The auto-translation by LLM on https://learn.microsoft.com/ is horrible. Because it has no idea what is explainer text and what part of the syntax of a command, programming language, class members, ... It translates reserved words that when taken at face value lead to errors. E.g. for https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/windows-hardware/drivers/d... you get /gerät-aktivieren for what should be /enable-device which must not be translated. For this reason I made a bookmark to switch to English:
javascript: (function() {
var url = window.location.href;
if (url.match(/de-de/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/de-de/gi, 'en-us');
} else if (url.match(/en-us/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/en-us/gi, 'de-de');
}
})();
To be fair, everyone is committing this crime: Amazon, Google, IBM... as a native spanish speaker, I have never wanted to read documentation in spanish: it is usually of lower quality, not up to date and uses translations of technical terms that make it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the literature (I'm looking at you, dragon book translation. Nobody says "canaletas" instead of "pipelines").
At least before the translations were done by profesionals, but now they are done with tech capable of hallucinating new stuff itself... I'm trusting translations even less than before.
It goes beyond that, a lot of content really shouldn't be translated to begin with.
I'm Spanish, yet I set my system to English because I know that at some point I'm going to look something up or I'm going to come upon some error, and it doesn't matter if the system is perfectly translated, the information I'm going to be able to find is different. There's a flexibility, a leeway for words that go from one language to another that distort terms and make finding information harder.
“Shell script” - “libreto de cápsula de sesión” :) (and mind you, this translation _was_ done by a supposed professional back in the 90s where it was basically the only option.
The only 3 languages worth writing documentation in are English Chinese and Japanese as far as I'm concerned. I only include Japanese because I've read some Japanese game console docs and they were done pretty well
Documentation for Visual Studio used to translate SQL Keywords... But most confusing is that Excel sometimes really uses localised words in formulas (if/then/...). Makes some sense for Excel-Users, but is very confusing when you don't expect this.
Are those actually localized, or is it just the displayed value?
In other words, would a French document not load properly if Excel is running in German?
I basically never use Office, and even though I admit my opinion of MS quality is as low as it could possibly be, I still kinda hope that they didn't stoop this low.
It's been a while so I can't really answer your question. But in a localized Excel version i can NOT use the english formula names. So after you googled a solution for your problem, you also need to find out the translations...
lol I really despise it when corporations try to be "too" smart/helpful and automatically translate their shit to the local language guessed from your IP, which is a major pain when traveling.
Google absolutely sucks ass at this: You can't set your default language without having a Google account which I refuse to sign in except on YouTube, and there's no easy way to change the language on some of their pages.
Even worse nowadays on YouTube itself: The auto-translated titles and machine dubbing, for which you can only pick one default language, which all other content will be forcibly translopped into. God forbid I speak more than one language and am comfortable consuming content in its original language.
It's insane that their don't have proper support for multilingual people. How hard is it to add a "if language is in [x,y,z], don't offer translation" check?
It's made even crazier by Google being such an international company. Don't they have a huge number of Indian developers? Why has not one of them been bothered enough by this to fix it?
YouTube is the epitome of "echo chambering": When you open YouTube from a hotel or Airbnb in other countries, god, you will see a flood of the most clickbaity videos from that country only, or whatever's been targeted for that IP/area watch the most, sometimes with lewd/suggestive thumbnails and just horrible
You know what's really dumb though? How they're an ads company and try to spy so much shit about you, but if you watch just 1-2 Russian videos then you'll get Russian ads for a while..
Anyone who determines language solely from IP is per se incompetent and needs to be completely blacklisted from the industry. The Accept-Language header exists for a reason.
Yeah! Why can't it just check the OPERATING SYSTEM LANGUAGE????
It's literally there!! My OS is in English, my browser is in English, don't fkn show me everything in Klingon just because I happen to be a prisoner on their ship!
Sometimes it's impossible even with an account. I can't search in English on my phone in Japan. If I go into options and change the language, the moment I click OK, it switches everything right back to Japanese. I know multiple colleagues who've had the same issue for years.
It's more annoying because browsers literally tell you what language they want.
Developers seem to have a canned response to this; largely that they don't trust users to have set their operating system language to the correct one... somehow
> In 2014, the company decided it could do without many of its testers. Mary Jo Foley reported that "a good chunk" were being laid off. Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
There were of course even more roles in the prehistory, but if we think the 2000s, I can count at least: RDB design and management; planning and specification work; interfacing with the customer; testing; merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack"; merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and, as such, sacrosanct.
Even early in its history, Microsoft was famous for merging these together into a single role: "developer". I remember reading (but can't find now) an article about how IBM has all these fancy roles like designer, architect, tester and the lowly programmer, and Microsoft's approach of integrating then is what allowed then to succeed over early competitors.
Remember Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, developers, developers" (in about 2000)? That's why.
I'm not saying I totally agree (although I think I do at least a bit), just that this is hardly new.
The “developers” mentioned in the monkey boy song were actually third-party developers. Ballmer wasn’t talking about Microsoft’s internal teams or nomenclature.
> An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
I think that depended (and still depends) a lot on the organization and the nature of the product.
I distinctly remember doing backend and some frontend development, requirements specification, database design, customer interfacing and even a bit of ops, all on the same job and with the same title in the 00's. That was in a small-to-medium company and my clients were on the small side so the projects might not have even had half a dozen people to begin with.
Larger organizations and more enterprisey projects would have had more specialized and limited roles: customer/specs people, possibly frontend and backend devs, DBAs, testing people, and those in charge of ops and environments. In my experience, that's still more or less true in enterprisey development today.
I think a part of the problem is that while new technologies have emerged and reduced the need to manually work with some older or underlying technologies, they haven't replaced previous skills.
Containers have reduced the amount of work needed to deal with deployments and environments but they haven't removed the need to know servers or operating systems. Cluster management can reduce the amount of manual work on setting up containers but it doesn't remove the need to know the underlying container engine. So now you need to know Linux servers and containers and k8s and whatnot just in order to manage a local backend development setup. At the same time, frameworks have made a lot of frontend work more manageable but they haven't made JavaScript or other underlying stuff disappear.
Thus the scope of what being a fully-versed full-stack developer entails has grown.
> My guess is that this change has its roots in the move from physical media delivery of software to internet delivery.
> My instinct is that there is some general principle that relates “friction” and “quality”, although I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe it.
I think the principle is: the greater the impact of a mistake, the more effort you'll put in (up front) to avoiding one. The more friction, the greater the impact.
When software was distributed on physical media and users had no internet you basically had only one (1) chance to get it right. Buggy software would be buggy effectively forever. So (for instance) video game companies had insane QA testing of every release. After QA, it'd get burned onto an expensive cartridge and it'd be done. People would pay the 2025 equivalent of $100+ for it, and they'd be unhappy (to say the least) if it didn't even work.
Once users had internet and patching became possible, that slipped a little, then more. Eventually managers realized you could even get away with shipping an incomplete, not working product. You'd just fix it later in a patch.
Now, with software being delivered over the internet, often as SAAS, everything is in a constant state of flux. Sure they can fix bugs (if they chose too), but as they fix bugs they're constantly introducing new ones (and maybe even removing features you use).
As someone who worked in the film industry for 15 years, this is why I get weary of anyone telling me a new tool “will just make things easier.“ All it does is raise the expectations of what I am supposed to do even if it leads to my role expanding every six months without compensation.
I don’t know a single specialized camera operator anymore. Literally every shooter I know is also a competent editor, which I do think is neat and makes us better Cam
Ops, but it also means people expect everyone to shoot and edit. Also capture excellent sound. Don’t forget the set has to look good. Make sure you’ve got a good Rolodex of locations ready to go as well.
We don’t need to keep every individual role just because it’s traditionally been there, but in a lot of industries we’ve clearly gone the wrong direction. And with something like QA/QC I could see that being a huge problem because the payoff is not obvious so upper management is going to want you to get something out the door no matter what state it is in.
I don't mind doing some of these tasks but if I could go my entire life without speaking to another customer, or even their engineering team, I would die happy
Microsoft does have a reputation for ungodly levels of backwards compatibility. You can still run the oldest Windows 95 programs today, still open the oldest Word documents, etc.
The issue with “quality” is that it's really subjective. As someone remembering the switch from Windows 98 (DOS-based) to Windows 2000 (NT-based), the boost in subjective quality was immense. But to someone who's already been on Linux for years, it would have looked like playing catch-up.
Last I checked, the only way to run a 16 bit game from my childhood is on Linux. Very easy. Odd to congratulate Microsoft on backwards compatibility when they are not doing better than Linux.
That's how computers and software work by default. It's an entirely different business philosophy. We can gain more market share but having a just works software environment for as many people as possible VS we can resell people the same software over and over again.
You're impressed that they managed to fill their diaper for so long without any leaks? Linux can read the oldest unix file, compile and run the oldest programs. Their "backwards compatability" is entirely a self created problem, they realized they can capture more value, in the short term, if users only see a binary so they have to implement a technically flawed solution.
Everything’s a trade off. Take something from 30 year ago written in a less popular language with a compiler that no one is maintaining, or that you might not even be able to find a copy of.
You can’t compile the source for modern systems, but the windows binary still runs.
Distributing the source also doesn’t solve the backwards compatibility problem even if it does ameliorate it. A compiler can’t paper over every compatibility problem.
Linux definitely has others to catch up. The only reason I switched to a Linux box is not how great it is for users, but 1) it is a dev box for system programming studies, 2) MSFT willingly trash Windows
> You can still run the oldest Windows 95 programs today, still open the oldest Word documents, etc.
No. You can't. Games requiring old DirectX versions will crash in subtle ways. A lot of programs are badly rendered on Windows 10 (for some reason Windows scales some UI elements but other not).
NT kernel is pretty solid and thr earlier NT kernel OS such as Win 2000 and XP are solid too. They definitely did not have the security features modern OSes have but security always evolves.
I mean NT is still way more advanced and modern than Linux will ever be, per definition. NT implements a lot of modern security architectures right into the kernel, while Linux inherently just lacks a lot of them.
But apart from NT I can't think of a lot more solid products that came out of Microsoft.
I think MS SQL Server is fine? Office is good if you ignore anything after 2013...VS debugger is good, but VS itself is bloated.
