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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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