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Patriots’ coach claims Microsoft tablets weren’t working during AFC Title game
Is New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick blaming Microsoft tablets for his teams’ season ending loss to the Denver Broncos?
During Sunday’s AFC championship game, TV announcers said that the New England Patriots’ Microsoft tablets were malfunctioning.
Could this malfunction have contributed to Tom Brady’s interception and ultimately the Patriots’ untimely demise that kept them from advancing to Super Bowl 50?
On Monday, Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick said that this wasn’t the first time that the team’s Microsoft tablets had malfunctioned.
CBS Sports.com reported that he said: “It’s a pretty common problem. We have ways of working through it. There’s really nothing you can do. It’s not like the headsets where the other sides are really affected. You deal with what you deal with.”
He said that the Patriots have experienced the problem at home and on the road. Their remedy, he said, was to use the old school method of printing photographs of formations. He said this method was “more dependable” than the Surfaces.
He added, however, that the Microsoft tablets trouble didn’t affect the outcome of the game.
The idea, though, that Microsoft’s tablets didn’t work isn’t a good look for Redmond or tech in general.
How often have the Surfaces malfunctioned during games? A Microsoft spokesman claims: “Not once this season have we experienced an issue related to the devices themselves. The issue is one of network stability in the various stadiums, which we have little control over.”
Each team’s Surfaces connect to private networks that are for a single team only. I understand that there have, indeed, been ongoing problems with those networks all year. It’s unclear who provides those networks.
An NFL spokesman confirmed that the Surfaces were not the problem: “The issue was identified as a network cable malfunction and was resolved during the 2nd quarter. The issue was not caused by the tablets or the software that runs on the tablets. We have experienced no issues with the tablets this season. Any issues were network related.”
Microsoft has spent over $400 million in getting the NFL to feature their tablets exclusively. So you could imagine the frustration they felt when the announcers initially (and for quite some time) referred to them as iPads.
Portable gadgets have become a necessity for sports teams, because of social media marketing. Social Media Marketing helps increase number of viewers. And having a well functioning tablets is necessary.
It must be even more frustrating when this past Sunday, announcers associated the correct brand name with a malfunction, especially if it is indeed the case that this is entirely a network issue.
The Surface hasn’t been associated with some abnormal level of problems at all. Reviews of the product have been consistently good. Indeed, more than a few wondered whether Apple’s new iPad Pro, launched late last year, had some stunning similarities to the Surface.
The marketing of the Surface has, however, been as good as Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was on Sunday. It all started with risible advertising that caused Microsoft to constantly be playing catch-up.
Now the brand is on the defensive again. Perhaps it needs a new coordinator, as well as a little more luck.
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