Meh, not many indeed. Anyway they adopted the beta to user and improve on the way mindset long time ago. Windows terminal was not very good back then but now it is OK.
I think there’s a difference between a product having problems and needing a restart once in a while and the product actively behaving in an undesirable way.
A pretty thin opinion piece, I was expecting more details. But there are a bunch of comments under that article which is probably juicier than the main text.
When I think about bad quality control Power Automate from their Power platform comes to mind. It could be quite a useful tool to automate several things and connect different systems with each other. Perhaps a high level serverless function with a visual editor you might say.
But it is a beta version at best for years. There are two version of editors that frequently break. You cannot overtax the system or all running instances morph into endless running tasks. Flows regularly break if you want to update something and the flow was created in a version of the editor no longer available.
You can also see their attempts to monetize this test version that needs a powerhouse of a machine to run its editor in a browser.
I like it for what it is if you are already (trapped?) in a Microsoft environment. There is some potential here and few consultants will tell you that it basically isn't production ready. But the product manager should be quite ashamed.
Also I heavily doubt it will stay free, so perhaps plan infrastructure accordingly.
The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
They seem to be very slowly losing to Apple on the laptop / productivity market and first signs of losing to Linux on gaming.
In the same way that their incompetence has been very slow to move the needle, once they lose the market it’s going to be almost impossible to get it back.
"first signs" for sure; I think / suspect the next big step for Valve would be to release a desktop gaming system. If it has a browser and "native" Discord it has the potential to take a chunk off the PC gaming market.
Ordinary folks are going more and more chromebooks these days, those are the "low cost laptops" that are on the shelves at your local bestbuy/curry's/elgiganten etc;
For everything more than that: the Macbook Air is equivalent or cheaper.
People seem to continue the lie that Apple hardware is more expensive, yet I just closed a deal on a business thinkpad (T14s Gen6) which was double the price and 2/3rds as performant, because we're a Windows shop and we don't buy Apple. Forgive my annoyance here but someone told me that "at least we don't buy expensive Macs" after we signed the invoice and it really got under my skin because it's legitimately half the price for more power. Completely blinded by ignorance.
Upgrades might be expensive, sure, but anything of any quality has always been like-for-like with Apple being cheaper on the low-spec end.
The consumer grade market where Windows used to dominate is having their lunch totally stolen by Chromebooks and Android Tablets. (More-so by Tablets I would argue).
Not on European markets, Chromebooks only leave the likes of Media Market after endless promotions trying to get rid of them.
We don't lie, we don't live in US, with US salaries, some European countries still get 800 euros as average salary, not to mention all the other even more poorer regions around the globe.
Although the same is true in the UK. So which Europe are we talking about?
Kids get Chromebooks in school, most people seem to be content with a tablet. I have a hard time finding anyone who has a laptop <8 years old now (that isn't a company laptop).
The Europe northic folks enjoy their vacations, being served by plenty of folks, in the tourism industry, while dreaming to earn more than 1000 euros a month without having to live with their parents, or being forced to emigrate.
I find it ironic that you’re talking about the cost of things, and that somehow the laptop with the premium operating system that costs money and requires more expensive hardware due to being bloated is somehow more inexpensive in your country than a Chromebook or a tablet.
Chromebooks and tablets are mostly useless as general computing devices.
Chromebooks only got a market chance thanks to US school system, and tablets, naturally Android ones that we're talking about here, are mostly consuming devices.
Hence why wealthy folks get Apple, they aren't getting Chromebooks and tablets either, when money is no concern.
By the way, you can buy new PC hardware below one month salary, that will get extended as long as possible.
what do you think people are doing with their computers that they cannot do with a tablet or Chromebook?
Like buddy, I’m not trying to argue with you here - clearly we live in different societies with different purchasing demographics. General computing devices for me and for you are completely different things than they would be for my mother or anyone else in the general population.
For the overwhelming majority of people, they may own a computer to file taxes to watch content and to play non-intensive little games (not the AAA spectacle the most gamers player).
They do not need a compiler, they usually do not need Microsoft Word, and they do not need to install random executables from the Internet.
What do you think they need to do that cannot be served by a tablet?
Schools are largely using chromos and chromebooks today (in my understanding across the countries where I have seen students in the last 8 years; so: Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and The UK).
Since having access to a web browser is significantly easier than Microsoft.
Actually, it was the same playbook Microsoft had in the 90s.
I bought a Lenovo AMD laptop a year or two back with 32GB RAM & 1TB HDD for around £650. The upgrade cost alone for that RAM/storage is £600 for a macbook air.
I don't think Linux will ever fully take over gaming regardless of effort unless competitive multiplayer game companies decide to give up on assuming total control over your system in order to make cheaters undetectable to the average gamer*.
It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".
But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.
* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.
A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
The only person who would say otherwise has clearly never written anything on that level on Windows. It's not just uneasy: it's Sisyphean. The code-signing signature you need alone is an order of magnitude more difficult to obtain than the development burden of an appropriately defensive kernel module.
We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
> A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.
> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.
> Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
There's not much Kernel Level malware singed in Windows (drivers have more scrutiny for whatever that's worth). Regardless, the point is that companies using KLA rely on the relative difficulty of circumventing protections implemented in a signed kernel, running signed drivers, on a machine where there is some chain of trust.
You don't need to take my word for it, Tim Sweeney said it himself (using dirty innuendos and weasel words, but anyway). EAC supports Linux, but doesn't utilise KLA (for many reasons), and doesn't make the same claims about protection as it does on Windows.
Depends who pushes it and how - Steam (Valve) have the clout to if not to "take over gaming" at least turn it into a duopoly on the desktop/laptop from an OS point (from a game client point of view there is already Steam.....and way....over here everyone else).
I don't think anyone else does.
There isn't any technical reasons preventing it, PS5's are based on a heavily modified BSD - it requires a single vendor to standardise and support the platform with enough resources/commitment to do it properly.
Sure valve can make Gamedroid a reality, but Valve seems to be on the side of not using KLA themselves.
And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.
The reasons are:
* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible).
* Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to.
* Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.
Perhaps not, but Linux desktop marketshare doubled in 2024. It is still minuscule, but it doesn't take much for a movement like this to take off. Microsoft continues to make Windows 11 impossible to install for the average user up to and including not all that rare scenarios where it cannot be installed at all.
Conversely, 15 minutes to install, fully patched, and ready to go Linux distro is a hugely attractive alternative to Windows. There are 3 viable gaming distros, and the underlying tech continues to evolve. It is already invisible to most games.
Yeah most games, except the ones which rely on KLA.
There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.
Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.
More than anything, once people realize that they can be fine without MS because 5-10% of the non-Apple market has done so (and the alternatives has figured out the kinks with the mass influx of users) it could move from a trickle to an avalanche.
The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
I think they already know and have been trying not to lose to Apple for a long time, as evidenced by their awkward attempts to embrace “good design” and “cool”.
Microsoft’s value is Excel+ Azure. And as long as they can sell Excel, they can sell a bunch of the other stuff at a cost so low that leaders have trouble saying no to janky Teams and other software.
And the Office package is a very attractive offering. $36 / user / month and they get managed emails, chat, office, SSO, cloud storage, Windows, etc - basically everything that used to be the domain of a sysadmin.
The competitors are all fragmented; Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack, Teams or Discord and doesn't do hardware management as far as I'm aware unless you use Chromebooks.
> Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack
Google is up to a dozen versions of chat, the current incarnation is called Google Meet which includes a video akak Zoom type service as well as a Slack-type chat service.
lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).
Well, with the windows 10 support ending, it is different now. To some extent staying on windows requires more effort than switching, which is an interesting place to be. I have "switched" people to macos or linux that before would not even bother and hear such stories everywhere. The linux ecosystem has matured and windows is no longer the easy/bugfree experience that was. Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago, linux worked out of the box while for windows I had to go troubleshooting mode and find/download/install drivers manually. 10-15 years ago or so it was always the opposite.
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
I can’t imagine going back to a time where I couldn’t just throw an excel file or ppt in a discussion and get collaborative editing straight away.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
Visio was built to be acquired by Microsoft. It was the best office family app pre-acquisition. Every subsequent release is worse than the one before it.
The other day I clicked "share" on a PowerPoint presentation saved in OneDrive, and it reverted to a version several hours old, losing that work. This is a typical experience using any of the Office products. Copilot is not "good at minutes and transcription" by any stretch of the imagination. It cannot understand a _simple_ word I say, with an RP-British accent, let alone many of the acronyms and terms used in industry.
Fortunately we have already switched away from Teams to Slack for chat, but since the best way to win is not to play, I just write text in vim and presentations in Keynote. Fortunately I have approximately no need for spreadsheets that aren't simple lists, though that appears to be the lock-in.
I'd rather use literally anything else. Google's stuff is probably best, but Quip was also fine.
The only thing I really like about Teams is that the AI-optimized audio codec is the only video call audio that doesn’t cause some people’s voices to become physically painful to listen to.
Even loading a command prompt or the calculator takes more than 3 seconds on Windows 11 so maybe they've just lowered the bar so much it passes internal testing.
I happen to use Windows on both personal and work laptop. Some of the bugs I see exist across Home and Enterprise version. Sleep remains a nightmare on Windows, and yes across laptops made by different manufacturers. I have created tickets and this, and IT doesn't have a solution.
I have decided that my next personal laptop definitely won't run Windows, and if I am allowed to ask for a Mac machine at work in the future, I'll jump at that opportunity.
That would mean two fewer Windows licenses and less usage of related products (good riddance, Edge!). And I am sure I am not the only one who is thinking about all this.
But of course I have no idea if that matters in the grand scheme of things -- after all, many people tolerate these bugs just like they tolerate all the ads by Microsoft, Google, Meta etc.
Every platform has some hardware that has issues with sleeping. I've had numerous Linux machines that entirely fail to resume often, this current MacBook I'm on fails to properly reconnect things on USB hubs after a resume, etc. The grass is always greener.
Try sleep study on your current machine. I had an issue with one machine constantly waking from sleep. Lots of other tools couldn't clue me into what was going on and why the system was actually waking. Sleep study pointed exactly to the device causing problems, disabling it from waking the system solved my sleep problems on that device.
As one MS Director put it out of frustration: "We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers. That's it."
