engineers can use. I ended up describing it in terms of speaking. I said drawing on the Pro 2 was like having a conversation with someone. With the Surface Pro 3 I feel like I need to either whisper or yell to have the same conversation. I had to press very lightly or very hard, and it changes the way I draw. I was also able to show them some of the lag I was noticing. They could all see me draw a line and watch it pop in a split second later.

There is a reason why Wacom dominated its niche for so long, even in the face of inexpensive asian knock-offs. (1) They had this stuff right. (2) Hackers who are perceptive enough that they don't underestimate the difficulty of getting this stuff right are a very small minority.

It seems like Microsoft could really benefit from having conversations (or hiring) experts in the (ahem) "UI" design of aircraft. The ergonomics, feedback and force required for action on controls, button placement.... all the sorts of things a pilot has to do to interact with the machine are very well studied and, more importantly, quantified by excellent engineers. That engineering expertise could surely be translated to the physical interface of a tablet in a way that is much less possible or relevant for a keyboard and mouse interface.

In this context, who are the hackers?

"asian knock-offs" seems odd in this context. Wacom is a Japanese company. Also, some inexpensive competitors like the monoprice-sold UC-Logic tablets are generally well-received despite having to shove a battery into the pen to avoid wacom's patented inductive coupling.

In this context, who are the hackers?

Programmers who tell themselves, "A stylus? Implementing that would be a piece of cake!" (I have to admit I'm guilty of this exact thing myself.)

"asian knock-offs" seems odd in this context. Wacom is a Japanese company.

And I'm of Korean extraction. From what I've seen, the majority of the knock-offs happen to be from asia. Those are the facts as I understand them. Your "oddness" seems to be supposition.

Which knock-off tablet and digitizers have you used?

The oddness is that Wacom is itself a Japanese company so even the 'original' products are Asian from soup-to-nuts. I'm unclear on the relevancy of your Korean extraction or what you believe I am supposing.

The oddness is that Wacom is itself a Japanese company so even the 'original' products are Asian from soup-to-nuts.

So, why is that odd? Is this some kind of racist pseudo logic that claims asians can't knock off products of other asians?

I'm unclear on the relevancy of your Korean extraction or what you believe I am supposing.

I'm kind of unclear on the relevancy of this whole subthread. Currently, China and other asian countries are doing what the US did in the 19th century: engaging in rapidly expanding economic activity around manufacturing, much of which plays fast and loose with IP laws and also disregards or abandons certain aesthetic, design, and otherwise traditional concerns. "Asian knockoff" is shorthand for countries playing the above economic role in the early 21st century. As far as I can tell, you're sniffing around motivated by the possibility of some kind of racially-based knee-jerk reaction to the term, in a way that reminds me of certain people who are motivated by racially based knee-jerks.

Oh just put it back in the deck.

The relevancy is that the knock-offs aren't bad, considering the patent situation, and [geographic region] knock-off doesn't make sense to specify when the original is from that region and the competing products are largely not made by companies based in Asia (Nokia, Logitech, Livescribe, etc). Incidentally, the competing digitizers are quite the value if you can get over the extra battery weight in the pen. Which, again is a result of abiding by wacom's patent. In this case "Asian knockoff" is shorthand for you having no idea what you're talking about.

I have used wacom products for over 10 years, my first being a graphire2 and my most recent is the surface pro 2. The Microsoft default calibration is better than the halfassed 4 point calibration offered with the wacom feel drivers. The 273 point calibration to address the significant corner distortion requires dropping to command line and 15 minutes of tapping in hopes to get at all the tiny UI elements on the high res screen. Wacom is imperfect and competent competitors benefit us all. And they are competent.

You probably hear this frequently, but your ethnicity has nothing to do with this. If you actively declare your ethnicity while throwing around accusations of race-baiting whenever someone highlights your baseless brand affinity, I'd wager that you go through agonizing retail experiences.

Oh just put it back in the deck.

Someone reading this who has a brain can easily figure out that you got it out in the first place. I was only talking about geographic and economic circumstances.

If you actively declare your ethnicity while throwing around accusations of race-baiting whenever someone highlights your baseless brand affinity,

Whatever. I was giving you a chance to "put the card back" but you blundered ahead anyhow. Anyone reading this thread can see you open up with the race-baiting question. Now you are upset because you were called out for it, and it's there to read.

Exercise: Where do you try to use set-like precision where it's not appropriate and wind up with racist pseudo logic, and what should one learn from that?

Also, if this is really about "brand loyalty" from the beginning, why does it take you so long in the thread to come out with brand-related evidence? Come on now.

