[arcanus]

> Microsoft entered into a long-term sponsorship partnership with the league in 2013. At the time, the N.F.L. had a list of demands for the equipment, including ruggedness, ease of use, size, effectiveness in extreme temperature and glare resistance.

> In 2014, Belichick noted that the system had crashed, but seemed mostly cool with it. “I’d say that’s all kind of part of the game,” he said.

> “I just can’t take it anymore,” he said at a news conference Tuesday.

This is an under-reported challenge of the increasing automation narrative: we need more robust systems.

[treehau5]

Robust systems are achievable already. We need managers that understand quality takes proper planning, time, and deep, concentrated, uninterrupted work.

[SteveNuts]

And money. Don't forget about lots and lots of money.

I'm going through this headache right now.

[ChuckMcM]

This is a huge challenge for quality software. As others have noted there is a disconnect between users, developers, managers, and quality/reliability engineering such that nobody seems to have enough of the picture to make the best decisions.

Sales wants more features to be competitive.

Management wants to ship it because it will generate revenue.

QRE/Manufacturing wants more time to test all of the features and their interactions.

And everywhere money gets squeezed out, sales wants to offer a discount to "win the deal", management wants to improve the margins by lowering the cost to develop, and the factory wants to ship product faster and spend less time qualifying it.

[cmdrfred]

But at $Startup they have an open office plan and meetings every 20 minutes and they make $Product!

[FLUX-YOU]

It's important to know what he was using. He's going back to pictures but I doubt the tablet crashes often just looking at pictures.

If there is some software developed specifically for his /the NFL's use, you have a code base that's giving the entire platform a bad image.

[freehunter]

Also depends on the definition of "crash". Did the system crash, did the app crash, or did it just reboot itself for updates at an inopportune moment?

The idea of using a Surface for something as trivial as looking at pictures is ridiculous. The idea of Surface is it's a full computer in tablet form. It's way too much power and way too much complexity for the use case.

[makecheck]

Even if software is at fault, the managers of any long-term strategic “partnership” with high publicity are still responsible: they should know what it means to stamp your name on something, and have everything under control. If some app isn’t working and that broken app is tarnishing your entire platform, you’d better have either a “plan B” implementation or enough control over the app to quickly bring it up to some standard.

Also, it really matters to have competent support and help documentation. Asking for help should not be a frustrating experience; users should want to come to you first (and not the press) to fix all their problems. If they continually receive useless answers like “power off and on”, or they have to wait a long time, or even your support people don’t know what’s wrong, then you shouldn’t be surprised if your users find other ways to vent and solve their problems.