More precisely: He said MSlers get paid by results, achieved Business Value. Testers exist and are called "End Users". Testing is mandatory and part of the core philosophy - they just must do it differently.
Reason: Fear of missing out if moving to slow.
I reminisce the times, where you put in a CD without internet connection. Actual Office is a mess. Thousands of half finished apps, subject to be cancelled anytime. Windows XP's UI was dubbed "glossy" - some of Office's apps UIs are LSD trips for kids. This is ridiculous. Nothing to work with and in no way usable for customer presentations.
That's a good point. I think it would be bearable if they actually had a good feedback platform & interact with their users. Feedback Hub is just terrible: slow, featureless & built on top of their buggiest ui platform.
Crowdsource it. (Microsoft could) start a website called WeHeardYouLetsFixTeams.com where users submit bug reports for Teams out in public, other people vote on how much each bug is a pain point for them, the Teams,
er team commits to fixing the top 5 each quarter. Do a whole media circus around it. Do a sales push to get people off Slack/Zulip/Discord/Telegram/Meet/etc. Get some industry accolades for listening to your users.
As a network engineer I regularly participate and mediate 'vendor support shootouts' between vendors like cisco, juniper, arista, verizon, at&t, and, microsoft - all often amongst each other. It is at times maddeningly frustrating.
Microsoft by far and away is the least responsive in nearly all cases. In one case the project involved thousands of SQL servers and MS was 100% unresponsive - moreover this was not a small customer, but one of microsoft's largest corporate customers. Still nothing but silence. So out with MS for that project. The yearly license fees were well into six figures. Even though MS has a track record of unresponsiveness, the silence was surprising and noteworthy. Why bet money on a horse that doesn't show up.
Both Microsoft and Apple software quality has go down recently. What is going on. Is it the AI-produced code? It can't be that...
I don't know how are things in Google land; their apps and websites are just-OK; however GMail seems quite stagnant - yeah they slapped LLM on it, cool; but other than that... they added Chat? few years ago? But at least Google's stuff mostly works, even when it's boring.
There was a total revamp to GMail called "Inbox" that Google was working on for a while, but it got deprecated and cancelled before it was released. From what I heard, they were testing it internally and most people liked it. It just was more search focused so the backend costs were more than they thought they could bear and it was scrapped.
I loved Inbox, it was way better at organizing than gmail. In true google fashion, as soon as people started to like it and use it, they unceremoniously killed it.
Interested, would you want gmail to do anything additional? Aside from a modernised look every now and then, I can't see that there's many additional features you might give an email client?
If you have the resources of Google available to you, I'd think something could be done to make email as a whole less bad. I get so many emails that inbox zero is NOT at all realistic. You could argue that's not Google's responsibility, and you'd be right, but it means I use Gmail less, which is at odds with me using it more and Google getting more of my attention.
Not really a fair comparison since this was probably alpha-quality software, and the build they used was very likely build for that specific demonstration (that ok, went badly). Like the (in)famous first iPhone presentation where Steve Jobs had multiple iPhones and needed to exactly time when to change between them otherwise they would crash.
If you are going to live-demo your latest software to the world, you better make sure that the very limited functionality you are going to showcase actually works. Especially since you get to choose the interaction, and know all the conditions and hardware beforehand.
Patches have been a mess the last couple years. Makes me think someone or a group of people either quit, were fired, or got pulled into the ai side of the business. The mistakes being made are that of junior programmers without a proper lead or review and testing team. That plus removal of features and addition of too much telemetry into the os and office products.
The high number of bugs in Windows patches has little to do with AI. As The Register reported, the root cause is Microsoft's mass layoff of dedicated QA staff and its switch from a waterfall to an agile software development methodology in 2014.
My guess: they vibe-coded the integrations between the new and old M365 components. Baffling lack of cross-component integration, all apparent only when you actually try to use it as intended.
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
The quality of Office is very rapidly declining; it seems that the entire team has moved to forcing AI into every feature instead of fixing any issues. The web version is barely usable (esp compared to Google's versions) and the desktop is quickly getting worse seemingly every day.
I have not used Azure for a few years now; back when I did use it, it seemed pretty good.
That applies to all teams not only Office, even Aspire now has AI on the dashboard, and they proudly made use of AI building the new Aspire CLI experience.
Not just that, but even their game studios. Take for example Starfield. Lots of hype, massive letdown. I'm one of many massive Bethesda fans. Starfield absolutely could have had so much more, but HN knows what happens with software projects. Deadlines aren't met, marketing / business depts start signaling that we need it out the door yesterday, and a bunch of things get cut. I have seen on reddit loads of comments about a ton of content being cut out of Starfield, which is ridiculous, Bethesda games are always content rich.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
I have been moderately interested in Starfield and anticipated it would follow the pattern of other Bethesda endeavours. Which is to say it takes a while post-release for they and their mod community to get it to a state I am at all interested.
No, its bad. Genuinely bad. This was the first Bethesda game I actually found bugs on day 1 for. I've played all their other games on launch and its never been this bad for me. I usually rarely spot bugs, I don't know if I just have the right hardware or what, but it just never happens to me.
The other problem is they did a major update, which broke a ton of mods. Then with their own mod store, they made it so only paid mods are considered "savefile safe" for enabling of achievements, which means every other mod I find that isn't a paid mod has a descriptiong along the lines of "I AM NO LONGER MAINTAINING THIS DUE TO BETHESDA WANTING TO PAYWALL SIMPLE FREE MODS JUST TO LET YOU SAVE WITHOUT ACHIEVEMENTS" or something like that, I've seen a few completely different mod authors just abandone ship completely.
This is probably their worst goof ever. I'm genuinely angered enough that if the next Elder Scrolls flops I may have to write off one of my all-time favorite game development studios.
I love Bethesda, but they're falling off real hard, and the only difference that could be affecting that is Microsoft in my eyes.
Just think. Starfield could have been a Game of the Year game. It was not.
It also only has one single DLC.
I love the game, its just not looking like it will ever meet its potential. I read on reddit a commend that I agree with, the only thing that could save Starfield now is a "Directors Cut" release.
Skyrim on day one came out with a game breaking bug in the main quest, and it crashed a lot too. Starfield's problem is that it's a very boring procgen hell.
Bethesda was notorious for releasing products riddled with bugs long before they got acquired by Microsoft. Morrowind has multiple fan patches, so does Oblivion. Fallout 4 used to crash a lot. I don’t think Microsoft as anything to do with their current sorry state.
Riddled with bugs is frankly expected for Bethesda.
Starfield's main problem was the shallow content which is very unlike Bethesda. Skyrim, for all its faults and issues, had so much to discover. As did the previous entries in the series. As did Fallout.
I don’t know. I stopped playing Elder Scrolls games at Oblivion which was significantly more shallow than Morrowind, itself less ambitious than Daggerfall. On the Fallout side, NV was great but not made by Bethesda and 4 is pretty much just a bad FPS with boring paddings in between the shooting.
I think the constant content downgrade has been going on for a long time.
My view is likely very tinted. Skyrim was my first Bethesda game and while I did the play the Oblivian remaster, I never touched Daggerfall.
From my view, assuming the remaster isn't too massively different content wise, the change was more in certain mechanics from Oblivion to Skyrim. Lore and story wise both games have incredible depth.
While I did enjoy Starfield, if found it to be flat. They stretched the resources too thin. Much of the content was too repetitive. It felt like a kids game. Neon, the supposed crime den riddled with drugs and gangs, may as well have been a kids amusement park.
Ultimately, the fact that Starfield came out over a decade later but offered so much less was a let down. Never mind that the game didn't really improve on the underlying mechanics. Modders solved a lot of loading screens in Skyrim decades ago, but Starfield is full of them. It felt dated at release already.
> Lore and story wise [Oblivion and Skyrim] have incredible depth.
As you said, you never played Daggerfall or Morrowind. Just about all of the lore in Oblivion and Skyrim comes from Daggerfall, Redguard, and Morrowind.
As for the stories... sorry, but you're on your own there. Oblivion's was okay, but Skyrim's story was a trainwreck from beginning to end. Of all the parts of Bethesda games, it is the character + story writing that has suffered the most over the years.
Bethesda has always been known for its abysmal lack of care about quality. Morrowind (2002) is riddled with bugs, a lot of them game breaking. They're all listed on the wiki, each article having several of them, with steps to resolve them using console commands (which you are expected to use if you want to finish the game).
Obviously, but I was responding to OP's claim that Bethesda's games took a dip in the quality department, by underlining that they were always infamous for putting out rushed games riddled with bugs.
My recent expierience:
2023: install windows on new machine. Login to microsoft account. Use computer.
2025: install windows on new machine. Try to log in to microsoft account. Cant. Use usb key. I dont have one. Use authenticator. Message is not show in authenticator. Use password. Wrong password (it was 100% the correct one) give up and use offline account. New try to log in: nothing works. In the end i had to reset my password.
I am building a new rig after years of solely using a MacBook, and reading all these horror stories of windows 10/11 I am just gonna go with Ubuntu. I may dual boot with windows but only if really needed.
Maybe not to install, but to chose what to install. Saying "install Debian instead of Ubuntu" is not a complete answer, because you have to select a window manager as well. If you go "pure" Debian, what should you then select? GNOME, KDE, cinnamon, xfce, Mate...?
It's an easier path to go with Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Less overwhelming choices when you just want to get started. Linux Mint is good for people used to Windows as it feels familiar. If you still want to go "pure" Debian you can use LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
Just go with the XFCE ISO and say you want to have non-free stuff, choose your locale and say yes to the partition plan, and you're done in like twenty minutes unless your storage is very slow.
Thanks. Well, in that case I would for sure select KDE Plasma over XFCE as it feels more modern from a design point of view and for someone coming from Windows or MacOS they would probably feel more at home.
It's not just their flagship products. It extends to nearly _everything_ they release.
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Poor quality, user-hostile experiences are a very common consequence of entrenched monopolies.
So many companies buy Microsoft regardless of the quality of the actual products. Given that context, why would directors invest in an expensive, invisible effort like controlling quality, when they could spend those resources on product launches that are naturally legible to upper management?
MSFT lays the burden of QC to its users. This is intended and they mean the end product to be shitty at the beginning and gradually improve every sprint/release. That's the world now.
