Now that the cat is finally out of the bag and we’ve gotten to play around with the Surface and read some reviews (our own review forthcoming), one question remains for the general consumer. Just how well does the Surface RT perform? Microsoft has kept the lid on the Surface RT until it actually shipped out to customers, as if to say, “It’s in your hands now, sucker!” We’ve had some reports on the WinSource forums about overheating of the Surface RT, but not much else has surfaced about usability, until now.
Hacker News has an in-depth look at some of the problems that people are experiencing with their Surface tablets, including an Office Suite that just doesn’t function like it should.
“So quickly, in fact, that I can outrun Microsoft Word on the Surface. I get the feeling that the Surface RT’s CPU or Word code just can’t keep up with my typing.”
No one wants a machine where the words you type appear magically several seconds after you’ve moved on in your sentence, but it’s interesting to note that a member of the Word Team for Office responded directly to this comment. His thoughts:
I’m on the Word team in Office and I’m coming into this thread incredibly late, but FWIW the slow typing on ARM was something we couldn’t fully address in time for the preview release. Word RTM (ARM and x86/x64) has much better performance.
One of the challenges we had was that for a large majority of the product cycle we didn’t even know about the Surface. We were looking at ARM early on, but the hardware we had was prerelease hardware from MSFT partners that had varying levels of performance.
Even now we don’t know a whole lot about the Surface. It’s a little frustrating, since we (Office) hit RTM we’re eagerly awaiting the point at which new Surface RTs will have Office RTM baked into them. The preview release is seriously many many months old from the RTM release, and it’s painful to think that this is what customers are going to see from Office when they turn on their shiny new device.
This comment reveals several things about the way Microsoft works on products. The fact that the Office team didn’t have a whole lot of interaction with Surface while still trying to design a product for it is pretty damning. It would be like Google trying to design a Maps app for a TI-83 calculator, without access to the hardware within. It’s just not going to end up well. The fact that early adopters are having these issues shows that Microsoft could stand to collaborate a bit better between their software and hardware departments. Another commenter claims that each team had access to information that was needed and the issue is a small one.
This issue is known, intermittent and dependent on a number of factors. It has been addressed and an update is forthcoming.
This type of issue would be identical across NVIDIA based ARM PCs and large numbers of the reference platforms were available at the same time they have been available to external developers.
Developers on the Office team (and Word team) that needed to contribute to the ARM focused work had access to the tools and hardware needed, including Surface specific hardware. There was no shortage of knowledge, hardware, or communication.
Obviously there’s a source of contention here as to whether or not Microsoft is seriously working together as a well-oiled machine in order for the Surface RT to be the iPad killer Steve Ballmer desperately wants it to be. What do our readers think? If you have a Surface RT at home, have you experienced any of these problems with Office or during the initial set up?