Since you're interested in "anyone reading this thread" and you're doggedly attached to leaving the race card at play, logout and take a gander at the color of your replies. If anything, it's clear that "asian knock-off" is 6 additional keypresses to "knock-off", so the only shorthand opportunities I see is to indicate that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Set-precision is unnecessary when the core issue is with reading comprehension and ghost-chasing. You completely missed my point that knock-offs, Asian and otherwise aren't bad; this was in the original reply and subsequent replies. By brand related evidence do you mean my anecdotes about having used wacoms? I figured additional context would help since I had previous addressed the quality of competing products, which you decided to ignore in favor of declaring your ethnicity and assorted other warblgarbl.

I don't believe "anyone reading this thread" would find race-baiting in my questions: "who are the hackers?" and "which knock-off tablet and digitizers have you used?"

Do you really consider announcing your ethnicity as an argument of authority to legitimize your blanket use of "asian knock-off" as calling me out for a race-baiting question? ha.

What you're interpreting as being upset is responding to your nonsense with due diligence to clarify my points (a) the inexpensive knock-offs aren't bad (b) the knock-offs aren't all Asian (c) however, wacom products are indeed Asian.

And let's all just forget your bizarro use of the word hackers for wacom or Microsoft employees. Guess that's what's cool these days; inform recruiting!

Wacom released the SD tablet in 1987. Their patent on inductively-powered styluses should have expired by now.

(Back then, US patents were valid for 17 years from issue date, but the backlog was also much shorter.)

I know that N-trig used to make an inductively-powered stylus about 5 years ago, but for whatever reason, they switched to batteries.

Ah, I did not realize it expired. It is quite strange then.

(3) Our patent system grants Wacom monopoly rights measured in decades in return for, well, no societal benefits that are readily apparent.

The benefit to the consumer is that some other company didn't just copy their technology down to the silk screening on the PCB, eliminating their ability to get any return on their R&D. Wacom is a terrible example for an anti-patent rant. Digitizing pen input is really hard to get right. N-trig has been working to come up with their own independent technology for years now. This is exactly the sort of R&D-heavy product development that's most endangered by copying. Without patents we'd be stuck at Wacom 1.0, and N-trig wouldn't have any incentive to come up with independent technology with different characteristics.

Fine, give them a limited monopoly.

But for 20 years?

Um, no.

The case for a monopoly has been put - and it's one I agree with - but I' with camperbob here, patent monopolies are too long. They don't respect the change in product lifecycles that's come about in the last century or so.

If it took 10 years to produce the next line of products and if products were manufactured to last that long then 15-20 years seems fine.

But the patent term is far too long compared to the product lifecycle (in computing/electronics fields at least); patented tech is too often redundant by the time it enters the public domain.

I'd like to see maybe 5-8 year terms and possibly with a cap that looks something like "if global revenue is 100 times the number of inventors times 50 years times the 90th percentile pay in the country where patented the patent lapses" (the idea being selling at a 1% patent premium that returns enough to reward the inventors with never having to work again means the patent should lapse) [but admit that would be a very hard law to draft without leaving loopholes; there's probably major flaws too, one really would rather look at profit but it's too easily manipulated I feel].

Anyway, can someone justify the 15-20 years over a 5-8 year term (for electronics, say)?

I don't disagree with any of this. What's a sensible patent term in aerospace, where a single design might take a decade to bring to market, and what's sensible in consumer electronics isn't the same.

The one thing that nobody seems to appreciate when it comes to pushing forward towards retina displays is just how many more pixels, how much more memory, and how much slower everything is on the same hardware.

Yet, anyone who has ever been a gamer knows that changing your resolution has a huge impact on your FPS.

It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, and not have serious performance problems in terms of responsiveness.

I'm sure Microsoft can get a lot of this fixed and they will, but like the smartphone revolution, sometimes you have to wait for hardware to catch up with software or you have to write the software to take full advantage of the hardware.

Agreed, and it's not limited to Microsoft. The iPhone 4 and the iPad 3 both had 2x the resolution of their predecessors but barely managed to keep the same level of performance.

Correction: 2x in each dimension, so actually 4x the total resolution.

That's one reason Apple kept the iPad 2 around for so long. It still performs really well and for most users that makes a bigger difference than higher resolution.

As someone who is not a gamer, I am curious -- why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input? Is the issue that the CPU is "in the loop"? Is this a matter of the built in graphics on the Haswell chips not being quite good enough for this application, or is it actually the CPU?

I mostly wonder because I've found the improvements to the GPU in the Haswell processors to be game changing. I can use Solidworks reasonably well on my core i5 laptop! The idea of doing that with integrated graphics on any other computer would have been laughable.

