Yeah, I'm baffled as to how the button placement made it past any kind of initial hands-on testing. It's hard to imagine a person using the pen on the screen for ten or fifteen minutes not encountering that problem.
To their credit, I've made similar mistakes in my career.
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.
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.
They are not supposed to be worse?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Automation should catch one class of problems but real world usage is necessary to catch a whole different type of issue.
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'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.