I started to notice this when I tried out Power BI back in 2018. Back then the software is barely useable by developers. The code editor is barebone and overall the software is bloat and slow. But it has improved a lot since then. We can definitely argue that at least some of the nitty gritties should be fixed even before the earlier releases, but I guess the culture is already "Move fast, get back when you fall" -- after all it is the users who fall anyway.
I wonder how old timers such as Raymond Chen or David Cutler view this phenomenon. David Cutler is said to be very stringent on the quality of the kernel at least.
Recently the UK bought some old laptops with Win10. I think they handed over to Microsoft +300 million pounds (or within that sum; I don't know how much was attributed to the actual laptops).
I think when you get these deals, you get rich, but you are no longer having any real incentive to do quality control. So the whole system breaks down. They do minimum quality control. Plus, a lot of what Microsoft seems to be doing nowadays is to spy on people. The recall anti-feature kind of gave this away, but before that there was "trusted computing", which I can understand may make sense for some organisations, but for solo users? Why am I being tagged and monitored suddenly? Why is a corporation claiming this is about "trust"? I don't trust that corporation. (I use Linux anyway, but still; one computer has Win10 right now, which I use mostly for testing stuff.)
azure seems quite shitty too. I only use it for having GPT models which is a corp requirement. For 1 hour total I spent on azure.com in past weeks, besides how slow it usually is, I ran into two issues:
- models sometimes got deployed to an unwanted instance, likely because some API is slow and front end state was not well maintained, so user clicking Next too soon will end up screw up the data being submitted
- one of the models (5-mini) deployment took very long and failed, it apparently ended up in a bad and invisible state, and future models can't be deployed any more on that instance. I retried today, same thing, gave up and created a new instance/
Azure AI is supposed to be an area MS making all the bets which I assume should have high quality, but apart from frequent update, it's same low quality as MS Teams.
Linux manages just fine without a QC department. However, it also only takes responsibility for the "kernel". Various components around the kernel can be broken, and indeed some filesystems can cause file loss, but users full-well know of those flaws because of the transparent nature of Linux development.
Perhaps a lack of transparency and too many responsibilities under one product (something Microsoft loves to do) is the problem, not the lack of an additional process layer.
Quality control for everything sucks now. AI has sucked up the smart developers. iOS 26 has bugs that would have caused Steve Jobs to throw desk ornaments at people.
It's way too early in the AI code lifecycle to see its full effects, especially for a codebase the size of Windows. It's going to take a decade for the full joy of this to manifest.
You can add your key to most UEFI system and don't require shim to have it to boot (or disable Secure Boot). You don't require a MS signed bootloader if you don't want to.
It will get worse, the combined strike of HTML-based "native" UIs, outsourcing and vibe-coding will be too much for any remaining original devs to defend against.
You are complaining that developers can't keep up with vibe coded features. The solution might actually be more AI.
There's an opportunity to automate some of the QA traditionally done manually. I tried this last week on our main app (not some toy thing):
(turn on agent mode in chat gpt)
"Hey put on your QA hat and test <url> with <user> and password. Give me detailed feedback on UX, bugs, etc."
I was being lazy here with my prompting. But it works shockingly well on anything browser based. It will start using whatever you point it at and do things that normal users might do. Obviously, you can give it more detailed guidelines on what to test, what to ensure is working, etc.
I got a pretty detailed report back and most of it was valid/constructive. I'm planning to do more of this. It beats developers doing QA (they are too biased usually and seem reluctant to do it) and we don't have any dedicated QA people. Manual QA can be very expensive. I don't think the need for that totally goes away, but you should probably focus that on the most valuable/hardest things to test.
In any case, it's pretty cool to watch Chat GPT explore a UI and attempting to use features. It's very thorough and it seems to figure out workarounds for UX issues as well when things don't work as expected. This is exactly the kind of stuff that developers testing their own UIs are blind to. They know where to click and don't even think about it.
A related issue is actually updating documentation and marketing material with up-to date screen captures and screenshots. Annoyingly, Chat GPT doesn't allow me to save the videos it takes of the AI using the browser. But that stuff could actually be documentation gold. Doing this manually is very tedious.
AI is very good for mirroring the culture around it. You can use it for all kinds of things, including QA, but you still need a culture where QA and UX matter.
MS doesn't have that. It's a B2B marketing company with a rapidly decreasing developer headcount glued to the back, far away from daylight.
Unfortunately the only thing about MS that doesn't suck is their sales prowess. Delivery and quality are optional, but getting companies to use their stack is not.
This is what so many people miss. Its the same with palantir, salesforce, oracle etc. These companies are masters of contract procurement. It doens't matter if the product is dogshit. It doesn't matter if the engineers are good or bad. It doens't matter if the CEO does a sieg hail, none of that matters. Even if they only sold literal empty boxes, they would still be able to find some corrupt fuck willing to buy 500 million of them for a kickback. The product is completely irrelevant, because the real "product" these companies offer is the ability to farm connections with the wealthy and powerful
Hot take but I seriously think both Agile/Scrum and "make a single dev do a ton of things that wouldn't necessarily count as software development" (like RDB design and management) is the direct cause of all of these problems. It is my opinion that Agile/scrum (or, at least, the "agile"/"scrum" that corporations understand) institutionalized the "move fast, break things, consolidate everything into as few positions as possible" mindset, in the name of things like "reducing expenditures" and "ship things really fast and damn the consequences". That includes, oh, I dunno, dumping QA/QC and putting all of that on the end-users. Maybe the real Agile might not do this, but I can't say because, from what I know, very few, if any, corporations actually use the real Agile at all, and instead repurpose the word to mean a completely different system.
While I largely agree, I do think a more significant portion of the problems are caused by Nadella's claims of 30% ML-generated code. If true (as a peddler of ML, there are many reasons for him not to be truthful) the is a rather strong inverse correlation of quality with these announcements and layoffs.
Furthermore, with modern MBAs at the helm, the concern is only pumping figures for the next quarter - five years be damned.
It's also completely possible to do agile with QA. One place I worked had 1 QA per 3 devs, and they were able to maintain a single (2 week) sprint behind cadence.
Scrum was always how Agile was sold to behemoths. It necessarily makes several compromises that deeply undermine it.
agile is a mixed bag with some quite good ideas and practices, but imo the main selling point for industry is that it allows complete dillution of compromise and responsibility, and it shows. this is why companies have bought en masse into the snakeoil and imo that's the main reason for quality problems: follow these rituals (without any regard to the core concepts behind them) and everything will be fine, and if it doesn't it was not our fault, "change is inevitable and shit happens".
also, qa is simply not optional, and agile actually stresses that pretty strongly.
This change did not happen in 2014. It happened about 14 years earlier, when they began to adopt their so-called “engineering culture” that really meant “testers shut up.” It then happened at Google in the early oughts.
Testers have been under attack in big tech since 1989, within my own experience. Maybe before that, as well.
It's getting out of control. Just yesterday, I was turning on remote desktop on Windows 11. It showed as enabled, with a label indicating that it was listening on port 3389, but it wasn't accessible from a remote host. I checked on Windows, and it turned out it wasn't actually listening on the RDP port at all. I tried toggling it off and on again, still nothing. Only a reboot helped.
A few weeks ago, a family member had Notepad stop working suddenly, showing an error saying it couldn't execute the binary or something similar. Reinstalling it from the Microsoft store or even downloading other official versions didn't help, they had to restore Windows from a backup.
The auto-translation by LLM on https://learn.microsoft.com/ is horrible. Because it has no idea what is explainer text and what part of the syntax of a command, programming language, class members, ... It translates reserved words that when taken at face value lead to errors. E.g. for https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/windows-hardware/drivers/d... you get /gerät-aktivieren for what should be /enable-device which must not be translated. For this reason I made a bookmark to switch to English:
To be fair, everyone is committing this crime: Amazon, Google, IBM... as a native spanish speaker, I have never wanted to read documentation in spanish: it is usually of lower quality, not up to date and uses translations of technical terms that make it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the literature (I'm looking at you, dragon book translation. Nobody says "canaletas" instead of "pipelines").
At least before the translations were done by profesionals, but now they are done with tech capable of hallucinating new stuff itself... I'm trusting translations even less than before.
Not everyone, just American companies. When people don't value something (like foreign languages) they dump the job to the AI.
It goes beyond that, a lot of content really shouldn't be translated to begin with.
I'm Spanish, yet I set my system to English because I know that at some point I'm going to look something up or I'm going to come upon some error, and it doesn't matter if the system is perfectly translated, the information I'm going to be able to find is different. There's a flexibility, a leeway for words that go from one language to another that distort terms and make finding information harder.
“Shell script” - “libreto de cápsula de sesión” :) (and mind you, this translation _was_ done by a supposed professional back in the 90s where it was basically the only option.
The only 3 languages worth writing documentation in are English Chinese and Japanese as far as I'm concerned. I only include Japanese because I've read some Japanese game console docs and they were done pretty well
I would add Spanish to that list. It's the 2nd most popular native language in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
Documentation for Visual Studio used to translate SQL Keywords... But most confusing is that Excel sometimes really uses localised words in formulas (if/then/...). Makes some sense for Excel-Users, but is very confusing when you don't expect this.
Are those actually localized, or is it just the displayed value?
In other words, would a French document not load properly if Excel is running in German?
I basically never use Office, and even though I admit my opinion of MS quality is as low as it could possibly be, I still kinda hope that they didn't stoop this low.
It's been a while so I can't really answer your question. But in a localized Excel version i can NOT use the english formula names. So after you googled a solution for your problem, you also need to find out the translations...
In German, the documentation site often mentions "Microsoft Kante". Weird to read...
The translation quality was much worse during the Windows Translator era.
lol I really despise it when corporations try to be "too" smart/helpful and automatically translate their shit to the local language guessed from your IP, which is a major pain when traveling.
Google absolutely sucks ass at this: You can't set your default language without having a Google account which I refuse to sign in except on YouTube, and there's no easy way to change the language on some of their pages.
Even worse nowadays on YouTube itself: The auto-translated titles and machine dubbing, for which you can only pick one default language, which all other content will be forcibly translopped into. God forbid I speak more than one language and am comfortable consuming content in its original language.
It's insane that their don't have proper support for multilingual people. How hard is it to add a "if language is in [x,y,z], don't offer translation" check?
It's made even crazier by Google being such an international company. Don't they have a huge number of Indian developers? Why has not one of them been bothered enough by this to fix it?