Will a faster CPU really improve this (i7 vs i5)? Or is it a matter of getting a higher end GPU attached to the same CPU (i3 with more powerful integrated GPU)?

It's really a question of faster motherboards.

Wait, really? What is the bottleneck on the motherboard?

bus speed.

It sits between the GPU and the display.

The problem was traditionally the link between the northbridge (which connects connects the CPU and RAM) and the southbridge (handles peripheral connections like SATA, PCI, PCI-E, etc) components of the motherboard. Intel has now changed their architecture in the last 4 or 5 years to be a single Platform Controller Hub where the CPU provides the functionality previously found in the northbridge chip.

In this particular case, a "faster motherboard" might have helped with pushing updates to the GPU faster, though my guess is that graphics memory becomes the concern with double the resolution (which in turn needs to have updates pushed by the CPU, so it could help anyway)

In modern Intel processors (especially in portable devices), the GPU is integrated on the CPU die, so pushing updates doesn't count (unless you count pulling data from main memory to provide to the GPU).

Don't these things use Intel GPUs that are on the CPU?

I would suspect one or combination of the following issues:

1) The OS doesn't give the pen interrupt high enough priority

2) The bandwidth between the CPU and touch screen digitizer is too small

3) Too many background processes that cause CPU to be overwhelmed (not likely though)

why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input?

GPUs are typically about reducing latency for a large amount of parallel processing. Things like stylus latency are more about reducing the latency for a very tiny amount of serially processed data, where the latency requirements are quite a bit more strenuous. (A kerjillion triangles, versus under 4 bytes total for x,y, and pressure, though there is a bit more than just that for rendering a drawn line with attendant mathematics.)

People who edit sound and do studio recording know from experience that people paying close attention can start noticing lags upwards of 5-10 ms or so. When you're concentrating on drawing, you're definitely paying close attention.

The way game input works compared to OS input is very _very_ different.

Games go through a more direct mode of user input (directX) whereas the OS has to take into account that where your clicking can do a million different things (basically games take -almost- exclusive use of your mouse/keyboard). This becomes even more problematic when it's in a drawing application and they're now running math over your input to figure out exactly what you meant.

I'm with you though. They really shouldn't have come this far with screwing up the latency on the pen again (this fixed it on the surface 2 after talking to gabe last time as well...)

Thank you, this makes it much clearer to me. =)

The CPU is required to process the digitizer input, figure out what it's trying to do, communicate it to the application, process it within the application, turn that into pixels on a constantly-updating canvas, and express that canvas as a texture to the GPU.

The GPU is responsible for displaying that texture to the screen.

As a gamer, there's a similar issue in gaming: a lot of modern games are getting bottlenecked on the CPU (just like drawing on the Surface is), because drawing to the GPU requires several layers of software abstraction. This means that a lot of games (mostly MMOs lately) will lag no matter how good your video card is if you don't have a sufficient video card. In fact, up to 40% of the CPU use of some games is not spent by the game, but by the drivers that sit between the game and the GPU.

"It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, and not have serious performance problems in terms of responsiveness."

Sure. It's not, however, foolish to wonder why they'd RELEASE a laggy device. Hoping that an already small market will shell out $1000+ for a device that might get a future SW update to work as well as the last model is ridiculous.

Microsoft demoed 1ms touchscreen lag in 2012.

Most modern touchscreens still have 100ms lag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

I was under the impression that that setup was something including a camera or something, and not an actual touchscreen.

Yeah, though maybe you could do it with FTIR instead of capacitive, so you wouldn't need external cameras.

This lag is in the software stack (mostly in UI graphics). Not in hardware.

Remember Androids ~>200ms sound lag?

Definitely not. Most of mobile software strives to run at 60fps. That's just 16.7ms.

display animation at 60fps and react to a hardware input through layers and layers of software abstraction are two different things.

Run of the mill 3M controller has 5ms latency

http://datasheet.octopart.com/87-5961-211-3M-datasheet-21189...

5 year old Fujitsu FMA1127 had 10ms.

http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/MICRO/fme/tsc/FMA1127_Data_...

Interrupt latency is measured in nano seconds.

If you had read the PDF, 5ms is the "minimum touch time", which is not latency, but a minimum touch time it can register.

The same software has no problem rendering complex games and doing all kinds of game logic, all in 16.7ms. What makes you think asking for a touch input will take 15 times longer?

Actually its response time.

I already gave you an example of software stack impact on latency - Android sound lag went down from >250ms to respectable 10ms for some Nexus devices. Blame buffers.

> Actually its response time.

Actually, no, it isn't.

