TRADE CHAT
Unbelievable bork
ASUS’S LATEST HIGH-SPEC TABLET PC hit my desk recently. Apart from its snazzy box, the most striking thing about the Vivobook 13 Slate OLED was a painfully obvious flaw. And that got me pondering how a fundamentally borked product makes it through the planning process and into customers’ hands. You’d think obvious flaws or configuration errors would be filtered out, these days. But that Asus tablet, well, let’s just say it has friends.
Jeremy Laird
We’ll come back to the Vivobook, but first I need to clarify the kind of fatal product flaws we’re dealing with. I’m not talking about unintentional errors and strategic missteps baked in years before a product hits the shelves. Obvious examples involve certain integrated circuits. Most agree AMD’s Bulldozer CPU architecture was a train wreck, but during the concept and design phase, it made sense.