Great advertising for $MSFT during the NFL AFC playoff game between Denver and New England on CBS. The announcers reported, just after the second quarter srarted, the Patriots coaches are complaining the tablets failed. Pictures are not being received, and players and coaches are frustrated. Subsequently, the announcers reported that the tablets are being hardwired for the remainder of the game. Denver says their tablets are working properly. Tabletgate? Are blackhat hackers at work for Las Vegas bookies? Are Dell and HP peeps in the vicinity? Will anyone trip over the cables? Will $MSFT take a dump on market pre-market or on the open? Curious minds want to know.
I doubt it's anyone hacking it. Microsoft is enough of a hack on their own! They really dropped the ball on everything from Windows to the mobile market. They got there late and shouldn't have, and what they pushed out as products since 2008 like windows mobile and windows CE before it have been substandard. The Microsoft Surface tablets that came after are just last-ditch attempts for Microsoft to hold on to a falling market for them. The coaches should have used Android tablets or Apple's tablets (which this forum just blocked the name for when I said the product? Confused on why) instead.
Your are aware that $MSFT paid $400 million to the NFL for the sponsorship? (I use the Samsung SM-P605V tablet; haven't turned on a Windows laptop in months.)
When access to a website fails, I don't think the hardware has anything to do with it unless there is a breakdown in the wifi adaptor. The tablet is a small computer that treats software equally. If the internet access is selective, I don't think that is the work of the tablet but of a hacker or spammer. Nevertheless, when something goes wrong with a webiste access, blame it on the website or on the telco.
What makes this odd is that Denver's tablets were still working just fine. They would most likely be using the same signal/connection, unless the NFL Offers two completely separate connections for security.
Hehe yeah I was laughing about this last night. I thought that maybe they should have diverted some of their advertising budget towards product design and they wouldn't be in this situation! But yeah, big fail for Microsoft. I can understand things sometimes not working but it's quite funny when you pay the NFL for sponsorship and then they broadcast information that your own products have failed in what was the most important game of the season for the Pats.
I think also that this is another example that even though technology as come a long way, it still can't be trusted 100% and maybe never will. I'm sure we've all had an important call cut out on a mobile or an app as failed when we've needed it the most. It's just unlucky for them that this failure happened on live TV in front of millions of viewers.
Just for jollies, I looked. $MSFT closed Friday at $52.29 and opened today at $51.95. Just shy of Noon it is ~$52.20, still shy of Friday's close. Oh well... giddyup.
I am going to guess and say that this was an inside job of the Denver organization. To give some history. New England Patriots have a long history of screwing up the headsets of opposing coaches when they play in Gillette stadium ( Patriots home stadium). In normal situations, coaches on a team should be able to communicate with each other through the headsets, and even QBs are able to hear what is being said by the coaches. But in that one particular stadium, the visiting team often has issues. For instance, earlier this year, the Steelers coaches could not talk into their headsets at all, and the only thing they heard through the headsets was a local radio broadcast of the game. The NFL drew a lot of fire because there is no rule in place that says if the equipement does not work for one team, the other team cannot use it. So with the Steelers vs Patriots game earlier this year, the steelers could not communicate with their QB, nor could they get strategy from coaches located in the press boxes, but the Patriots could. And unfortunately, the same no-rule applies to electronics on the sidelines. If the tablets were not working for the Patriots, but where for the Broncos, the Broncos could use them. I knew the Pats weren´t going to the Superbowl as soon as they failed to get the #1 seed in the AFC. They couldn´t cheat.
FWIW, $MSFT says it was a network failure and not an tablet failure. Whatever. In the meanwhile, I'm thinking an entry position might present itself as a good opportunity around $48 as their cloud strategy develops.