"This controller is well known for its < 5.4 milliseconds response time"

What I've read is most of the lag in the more optimized touchscreen stacks (read=iOS) is due to filtering and smoothing, which takes a few samples to do. The worse stacks (early android) had poor drivers and a lot of layers of abstraction, or worse, Java (maybe this is what you mean when you say "UI Graphics", but the raw numbers we're talking about here are on a far lower layer than scrolling in lists).

Graphics rendering lag is at worst 2 frames of video (double-buffering).

Nice video! It really shows the perceptual difference well.

However, I'm not sure it's fair to call it a "touchscreen" when it's most likely a touchpad input surface aligned with an overhead projector. It's impossible to say from the video how feasible it would be to achieve the same performance with an actual touchscreen, let alone a high-resolution mobile device. But I'm looking forward to it. :)

The creators of the drawing app "Colors!" for 3DS and iOS also tested their app's latency across a wide range of devices, and they achieved a 9ms latency in 2004's Nintendo DS:

http://www.collectingsmiles.com/news/measuring-latency-in-co...

  Nintendo 3DS – 23 ms
  PlayStation Vita – 49 ms
  Surface Pro – 100 ms
  iPhone 5 – 81 ms
  Galaxy Note – 71 ms
  Galaxy S3 – 104 ms & Nexus 10 – 99 ms
  Galaxy Note 2 – 132 ms
  Wii U GamePad – 53 ms
  Nintendo DS – 9 ms

Some people are wondering (here and on the previous post) how this problem could have escaped usability testing. My guess is, Gabe seems to have a somewhat unusual grip, so it's more than plausible nobody anticipated this problem. I am not a professional artist, but I've been drawing for more than two decades now. I also have an original Surface Pro because I really wanted to get my hands on a Wacom that could do more than just draw. I've churned out tons of sketches on it using Sketchbook Express.

When his first review of the Pro 3 came out, I could not understand why he had problems with the home button. When I draw, my palm tends to rest on the lower right corner of the screen. This is also how I've seen most other sketchers draw. I could not position myself such that I'd hit where the home button on the Pro 3 is.

However, I've also seen enough people write with really (to me) weird grips. I imagine that it extends to drawing as well.

Gotta really give it to Microsoft. The transformation of the company under Nadella's leadership is really impressive. They really stepped up their game. They finally got someone on the PR team that actually knows what they are doing.

It's starting to feel as though the philosophy in Microsoft is less about 'Windows everywhere', but more about relevance. Product teams are created for various niches (e.g. Surface, Azure, etc.) but those teams now have a large degree of autonomy in pursuing their goals.

As an example, the Office team's goals aren't to prop up Windows as a platform by providing a sufficient but substandard product on other platforms, but rather to make a great product; as a result, Office 365 for iPad. The Surface team isn't about making a platform to foist Windows 8 onto people or pressure tablet makers, it's about making a great personal tablet/laptop frankenstein.

Likewise, Azure is (reportedly) a great backend for apps on all kinds of platforms, especially on iOS, rather than a 'competitive advantage' to make sure that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 work great with each other and only with each other.

I really feel as though this is the right direction for them, and that it's producing some really great results so far.

It's like they finally got around to reading Dave Winer's post from 13 years ago (!) on the idea of the "strategy tax" (http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html):

Sometimes products developed inside a company such as Microsoft have to accept constraints that go against competitiveness, or might displease users, in order to further the cause of another product. I recognized the concept but had never heard the term.

An example. Consider a company that develops both a Web browser and a word processor. The product team for the browser might get lots of input from users saying "We'd like a better editor in the browser." It would be natural to give the users what they want. So they put the feature in their project plan, but when it comes up for review, the CEO shoots them down. "They should use the word processor," he says.

Gabe was raving about the Surface even with Ballmer at MS. I guess now it's time to credit anything good happening to Nadella's chairmanship.

I was about to chime in on this. Yes, the surface got thrown at Gabe since the getgo. He's been raving about it for a long time.

Which is surprising as he was using it as part of his major workflow for a while over his cintiq.

Except Microsoft didn't respond to his raves while Ballmer was in place.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Microsoft has arrived at a place where simply being as good or a bit better than it's competition is not enough. Over the past 10 years, they've alienated, infuriated, exploited, cheated and abused so many of their users and people who support their users that the bar they have to jump over is higher than the bar any other company has to jump over.

That's a good thing for everyone else. It means better products and stiffer competition, but only if Microsoft recognises the true scale of the challenge facing them. There is so little good will towards Microsoft who are still seen by many as the lumbering, malevolent spoilt child of tech that (as I've already said) being good or a bit better falls far short of the leaps and bounds they need to be making.