Translation thiefdoms, they are usually part of the local ledia gatekeeping infrastructure
In my case, I browse YouTube in English, but my Google account has both Polish and English enabled.
Polish video titles get translated to English, and English video titles get translated to Polish.
Even better, somebody probably got a promotion out of ruining that, because they made the amount of content "available" in other languages go up
Translop, what an apt term! Thanks)
> Even worse nowadays on YouTube itself
YouTube is the epitome of "echo chambering": When you open YouTube from a hotel or Airbnb in other countries, god, you will see a flood of the most clickbaity videos from that country only, or whatever's been targeted for that IP/area watch the most, sometimes with lewd/suggestive thumbnails and just horrible
You know what's really dumb though? How they're an ads company and try to spy so much shit about you, but if you watch just 1-2 Russian videos then you'll get Russian ads for a while..
Anyone who determines language solely from IP is per se incompetent and needs to be completely blacklisted from the industry. The Accept-Language header exists for a reason.
Yeah! Why can't it just check the OPERATING SYSTEM LANGUAGE????
It's literally there!! My OS is in English, my browser is in English, don't fkn show me everything in Klingon just because I happen to be a prisoner on their ship!
Sometimes it's impossible even with an account. I can't search in English on my phone in Japan. If I go into options and change the language, the moment I click OK, it switches everything right back to Japanese. I know multiple colleagues who've had the same issue for years.
Did you try No Country Redirect?
http://www.google.com/ncr
It doesn't work for some/many things, like account sign-in screens, and I think the last time I tried, Google Files/Drive either
> set your default language without Google account
You can: https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1
Conveniently this URL supports th hl param https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/xml_results... It explicitly sets the language, so in case you switched to a language you don't understand, visit this English link: https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1&hl=en Ofc you can also delete cookies.
Interestingly not all available languages change the UI, e.g. 'Èdè Yorùbá (jorubera)' does nothing. The dropdown has 144 options, but the official interface language list only 74: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/xml_results...
Yes, I hate this.
It's more annoying because browsers literally tell you what language they want.
Developers seem to have a canned response to this; largely that they don't trust users to have set their operating system language to the correct one... somehow
https://dijit.svbtle.com/trusting-the-user-they-know-what-la...
> In 2014, the company decided it could do without many of its testers. Mary Jo Foley reported that "a good chunk" were being laid off. Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
There were of course even more roles in the prehistory, but if we think the 2000s, I can count at least: RDB design and management; planning and specification work; interfacing with the customer; testing; merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack"; merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and, as such, sacrosanct.
Even early in its history, Microsoft was famous for merging these together into a single role: "developer". I remember reading (but can't find now) an article about how IBM has all these fancy roles like designer, architect, tester and the lowly programmer, and Microsoft's approach of integrating then is what allowed then to succeed over early competitors.
Remember Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, developers, developers" (in about 2000)? That's why.
I'm not saying I totally agree (although I think I do at least a bit), just that this is hardly new.
The “developers” mentioned in the monkey boy song were actually third-party developers. Ballmer wasn’t talking about Microsoft’s internal teams or nomenclature.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/the-real-story-behi...
Try the Developers remix. Total ear worm.
https://youtu.be/ug4c2mqlE_0?si=qtqu7tOC7Xpw67aN
Exactly the clip I meant! :-)
I see your remix and raise you : get on your feet! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=edN4o8F9_P4
> Even early in its history, Microsoft was famous for merging these together into a single role: "developer".
No. Microsoft was famous for having a role called Software Development Engineer in Test.
> Remember Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, developers, developers" (in about 2000)? That's why.
No. Ballmer's chant was about 3rd party developers.
> An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
I think that depended (and still depends) a lot on the organization and the nature of the product.
I distinctly remember doing backend and some frontend development, requirements specification, database design, customer interfacing and even a bit of ops, all on the same job and with the same title in the 00's. That was in a small-to-medium company and my clients were on the small side so the projects might not have even had half a dozen people to begin with.
Larger organizations and more enterprisey projects would have had more specialized and limited roles: customer/specs people, possibly frontend and backend devs, DBAs, testing people, and those in charge of ops and environments. In my experience, that's still more or less true in enterprisey development today.
I think a part of the problem is that while new technologies have emerged and reduced the need to manually work with some older or underlying technologies, they haven't replaced previous skills.
Containers have reduced the amount of work needed to deal with deployments and environments but they haven't removed the need to know servers or operating systems. Cluster management can reduce the amount of manual work on setting up containers but it doesn't remove the need to know the underlying container engine. So now you need to know Linux servers and containers and k8s and whatnot just in order to manage a local backend development setup. At the same time, frameworks have made a lot of frontend work more manageable but they haven't made JavaScript or other underlying stuff disappear.
Thus the scope of what being a fully-versed full-stack developer entails has grown.
My guess is that this change has its roots in the move from physical media delivery of software to internet delivery.
My instinct is that there is some general principle that relates “friction” and “quality”, although I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe it.
I.e. where there is a barrier to entry, quality of results tends to improve.
I also see this in ease of publishing to social media, bias of “old music is better” (time has sorted wheat from chaff) and so on.
Perhaps there’s a well known description of this phenomenon somewhere already…
> My guess is that this change has its roots in the move from physical media delivery of software to internet delivery.
> My instinct is that there is some general principle that relates “friction” and “quality”, although I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe it.
I think the principle is: the greater the impact of a mistake, the more effort you'll put in (up front) to avoiding one. The more friction, the greater the impact.
When software was distributed on physical media and users had no internet you basically had only one (1) chance to get it right. Buggy software would be buggy effectively forever. So (for instance) video game companies had insane QA testing of every release. After QA, it'd get burned onto an expensive cartridge and it'd be done. People would pay the 2025 equivalent of $100+ for it, and they'd be unhappy (to say the least) if it didn't even work.
Once users had internet and patching became possible, that slipped a little, then more. Eventually managers realized you could even get away with shipping an incomplete, not working product. You'd just fix it later in a patch.
Now, with software being delivered over the internet, often as SAAS, everything is in a constant state of flux. Sure they can fix bugs (if they chose too), but as they fix bugs they're constantly introducing new ones (and maybe even removing features you use).
Like a reverse Henry Ford (assembly line)
As someone who worked in the film industry for 15 years, this is why I get weary of anyone telling me a new tool “will just make things easier.“ All it does is raise the expectations of what I am supposed to do even if it leads to my role expanding every six months without compensation.
I don’t know a single specialized camera operator anymore. Literally every shooter I know is also a competent editor, which I do think is neat and makes us better Cam Ops, but it also means people expect everyone to shoot and edit. Also capture excellent sound. Don’t forget the set has to look good. Make sure you’ve got a good Rolodex of locations ready to go as well.
We don’t need to keep every individual role just because it’s traditionally been there, but in a lot of industries we’ve clearly gone the wrong direction. And with something like QA/QC I could see that being a huge problem because the payoff is not obvious so upper management is going to want you to get something out the door no matter what state it is in.
I don't mind doing some of these tasks but if I could go my entire life without speaking to another customer, or even their engineering team, I would die happy
> At one point, Microsoft's QC was legendary
I have been Microsoft-adjacent for 30 years, and at no point in that time have I been aware of Microsoft having a reputation for "quality".
Microsoft does have a reputation for ungodly levels of backwards compatibility. You can still run the oldest Windows 95 programs today, still open the oldest Word documents, etc.
The issue with “quality” is that it's really subjective. As someone remembering the switch from Windows 98 (DOS-based) to Windows 2000 (NT-based), the boost in subjective quality was immense. But to someone who's already been on Linux for years, it would have looked like playing catch-up.
Last I checked, the only way to run a 16 bit game from my childhood is on Linux. Very easy. Odd to congratulate Microsoft on backwards compatibility when they are not doing better than Linux.
They are still doing better than Linux. Try running a 16-bit Linux game from your childhood on... anything.
> a 16-bit Linux game from your childhood
Ah the fond memories of playing 16-bit native Linux games in 1987
I almost explained that was not meant literally but I thought it was obvious enough...
Mainline linux never supported 16 bit cpus.
That's how computers and software work by default. It's an entirely different business philosophy. We can gain more market share but having a just works software environment for as many people as possible VS we can resell people the same software over and over again.
You're impressed that they managed to fill their diaper for so long without any leaks? Linux can read the oldest unix file, compile and run the oldest programs. Their "backwards compatability" is entirely a self created problem, they realized they can capture more value, in the short term, if users only see a binary so they have to implement a technically flawed solution.
Everything’s a trade off. Take something from 30 year ago written in a less popular language with a compiler that no one is maintaining, or that you might not even be able to find a copy of.
You can’t compile the source for modern systems, but the windows binary still runs.
Distributing the source also doesn’t solve the backwards compatibility problem even if it does ameliorate it. A compiler can’t paper over every compatibility problem.
Linux definitely has others to catch up. The only reason I switched to a Linux box is not how great it is for users, but 1) it is a dev box for system programming studies, 2) MSFT willingly trash Windows
> You can still run the oldest Windows 95 programs today, still open the oldest Word documents, etc.
No. You can't. Games requiring old DirectX versions will crash in subtle ways. A lot of programs are badly rendered on Windows 10 (for some reason Windows scales some UI elements but other not).
Yeah, the "Microsoft Works" product was considered an oxymoron
I think they went too Moneyball and figured telemetry and metrics could solve everything. McNamara fallacy and all that
NT kernel is pretty solid and thr earlier NT kernel OS such as Win 2000 and XP are solid too. They definitely did not have the security features modern OSes have but security always evolves.
I mean NT is still way more advanced and modern than Linux will ever be, per definition. NT implements a lot of modern security architectures right into the kernel, while Linux inherently just lacks a lot of them.
But apart from NT I can't think of a lot more solid products that came out of Microsoft.
I think MS SQL Server is fine? Office is good if you ignore anything after 2013...VS debugger is good, but VS itself is bloated.
Meh, not many indeed. Anyway they adopted the beta to user and improve on the way mindset long time ago. Windows terminal was not very good back then but now it is OK.
Quantity yes, quality no.
Yes, the famous blue screen of death during live presentation of Windows 95 by Bill Gates.
I think there’s a difference between a product having problems and needing a restart once in a while and the product actively behaving in an undesirable way.