I for one have been enjoying Microsoft's slow motion fall from grace and I'll continue to do so because I'm still angry at they way they've behaved on the web and abused their position with Internet Explorer. People may well disagree with my view point, but disagreeing with me (and the score like me) makes no difference. It's the way we feel, the way we will continue to feel and Microsoft will need nothing short of a miracle to change our minds.

Microsoft knows the days of strong arm tactics and PC dominance are gone. They know they aren't the king of the hill anymore. You can see it in the way they are handling Surface and Azure, or mishandling in the way of Xbox.

So when Apple lets people test out a new language, and the author notes important, but not universally demanded features, the tone is "It's amazing how awesome Apple is. Can't wait to see how it works out."

When MS does something not wholly different, there's a bunch of "HarrrrUMPH! They should have got this fixed already. It's such an obviously easy thing. If they were half the company or any open source community was, they would try to create something like a programming language!!"

Those contentious bones.

Those situations are so different from each other I'm honestly amazed you wrote it, looked at it, and still thought it was a smart move to play that card.

Seems like a small niche to be focusing on. I understand the PR angle (it's a home run for the PR team) but I don't think catering to artists who draw digitally is going to make or break the tablet.

Where's the feel good story about the coder, the gamer, or the office junkie? Each of which makes up a considerably larger slice of the premium laptop/tablet marketplace.

The coder, the gamer, and the office junkie are the traditional Microsoft audience from the 90s + 2000s (maybe in reverse order). Apple had the artist audience even back in the 2000s, macintoshes were really niche-y then

Seeing Apple's huge success in the late 2000s, Microsoft's grand marketing strategy since has been to try and re approach a young hip, artistic audience while not losing their traditional base.

It's a huge shift and it won't be easy, since managers who buy for their offices want a low-rent, predictable product and their feathers are easily ruffled.

I dunno.

Not make or break maybe. Be a potentially big market - hella yeah.

The majority of design-ish people I know, including myself, would kill for a decent tablet drawing environment. Folk are already laying out for specialist devices like http://www.wacom.com/en/gb/creative/cintiq-24-hd-touch.

My iPad is cute and useful for many things. I do very rough sketch stuff on it. For professional deign work it's pretty much useless. As somebody who's been buying Apple kit since before Jobs return the surface is the first time I've ever been tempted by Windows hardware.

I know many folk who walk around with a Macbook + iPad + wacom tablet. I can see a lot of those folk switching if the Surface 3 worked well. I know lots of long-term Apple folk who were really tempted by the Surface 2.

The office junkies, coders and games have alternatives. Currently there is almost nothing that does what the Surface 2/3 do, on the design side, in a single device.

(I also imagine that the issues of stylus sensitivity & lag will apply to other interaction models to. Getting those things to feel "natural" is non-trivial. Pleasing the design folk will probably make it better for other peeps too.)

I've been looking a the cintiq too, and may still do that, because wacom caters to illustrators directly.

Was a Windows user but have a MBP now. I follow the Surface reports with interest entirely because of the apparent quality of stylus input. Getting a Wacom is my likely path at this point though.

Apple has had a stranglehold on the graphic design industry for years despite not actually making a good stylus-driven product for that market.

I don't know if there's a legitimate marketing reason for this, but it's a tremendously symbolic conflict. Microsoft attacking Apple in their stronghold.

I'm not even a serious artist--I'm a programmer who makes games--and the only reason I bought an SP2 was Photoshop.

I took it back because the SP3 news dropped that week.

Kind of regretting that now.

This feels like Altavista and then Google appealing to the tech types in the earlier days of search engines. If you wanted to convince the masses that the sketching and note-taking was high quality, why wouldn't you get it right for the artists as a priority?

I assume anyone from Penny Arcade has a gaming background too.

> the gamer

If they get Gabe happy with it, then they will get a ton of free PR in front of a lot of gamers. For example, see this post of his (especially the second half) about the original surface pro: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surf...

OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development. Bold (and encouraging) move on their part if they didn't.

> OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development

Mike Krahulik has been a fan of Surface Pro from the beginning,[1] has been very vocal about what he likes and dislikes, and has a very large audience.[2] It seems likely they were counting on him blogging his experiences as soon as possible after his last Surface Pro post,[3] which had some fairly negative points that made using the new Surface Pro difficult (if not impossible) for him.

[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surf...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade

[3]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/05/23/surface-pro...

Microsoft keeping Gabe happy with the surface line is probably one of their top 5 PR priorities for the devices. I am not surprised by this post in the least, but I am glad that Gabe is going to get something he can use for his work.