A pretty thin opinion piece, I was expecting more details. But there are a bunch of comments under that article which is probably juicier than the main text.
When I think about bad quality control Power Automate from their Power platform comes to mind. It could be quite a useful tool to automate several things and connect different systems with each other. Perhaps a high level serverless function with a visual editor you might say.
But it is a beta version at best for years. There are two version of editors that frequently break. You cannot overtax the system or all running instances morph into endless running tasks. Flows regularly break if you want to update something and the flow was created in a version of the editor no longer available.
You can also see their attempts to monetize this test version that needs a powerhouse of a machine to run its editor in a browser.
I like it for what it is if you are already (trapped?) in a Microsoft environment. There is some potential here and few consultants will tell you that it basically isn't production ready. But the product manager should be quite ashamed.
Also I heavily doubt it will stay free, so perhaps plan infrastructure accordingly.
well it's 'el reg', so that's by design (the comment section)
First time reading The Register huh?
The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
They seem to be very slowly losing to Apple on the laptop / productivity market and first signs of losing to Linux on gaming.
In the same way that their incompetence has been very slow to move the needle, once they lose the market it’s going to be almost impossible to get it back.
"first signs" for sure; I think / suspect the next big step for Valve would be to release a desktop gaming system. If it has a browser and "native" Discord it has the potential to take a chunk off the PC gaming market.
Only on markets where folks can afford Apple margins.
As for Linux, I keep waiting for the return of netbooks wave, in something that isn't a constrained Chromebook or Android tablet with keyboard.
Ordinary people buy what they can see on the local PC stores, not buy over Internet, importing System 76 and similar.
Ordinary folks are going more and more chromebooks these days, those are the "low cost laptops" that are on the shelves at your local bestbuy/curry's/elgiganten etc;
For everything more than that: the Macbook Air is equivalent or cheaper.
People seem to continue the lie that Apple hardware is more expensive, yet I just closed a deal on a business thinkpad (T14s Gen6) which was double the price and 2/3rds as performant, because we're a Windows shop and we don't buy Apple. Forgive my annoyance here but someone told me that "at least we don't buy expensive Macs" after we signed the invoice and it really got under my skin because it's legitimately half the price for more power. Completely blinded by ignorance.
Upgrades might be expensive, sure, but anything of any quality has always been like-for-like with Apple being cheaper on the low-spec end.
The consumer grade market where Windows used to dominate is having their lunch totally stolen by Chromebooks and Android Tablets. (More-so by Tablets I would argue).
Not on European markets, Chromebooks only leave the likes of Media Market after endless promotions trying to get rid of them.
We don't lie, we don't live in US, with US salaries, some European countries still get 800 euros as average salary, not to mention all the other even more poorer regions around the globe.
I’m living in Sweden.
I’m talking about the Swedish perspective.
Although the same is true in the UK. So which Europe are we talking about?
Kids get Chromebooks in school, most people seem to be content with a tablet. I have a hard time finding anyone who has a laptop <8 years old now (that isn't a company laptop).
The Europe northic folks enjoy their vacations, being served by plenty of folks, in the tourism industry, while dreaming to earn more than 1000 euros a month without having to live with their parents, or being forced to emigrate.
I find it ironic that you’re talking about the cost of things, and that somehow the laptop with the premium operating system that costs money and requires more expensive hardware due to being bloated is somehow more inexpensive in your country than a Chromebook or a tablet.
Make it make sense
Chromebooks and tablets are mostly useless as general computing devices.
Chromebooks only got a market chance thanks to US school system, and tablets, naturally Android ones that we're talking about here, are mostly consuming devices.
Hence why wealthy folks get Apple, they aren't getting Chromebooks and tablets either, when money is no concern.
By the way, you can buy new PC hardware below one month salary, that will get extended as long as possible.
https://www.worten.pt/informatica-e-acessorios/computadores/...
what do you think people are doing with their computers that they cannot do with a tablet or Chromebook?
Like buddy, I’m not trying to argue with you here - clearly we live in different societies with different purchasing demographics. General computing devices for me and for you are completely different things than they would be for my mother or anyone else in the general population.
For the overwhelming majority of people, they may own a computer to file taxes to watch content and to play non-intensive little games (not the AAA spectacle the most gamers player).
They do not need a compiler, they usually do not need Microsoft Word, and they do not need to install random executables from the Internet.
What do you think they need to do that cannot be served by a tablet?
By starters, the Windows software required by most schools and jobs.
By the way, which OSes do you think taxes software target over here?
Android tablets, with usable keyboards, are at the same price as laptops, without the software everyone else is using.
Schools are largely using chromos and chromebooks today (in my understanding across the countries where I have seen students in the last 8 years; so: Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and The UK).
Since having access to a web browser is significantly easier than Microsoft.
Actually, it was the same playbook Microsoft had in the 90s.
I’m sorry that your country is 30 years behind
Apparently it is advanced enough to spend vacations here, running away from short Summers and rainy weather.
I bought a Lenovo AMD laptop a year or two back with 32GB RAM & 1TB HDD for around £650. The upgrade cost alone for that RAM/storage is £600 for a macbook air.
which one and where?
my thinkpad was around 20,000 Swedish krona
Pinebook existed
It did, question is what can I buy today down at Media Market.
I don't think Linux will ever fully take over gaming regardless of effort unless competitive multiplayer game companies decide to give up on assuming total control over your system in order to make cheaters undetectable to the average gamer*.
It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".
But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.
* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.
I work in gamedev.
A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
The only person who would say otherwise has clearly never written anything on that level on Windows. It's not just uneasy: it's Sisyphean. The code-signing signature you need alone is an order of magnitude more difficult to obtain than the development burden of an appropriately defensive kernel module.
We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
For now.
> A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.
> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.
> Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
There is a lot of signed malware for Windows.
There's not much Kernel Level malware singed in Windows (drivers have more scrutiny for whatever that's worth). Regardless, the point is that companies using KLA rely on the relative difficulty of circumventing protections implemented in a signed kernel, running signed drivers, on a machine where there is some chain of trust.
You don't need to take my word for it, Tim Sweeney said it himself (using dirty innuendos and weasel words, but anyway). EAC supports Linux, but doesn't utilise KLA (for many reasons), and doesn't make the same claims about protection as it does on Windows.
Depends who pushes it and how - Steam (Valve) have the clout to if not to "take over gaming" at least turn it into a duopoly on the desktop/laptop from an OS point (from a game client point of view there is already Steam.....and way....over here everyone else).
I don't think anyone else does.
There isn't any technical reasons preventing it, PS5's are based on a heavily modified BSD - it requires a single vendor to standardise and support the platform with enough resources/commitment to do it properly.
Sure valve can make Gamedroid a reality, but Valve seems to be on the side of not using KLA themselves.
And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.
The reasons are:
* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible). * Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to. * Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.
Perhaps not, but Linux desktop marketshare doubled in 2024. It is still minuscule, but it doesn't take much for a movement like this to take off. Microsoft continues to make Windows 11 impossible to install for the average user up to and including not all that rare scenarios where it cannot be installed at all.
Conversely, 15 minutes to install, fully patched, and ready to go Linux distro is a hugely attractive alternative to Windows. There are 3 viable gaming distros, and the underlying tech continues to evolve. It is already invisible to most games.
Yeah most games, except the ones which rely on KLA.
There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.
Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.
Luckily for Microsoft, quality of Apple's software is deteriorating as well.
No one is using products from Microsoft due to their quality.
More than anything, once people realize that they can be fine without MS because 5-10% of the non-Apple market has done so (and the alternatives has figured out the kinks with the mass influx of users) it could move from a trickle to an avalanche.
The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
I think they already know and have been trying not to lose to Apple for a long time, as evidenced by their awkward attempts to embrace “good design” and “cool”.
Microsoft’s value is Excel+ Azure. And as long as they can sell Excel, they can sell a bunch of the other stuff at a cost so low that leaders have trouble saying no to janky Teams and other software.
The question is what can obviate Excel.
There will be consequences, but long term. Everyone at my startup hates MSFT products and Teams especially. We've talked about switching.
Everyone hates teams, but every company uses it and will keep using it because it's bundled with office anyway.
And the Office package is a very attractive offering. $36 / user / month and they get managed emails, chat, office, SSO, cloud storage, Windows, etc - basically everything that used to be the domain of a sysadmin.
The competitors are all fragmented; Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack, Teams or Discord and doesn't do hardware management as far as I'm aware unless you use Chromebooks.
> Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack
Google is up to a dozen versions of chat, the current incarnation is called Google Meet which includes a video akak Zoom type service as well as a Slack-type chat service.
I thought they rebranded Teams to Copilot 365?
lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).
The startup I work at uses Teams. It's the whole "Microsoft for startups" package deal they do means we're on all things Microsoft.
Why "talked about switching" is irrelevant. If it is cheap enough, you will take it.
Well said.
Most people dislike their government, they however comply with it in the dimensions that matter.
The difference is that every time a new company is founded, it's a clean slate for which tools are used.
You still need to play to the constraints of the market, which come in hard and soft varieties.
Yeah. I know this one.
Its the same story since like 15+ years now.
Well, with the windows 10 support ending, it is different now. To some extent staying on windows requires more effort than switching, which is an interesting place to be. I have "switched" people to macos or linux that before would not even bother and hear such stories everywhere. The linux ecosystem has matured and windows is no longer the easy/bugfree experience that was. Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago, linux worked out of the box while for windows I had to go troubleshooting mode and find/download/install drivers manually. 10-15 years ago or so it was always the opposite.
I don’t get the Teams hate.
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
I can’t imagine going back to a time where I couldn’t just throw an excel file or ppt in a discussion and get collaborative editing straight away.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
Visio was built to be acquired by Microsoft. It was the best office family app pre-acquisition. Every subsequent release is worse than the one before it.
Lucid is a better tool in every way.
Lucid is for a totally different purpose though.
The other day I clicked "share" on a PowerPoint presentation saved in OneDrive, and it reverted to a version several hours old, losing that work. This is a typical experience using any of the Office products. Copilot is not "good at minutes and transcription" by any stretch of the imagination. It cannot understand a _simple_ word I say, with an RP-British accent, let alone many of the acronyms and terms used in industry.
Fortunately we have already switched away from Teams to Slack for chat, but since the best way to win is not to play, I just write text in vim and presentations in Keynote. Fortunately I have approximately no need for spreadsheets that aren't simple lists, though that appears to be the lock-in.
I'd rather use literally anything else. Google's stuff is probably best, but Quip was also fine.
The only thing I really like about Teams is that the AI-optimized audio codec is the only video call audio that doesn’t cause some people’s voices to become physically painful to listen to.
Teams works fine for my limited needs. Though it feels sluggish, sometimes a chat or calendar takes 3 seconds to load.
Even loading a command prompt or the calculator takes more than 3 seconds on Windows 11 so maybe they've just lowered the bar so much it passes internal testing.
Anecdotally:
I happen to use Windows on both personal and work laptop. Some of the bugs I see exist across Home and Enterprise version. Sleep remains a nightmare on Windows, and yes across laptops made by different manufacturers. I have created tickets and this, and IT doesn't have a solution.
I have decided that my next personal laptop definitely won't run Windows, and if I am allowed to ask for a Mac machine at work in the future, I'll jump at that opportunity.
That would mean two fewer Windows licenses and less usage of related products (good riddance, Edge!). And I am sure I am not the only one who is thinking about all this.
But of course I have no idea if that matters in the grand scheme of things -- after all, many people tolerate these bugs just like they tolerate all the ads by Microsoft, Google, Meta etc.
Every platform has some hardware that has issues with sleeping. I've had numerous Linux machines that entirely fail to resume often, this current MacBook I'm on fails to properly reconnect things on USB hubs after a resume, etc. The grass is always greener.
Try sleep study on your current machine. I had an issue with one machine constantly waking from sleep. Lots of other tools couldn't clue me into what was going on and why the system was actually waking. Sleep study pointed exactly to the device causing problems, disabling it from waking the system solved my sleep problems on that device.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
Time will tell if they'll hit the trust thermocline: https://xcancel.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
But I think it's the worst aspect of the subscription model. In the past, people just wouldn't buy the new version if it sucked
Complaining about Microsoft's lack of quality control is like complaining the strip club has poor lighting for reading.
As one MS Director put it out of frustration: "We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers. That's it."
More precisely: He said MSlers get paid by results, achieved Business Value. Testers exist and are called "End Users". Testing is mandatory and part of the core philosophy - they just must do it differently.
Reason: Fear of missing out if moving to slow.
I reminisce the times, where you put in a CD without internet connection. Actual Office is a mess. Thousands of half finished apps, subject to be cancelled anytime. Windows XP's UI was dubbed "glossy" - some of Office's apps UIs are LSD trips for kids. This is ridiculous. Nothing to work with and in no way usable for customer presentations.
> We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers.
Maybe they should read bug reports posted by the end users, and not have half-baked solutions posted by Very Ignorant Persons.
That's a good point. I think it would be bearable if they actually had a good feedback platform & interact with their users. Feedback Hub is just terrible: slow, featureless & built on top of their buggiest ui platform.
Unfortunately their audience is probably too big.
There's no business case for reading bug reports.
Only when you are a monopoly
Crowdsource it. (Microsoft could) start a website called WeHeardYouLetsFixTeams.com where users submit bug reports for Teams out in public, other people vote on how much each bug is a pain point for them, the Teams, er team commits to fixing the top 5 each quarter. Do a whole media circus around it. Do a sales push to get people off Slack/Zulip/Discord/Telegram/Meet/etc. Get some industry accolades for listening to your users.
> As one MS Director put it out of frustration: "We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers. That's it."
This is true since at least Win 95. One usually needed to wait until SP2 to get a resemblance of quality from Microsoft.
Now, since Vista, they got rid of ServicePacks. This says a lot about their quality culture.
As a network engineer I regularly participate and mediate 'vendor support shootouts' between vendors like cisco, juniper, arista, verizon, at&t, and, microsoft - all often amongst each other. It is at times maddeningly frustrating.
Microsoft by far and away is the least responsive in nearly all cases. In one case the project involved thousands of SQL servers and MS was 100% unresponsive - moreover this was not a small customer, but one of microsoft's largest corporate customers. Still nothing but silence. So out with MS for that project. The yearly license fees were well into six figures. Even though MS has a track record of unresponsiveness, the silence was surprising and noteworthy. Why bet money on a horse that doesn't show up.
Both Microsoft and Apple software quality has go down recently. What is going on. Is it the AI-produced code? It can't be that...
I don't know how are things in Google land; their apps and websites are just-OK; however GMail seems quite stagnant - yeah they slapped LLM on it, cool; but other than that... they added Chat? few years ago? But at least Google's stuff mostly works, even when it's boring.
There was a total revamp to GMail called "Inbox" that Google was working on for a while, but it got deprecated and cancelled before it was released. From what I heard, they were testing it internally and most people liked it. It just was more search focused so the backend costs were more than they thought they could bear and it was scrapped.
I loved Inbox, it was way better at organizing than gmail. In true google fashion, as soon as people started to like it and use it, they unceremoniously killed it.
You say stagnant, I say stable.
Agreed.
I can't think of a single feature I personally think GMail is missing (and arguably some features I wish they hadn't added).
I do think their settings panels, and their filter management in particular, could sorely use some UX improvements.
Interested, would you want gmail to do anything additional? Aside from a modernised look every now and then, I can't see that there's many additional features you might give an email client?
If you have the resources of Google available to you, I'd think something could be done to make email as a whole less bad. I get so many emails that inbox zero is NOT at all realistic. You could argue that's not Google's responsibility, and you'd be right, but it means I use Gmail less, which is at odds with me using it more and Google getting more of my attention.
> At one point, Microsoft's QC was legendary.
Is that legendary QC in the room with us right now?
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
Not really a fair comparison since this was probably alpha-quality software, and the build they used was very likely build for that specific demonstration (that ok, went badly). Like the (in)famous first iPhone presentation where Steve Jobs had multiple iPhones and needed to exactly time when to change between them otherwise they would crash.
> Not really a fair comparison
If you are going to live-demo your latest software to the world, you better make sure that the very limited functionality you are going to showcase actually works. Especially since you get to choose the interaction, and know all the conditions and hardware beforehand.
Patches have been a mess the last couple years. Makes me think someone or a group of people either quit, were fired, or got pulled into the ai side of the business. The mistakes being made are that of junior programmers without a proper lead or review and testing team. That plus removal of features and addition of too much telemetry into the os and office products.
The high number of bugs in Windows patches has little to do with AI. As The Register reported, the root cause is Microsoft's mass layoff of dedicated QA staff and its switch from a waterfall to an agile software development methodology in 2014.
Nobody does Agile correctly anywhere, certainly not large companies like Microsoft so I don't think the methodology itself is the reason!
My guess: they vibe-coded the integrations between the new and old M365 components. Baffling lack of cross-component integration, all apparent only when you actually try to use it as intended.
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
The majority of Microsoft’s profit comes from Azure and Office, everything else is almost irrelevant to them now.
The quality of Office is very rapidly declining; it seems that the entire team has moved to forcing AI into every feature instead of fixing any issues. The web version is barely usable (esp compared to Google's versions) and the desktop is quickly getting worse seemingly every day.
I have not used Azure for a few years now; back when I did use it, it seemed pretty good.
That applies to all teams not only Office, even Aspire now has AI on the dashboard, and they proudly made use of AI building the new Aspire CLI experience.
Right. And azure has issues as witnessed last week with the outage.
Sadly it's the new IBM for conglomerates.
Not just that, but even their game studios. Take for example Starfield. Lots of hype, massive letdown. I'm one of many massive Bethesda fans. Starfield absolutely could have had so much more, but HN knows what happens with software projects. Deadlines aren't met, marketing / business depts start signaling that we need it out the door yesterday, and a bunch of things get cut. I have seen on reddit loads of comments about a ton of content being cut out of Starfield, which is ridiculous, Bethesda games are always content rich.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
Ship loading screen simulator
I have been moderately interested in Starfield and anticipated it would follow the pattern of other Bethesda endeavours. Which is to say it takes a while post-release for they and their mod community to get it to a state I am at all interested.
Are we there yet?
No, its bad. Genuinely bad. This was the first Bethesda game I actually found bugs on day 1 for. I've played all their other games on launch and its never been this bad for me. I usually rarely spot bugs, I don't know if I just have the right hardware or what, but it just never happens to me.
The other problem is they did a major update, which broke a ton of mods. Then with their own mod store, they made it so only paid mods are considered "savefile safe" for enabling of achievements, which means every other mod I find that isn't a paid mod has a descriptiong along the lines of "I AM NO LONGER MAINTAINING THIS DUE TO BETHESDA WANTING TO PAYWALL SIMPLE FREE MODS JUST TO LET YOU SAVE WITHOUT ACHIEVEMENTS" or something like that, I've seen a few completely different mod authors just abandone ship completely.
This is probably their worst goof ever. I'm genuinely angered enough that if the next Elder Scrolls flops I may have to write off one of my all-time favorite game development studios.
I love Bethesda, but they're falling off real hard, and the only difference that could be affecting that is Microsoft in my eyes.
Just think. Starfield could have been a Game of the Year game. It was not.
It also only has one single DLC.
I love the game, its just not looking like it will ever meet its potential. I read on reddit a commend that I agree with, the only thing that could save Starfield now is a "Directors Cut" release.
Skyrim on day one came out with a game breaking bug in the main quest, and it crashed a lot too. Starfield's problem is that it's a very boring procgen hell.
Bethesda was notorious for releasing products riddled with bugs long before they got acquired by Microsoft. Morrowind has multiple fan patches, so does Oblivion. Fallout 4 used to crash a lot. I don’t think Microsoft as anything to do with their current sorry state.
Riddled with bugs is frankly expected for Bethesda.
Starfield's main problem was the shallow content which is very unlike Bethesda. Skyrim, for all its faults and issues, had so much to discover. As did the previous entries in the series. As did Fallout.
I don’t know. I stopped playing Elder Scrolls games at Oblivion which was significantly more shallow than Morrowind, itself less ambitious than Daggerfall. On the Fallout side, NV was great but not made by Bethesda and 4 is pretty much just a bad FPS with boring paddings in between the shooting.
I think the constant content downgrade has been going on for a long time.