Gabe being in Seattle also makes it pretty easy to interact with him.

Gabe is just the character that initially represented Mike Krahulik, the artist of PA and the person writing those posts.

Whoops: fixed, thanks.

They'd have to be insane. You can't pay for advertisements like these. Despite the mixed feelings Gabe has had with Surface 3. Just look at this HN thread; every post Gabe made about the Surface caused similar comments.

In his case, he'd already generated bad press, so letting him comment to the positive on changes they're working on benefits them.

Gabe's posts have had strong impact on a relatively small audience. It's hard to realistically imagine it's had a significant impact on Surface sales one way or the other.

On the other hand when he blogs about the future direction that they are taking then this is all data that competitors will gobble up, and in many cases can bring to market ahead of MS.

Quite possibly the PR gain here is offset by the future opportunity cost by giving competitors a heads up on future strategy.

"the device is done and shipping in like a week"

Those competitors are probably going to have to put in a bit of overtime then :)

The other stuff he talks about isn't new either - pressure curves have been around forever (I have a very old tablet thinkpad with a pressure curve) and the tablet photoshop he played with has already been displayed at a show.

They're using him as a PR sheep. Of course they didn't require an NDA.

Surface Pro is very interesting from a product management perspective. Surface Pro 1 satisfied this niche, and Surface Pro 2 improved upon the first model significantly. Surface Pro 3 addresses many of the form factor concessions of the previous model (aspect ratio, thickness) which would make it theoretically more palatable to the mainstream use cases -- however, the N-Trig digitizer and button placement hardware decisions makes this less appealing to that aforementioned niche.

BUT, you don't have to update. People that found great use in SP1+2, have very little incentive to upgrade for several reasons. Short cycles and price aside, the dilemma is now whether this niche can even commit to buying or recommend a SP2 or Surface Pro accessories even prices drop because SP3 is a clear signal of a significant form factor change. The frankly necessary blade accessories are now fragmented between form factors and the older form will not likely be supported going forward.

Great to see Microsoft listening to issues with the Surface and attempting to fix them. Hopefully they can polish it up into a machine that can be competitive in the market.

It sounds like it's already competitive in the market of nerds who draw cartoons on their computers, and need to be mobile. The Wacom Cintiq is probably much better for serious drawing, though you give up the portability of a self-contained tablet computer.[1] I'm not sure the Surface will succeed in any markets other than that though. It just solve any common problems significantly better than the alternatives.

[1] http://www.wacom.com/en/us/creative/cintiq-13-hd

I think it has pretty good potetial in hospitals, education and insurance where ability to take notes is important. Especially the use case where you are expected to stand and jot down things on a tablet sized device.

Those enterprises have already been well satisfied by the convertible tablets from Lenovo, Fujitsu, Panasonic, etc. for years. I don't think the Surface will make much headway into those fields, beyond the few people who are literally working in the field and not in offices.

I think the surface form factor is much slimmer than the bulky things I see in the hospital. This might be to the convertible tablets what Ipad was to the tablets before it.

If I didn't doubt Windows so much for programming stuff I'd really like to get one for university - looks like the perfect machine for lectures and also everything else I need a laptop for. For any students but CS I think it's awesome.

In my experience, I found that I was far more productive/successful in undergrad when I used Windows as my main OS and set up *nix virtual machines for the my computer science classes. Having the computer just _work_ and not needing to worry about software/configuration conflicts between classes was a huge improvement over trying to do everything inside of a single native OS.

That said, I now have a Macbook Pro and love that I have a native unix shell and MacPorts. But I still run virtual machines for specific projects (e.g. a Windows VM for all that software that just doesn't exist for OSX/Linux; unfortunately free alternatives don't work when you need to collaborate with a team).

Yep fair enough, Windows is a lot nicer to deal with but it just doesn't seem to have the same developer support. My alternative buy is definitely a Macbook but I do think the surface would be better for other student use cases - that said plenty of people on campus have Macbooks so it's not exactly a painful choice.

VMs are a good point and probably pretty much equalise things technically but OSX seems the better main OS for just doing work that happens to be programming/using developer tools etc.

At the last startup I worked at, Microsoft sent designers and engineers that worked on Windows Server to better understand why we deployed on CentOS. They flew in from Redmond and spent a couple hours with us. We were forthright with them and they seemed to take the feedback to heart (differences in automation being the biggest solid need we could offer, since "running a Windows shop is just different" isn't really tangible feedback).

It impressed me, honestly, and it's good to see them listen to the failings in some of their product lines.

They need to increase the fanout of systems engineering knowledge on the windows platform (outside of microsoft). For low level stuff its much easier finding information about linux than it is about any of the other OS'es (in my limited experience).

When MS is cornered (when they are losing in one area or another), and they are determined to win the competition should be scared. They are very good at committing to a project, and being in it for the long haul.

> They are very good at committing to a project, and being in it for the long haul.

How so? I can think of several projects (especially hardware) that they abandoned after the first version. Granted, they gave the Zune a fair shake (though I don't think the iPod had much to be scared of). SPOT, too, considering that smart phones were starting to get useful about a year after SPOT's release.

But as a counter example, I know of one unreleased hardware product they're working on right now that stands little chance of going beyond V1 due to (without inappropriately saying too much) a lack of commitment on MSFT's part. Could be that in this case they're not "determined to win", but I'm not in a position to know how determined they are.

Xbox comes to mind....

There are plenty of examples of Microsoft releasing a product which initially had little uptake but that eventually, after several releases, did well. Even big ones like Windows, Office, and SQL Server are examples of this.

As for unreleased products: I think that is an orthogonal discussion.

Excel immediately comes to mind.

> They are very good at committing to a project, and being in it for the long haul.

Nobody has yet mentioned Microsoft PlaysForSure. Those clowns really screwed the pooch on that one. They got their "partners" to commit to a form of DRM that the Zune (brown bar of turd) didn't support and that Microsoft then abandoned.

How's the "long haul" working out for that particular fiasco?

Sorry if this sounds like a rant (which it is). But I don't understand how Microsoft's numerous mistakes keep getting erased into the mists of time. This wasn't something that happened eons ago. PlaysForSure was introduced a mere ten years ago.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure

Why don't they just take off the Windows button? Can't you just swipe in from the right side of the screen to see the on-screen version? There's a Windows button in the task bar as well.

It's more or less like the home button on an iPhone or iPad. Gestures are good, but there are scenarios where you can't easily use them or a novice user won't know about them. The Start button doesn't always show up in Desktop scenarios.

Also, I think you can use it to wake a device from sleep?

TBH, as soon as I saw the change from a Wacom digitizer to N-Trig's I cringed. I don't know what differences there are between the technologies they each use, but Wacom's is definitely more responsive on the whole. I like that they aren't using a 16:9 aspect ratio for the screen, but the switch away from Wacom kept me from making the Surface an automatic purchase.

Did you see http://surfaceproartist.com/blog/2014/5/27/microsoft-address... ?

Interesting that the Surface Pro 2 did so much better in terms of "feel" and "lag". I wonder if the switch to the nTrig panel is behind the regression (I have an old HP TX2 with an nTrig panel; it was always terrible, but maybe they've improved since then...).

Why would people want to use a Surface Pro3 as a drawing tablet? What is the target consumer for this device? The last time I played with the device, it was running regular Windows apps on a small screen and it was a nightmare getting the menus and buttons right. If applications have to be tailored for the Surface, how will they work on the desktop?

The Surface Pro 3 has a 12 inch screen compared to the Surface Pro 2's 10 inch screen and the Macbook Air's 11 inch screen, so the real estate is improved by quite a bit. It gets expensive to find a larger screen with a digitizer, and the guys from PA are on the road quite a bit so I'd imagine portability counts.

Microsoft bringing protoypes to the PA offices seems about as expected as this Dave Barry line:

  giant talking broccoli stalks will come around and mow your lawn, for free

Touchscreen latency is difficult, especially with increasing resolution. But if they managed it acceptably for the SP 2, it must be possible, I guess.

What Microsoft should do is bring more artistic people into the Surface team, perhaps engineers with artistic abilities, and by doing exactly what they did for Gabe: study how artists work. The end result is a much better product without the need for a post-mortem scramble.

It's good to see tech companies like Microsoft and Apple trying to make the artists happy, not forgetting every human being has their own artistic side. The last sentence is very inspiring, though.

I hope he's getting paid for his time. MS should really be hiring him.

He probably gets paid in the form of free Surface tablets and accessories.

No one should be surprised Microsoft is trying to do their best to improve the Surface and converse with customers. They are great at requirements gathering. However all of this is their job and not solely out of good will. As a huge company that makes grand promises, they are expected to deliver a product that works for their customers. Would you expect any less?

As customers we should care about the best products that help us achieve our end goal. If you absolutely have to give your 'loyalty' to a company, your 'loyalty' should be given (in my opinion) to the company that is predictable, consistent, and reliable.

Sounds to me like they just hadn´t thought about this use case deep enough. Good to see they´re doing something about it, and with some nice publicity at that.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't run these type of tests BEFORE releasing surfae 3 pro

This is going to be great SP4 is going to work great for Gabe.

But surely these changes were made for a reason?

> I could see some of them shaking their heads and looking at each other. They were very obviously bothered that they had not seen this before.

Why I can't imagine Apple being in such a situation?

It looks ugly as hell. I would never want to be seen using something like that.

if anything, this is a testament to why closed source software is dead.

Spend $1000+ on a device. it doesn't do what you want? get world famous and complain. have a team of engineers fix it for you. ...right.

Almost everything i hated on my first android phone i fixed it myself or lazily waited for someone else to fix it... yeah, it took a year or so to have it how i liked. My new phone, if i install any custom ROM i will lose some of the new hardware functionality, so i can't. i have to wait for the company to fix the annoyances i have, which i am pretty sure will be never. sadly i don't have the time to make the new hardware work because that is a retarded huge amount of time you need to waste.

And I was going to use a Surface Pro tablet with Ubuntu Linux.

If even Microsoft cannot make the device work right the first time around, even while apparently trying hard, I wonder how bad will the situation be on Linux. Still going to try; maybe later, when touch support on Ubuntu will be more ready and Surface Pro's will drop in price on eBay (I'm thinking of going with 256MB+ Surface Pro 2, unless they will make a newer generation of smaller tablets)

So if you're a famous millionaire the Surface Pro 3 is the device for you, and Microsoft will make sure to fix all your problems with it.

Hooray?

It is probably a stretch to call Mike Krahulik a famous millionaire. Microsoft used his art in their recent ad campaigns, which itself was a response to a prior unsolicited positive writeup on their product. So it is perfectly reasonable that they get his feedback (albeit far too late). Not all the problems were fixed, and I suspect some of the problems can't really be fixed given the hardware that is being shipped. To some degree this is damage control on the part of Microsoft, because on his initial impressions with SP3, Krahulik was clear that he could not recommend this to illustrators with a similar workflow -- most of which are not famous millionaires.

How is it a stretch? He's a millionaire, there's no denying that.

Sure mainstream people might not know who he is but in tech circles literally everyone does. So how is he not famous?

I'd challenge you to find a more high profile person using Surface 3 and giving their public thoughts on it.

So, my comment stands; if you are a famous millionaire then it's the product for you apparently, because Microsoft will actually fix your complaints. Otherwise, good luck.

He is well-known in gaming circles moreso than tech circles (there is some overlap of course), and I can't confirm or deny he is a millionaire; frankly I have no idea. Famous has an imprecise definition; but as you conceded, "mainstream people" might not know who he is. This is why I consider it a stretch to call him a famous millionaire; I'd hesitate to use the same label used for Cliff Bleszinski or Paul Graham. Krahulk is influential in specific areas, but famous millionaire as the frame seems like a personal issue you're projecting.

And regarding your challenge to find a more high profile person using the SP3 -- it is not released yet. The only people giving public thoughts on it are tech reviewers and Microsoft employees. In that regard, Microsoft used Krahulik's works on their website, so he may very well have augmented his millionaire's gold coin swimming pool with Microsoft money. Despite this, Krahulik still plainly voiced criticisms of the SP3 product, and Microsoft's surface team addressed this feedback in positive way. Of course, they want to leverage his influence. The impacted users would all theoretically benefit. I doubt that the result will be that he alone is getting a Krahulik hotpatch for personal use.

As a developer working with vendor software, I too get prerelease access and are offered an avenue to submit problems I find to the vendor. The primary differences here are that I am strongly discouraged by the vendor to share my experiences with prerelease software.

Lastly, Microsoft showed him that they can address somethings, but he was clear that issues remain. By contrast, the product team didn't respond with a suggestion to "just avoid holding it in that way".

Your posts appear to be reverse snobbery.

Microsoft are fixing those complaints for everyone. There's nothing unique about those complaints that suggest they only impact millionaires. It's just a quicker shortcut to deal with one person than release and corral feedback from thousands who don't always make their complaints clear.

If memory serves, he was sent a Surface Pro 2 by Microsoft. And a Surface Pro 3. I don't recall if he was given the original Pro or if he bought that one himself.

Either way, I would view his endorsement and any other interaction with Microsoft with a shaker of salt; this is not at all dissimilar from the multitude of celebrities whom Samsung sends the latest Galaxy phone in a swag bag in order to get a "I wasn't paid off, I just really like it!" endorsement. His celebrity status commands him a certain amount of influence for whatever judgment he proclaims on the Surface (note, for instance, how every post he makes about it ends up on the front page of HN). I can guarantee if the same points were raised by a normal person who paid for the thing on their tumblr blog, there would not be a team of Microsoft engineers rushing to fix them.

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