My view is likely very tinted. Skyrim was my first Bethesda game and while I did the play the Oblivian remaster, I never touched Daggerfall.
From my view, assuming the remaster isn't too massively different content wise, the change was more in certain mechanics from Oblivion to Skyrim. Lore and story wise both games have incredible depth.
While I did enjoy Starfield, if found it to be flat. They stretched the resources too thin. Much of the content was too repetitive. It felt like a kids game. Neon, the supposed crime den riddled with drugs and gangs, may as well have been a kids amusement park.
Ultimately, the fact that Starfield came out over a decade later but offered so much less was a let down. Never mind that the game didn't really improve on the underlying mechanics. Modders solved a lot of loading screens in Skyrim decades ago, but Starfield is full of them. It felt dated at release already.
> Lore and story wise [Oblivion and Skyrim] have incredible depth.
As you said, you never played Daggerfall or Morrowind. Just about all of the lore in Oblivion and Skyrim comes from Daggerfall, Redguard, and Morrowind.
As for the stories... sorry, but you're on your own there. Oblivion's was okay, but Skyrim's story was a trainwreck from beginning to end. Of all the parts of Bethesda games, it is the character + story writing that has suffered the most over the years.
Bethesda has always been known for its abysmal lack of care about quality. Morrowind (2002) is riddled with bugs, a lot of them game breaking. They're all listed on the wiki, each article having several of them, with steps to resolve them using console commands (which you are expected to use if you want to finish the game).
Just use OpenMW.
Obviously, but I was responding to OP's claim that Bethesda's games took a dip in the quality department, by underlining that they were always infamous for putting out rushed games riddled with bugs.
My recent expierience: 2023: install windows on new machine. Login to microsoft account. Use computer.
2025: install windows on new machine. Try to log in to microsoft account. Cant. Use usb key. I dont have one. Use authenticator. Message is not show in authenticator. Use password. Wrong password (it was 100% the correct one) give up and use offline account. New try to log in: nothing works. In the end i had to reset my password.
I am building a new rig after years of solely using a MacBook, and reading all these horror stories of windows 10/11 I am just gonna go with Ubuntu. I may dual boot with windows but only if really needed.
Ubuntu is Debian with some MICROS~1 thrown in. Just go with Debian and tell the installer you want non-free stuff if you need certain drivers.
Debian as a first time Linux user seems painful. Unless you enjoy spending hours and hours setting up a computer. Mint is still the simplest for me.
Why would it take "hours and hours"?
Maybe not to install, but to chose what to install. Saying "install Debian instead of Ubuntu" is not a complete answer, because you have to select a window manager as well. If you go "pure" Debian, what should you then select? GNOME, KDE, cinnamon, xfce, Mate...?
It's an easier path to go with Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Less overwhelming choices when you just want to get started. Linux Mint is good for people used to Windows as it feels familiar. If you still want to go "pure" Debian you can use LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
Just go with the XFCE ISO and say you want to have non-free stuff, choose your locale and say yes to the partition plan, and you're done in like twenty minutes unless your storage is very slow.
Thanks. Well, in that case I would for sure select KDE Plasma over XFCE as it feels more modern from a design point of view and for someone coming from Windows or MacOS they would probably feel more at home.
It's not just their flagship products. It extends to nearly _everything_ they release.
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Poor quality, user-hostile experiences are a very common consequence of entrenched monopolies.
So many companies buy Microsoft regardless of the quality of the actual products. Given that context, why would directors invest in an expensive, invisible effort like controlling quality, when they could spend those resources on product launches that are naturally legible to upper management?
MSFT lays the burden of QC to its users. This is intended and they mean the end product to be shitty at the beginning and gradually improve every sprint/release. That's the world now.
I started to notice this when I tried out Power BI back in 2018. Back then the software is barely useable by developers. The code editor is barebone and overall the software is bloat and slow. But it has improved a lot since then. We can definitely argue that at least some of the nitty gritties should be fixed even before the earlier releases, but I guess the culture is already "Move fast, get back when you fall" -- after all it is the users who fall anyway.
I wonder how old timers such as Raymond Chen or David Cutler view this phenomenon. David Cutler is said to be very stringent on the quality of the kernel at least.
Recently the UK bought some old laptops with Win10. I think they handed over to Microsoft +300 million pounds (or within that sum; I don't know how much was attributed to the actual laptops).
I think when you get these deals, you get rich, but you are no longer having any real incentive to do quality control. So the whole system breaks down. They do minimum quality control. Plus, a lot of what Microsoft seems to be doing nowadays is to spy on people. The recall anti-feature kind of gave this away, but before that there was "trusted computing", which I can understand may make sense for some organisations, but for solo users? Why am I being tagged and monitored suddenly? Why is a corporation claiming this is about "trust"? I don't trust that corporation. (I use Linux anyway, but still; one computer has Win10 right now, which I use mostly for testing stuff.)
azure seems quite shitty too. I only use it for having GPT models which is a corp requirement. For 1 hour total I spent on azure.com in past weeks, besides how slow it usually is, I ran into two issues:
- models sometimes got deployed to an unwanted instance, likely because some API is slow and front end state was not well maintained, so user clicking Next too soon will end up screw up the data being submitted
- one of the models (5-mini) deployment took very long and failed, it apparently ended up in a bad and invisible state, and future models can't be deployed any more on that instance. I retried today, same thing, gave up and created a new instance/
Azure AI is supposed to be an area MS making all the bets which I assume should have high quality, but apart from frequent update, it's same low quality as MS Teams.
Linux manages just fine without a QC department. However, it also only takes responsibility for the "kernel". Various components around the kernel can be broken, and indeed some filesystems can cause file loss, but users full-well know of those flaws because of the transparent nature of Linux development.
Perhaps a lack of transparency and too many responsibilities under one product (something Microsoft loves to do) is the problem, not the lack of an additional process layer.
Quality control for everything sucks now. AI has sucked up the smart developers. iOS 26 has bugs that would have caused Steve Jobs to throw desk ornaments at people.
Consequences of having early access to ChatGPT and getting AI knowledge debt?
It's way too early in the AI code lifecycle to see its full effects, especially for a codebase the size of Windows. It's going to take a decade for the full joy of this to manifest.
Windows feels more like an advertisement supported OS.
MS is pulling scam like maneuvers to get folks to pay for Copilot.
They really seem like they're racing to the bottom :(.
If accessibility gets much worse, I'm moving to Linux even if Orca isn't as fleshed out as NVDA and its dozens of addons.
See also: "Task Manager might continue running in the background after the app is closed"
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/october-28-2025-kb...
Software quality in general seems at risk of a massive drop in quality with rise of A.I.
Forget QC- question becomes has a human looked at it at all
Reminder: The UEFI/SecureBoot/systemd-boot stack is controlled by Microsoft as well. Microsoft signs our bootloaders.
You can add your key to most UEFI system and don't require shim to have it to boot (or disable Secure Boot). You don't require a MS signed bootloader if you don't want to.
I just keep it simple and use BIOS.
Was Microsoft ever in control of its quality?
It will get worse, the combined strike of HTML-based "native" UIs, outsourcing and vibe-coding will be too much for any remaining original devs to defend against.
You are complaining that developers can't keep up with vibe coded features. The solution might actually be more AI.
There's an opportunity to automate some of the QA traditionally done manually. I tried this last week on our main app (not some toy thing):
(turn on agent mode in chat gpt)
I was being lazy here with my prompting. But it works shockingly well on anything browser based. It will start using whatever you point it at and do things that normal users might do. Obviously, you can give it more detailed guidelines on what to test, what to ensure is working, etc.I got a pretty detailed report back and most of it was valid/constructive. I'm planning to do more of this. It beats developers doing QA (they are too biased usually and seem reluctant to do it) and we don't have any dedicated QA people. Manual QA can be very expensive. I don't think the need for that totally goes away, but you should probably focus that on the most valuable/hardest things to test.
In any case, it's pretty cool to watch Chat GPT explore a UI and attempting to use features. It's very thorough and it seems to figure out workarounds for UX issues as well when things don't work as expected. This is exactly the kind of stuff that developers testing their own UIs are blind to. They know where to click and don't even think about it.
A related issue is actually updating documentation and marketing material with up-to date screen captures and screenshots. Annoyingly, Chat GPT doesn't allow me to save the videos it takes of the AI using the browser. But that stuff could actually be documentation gold. Doing this manually is very tedious.
AI is very good for mirroring the culture around it. You can use it for all kinds of things, including QA, but you still need a culture where QA and UX matter.
MS doesn't have that. It's a B2B marketing company with a rapidly decreasing developer headcount glued to the back, far away from daylight.
> Hey put on your QA hat
Wow, that was like a hell of vibe alone!
Based on my experience Im surprised they had quality control in the first place.
“slowly, then all at once”
Unfortunately the only thing about MS that doesn't suck is their sales prowess. Delivery and quality are optional, but getting companies to use their stack is not.
This is what so many people miss. Its the same with palantir, salesforce, oracle etc. These companies are masters of contract procurement. It doens't matter if the product is dogshit. It doesn't matter if the engineers are good or bad. It doens't matter if the CEO does a sieg hail, none of that matters. Even if they only sold literal empty boxes, they would still be able to find some corrupt fuck willing to buy 500 million of them for a kickback. The product is completely irrelevant, because the real "product" these companies offer is the ability to farm connections with the wealthy and powerful
> Unfortunately the only thing about MS that doesn't suck is their sales prowess.
And their vacuum cleaner. /s
Hot take but I seriously think both Agile/Scrum and "make a single dev do a ton of things that wouldn't necessarily count as software development" (like RDB design and management) is the direct cause of all of these problems. It is my opinion that Agile/scrum (or, at least, the "agile"/"scrum" that corporations understand) institutionalized the "move fast, break things, consolidate everything into as few positions as possible" mindset, in the name of things like "reducing expenditures" and "ship things really fast and damn the consequences". That includes, oh, I dunno, dumping QA/QC and putting all of that on the end-users. Maybe the real Agile might not do this, but I can't say because, from what I know, very few, if any, corporations actually use the real Agile at all, and instead repurpose the word to mean a completely different system.
While I largely agree, I do think a more significant portion of the problems are caused by Nadella's claims of 30% ML-generated code. If true (as a peddler of ML, there are many reasons for him not to be truthful) the is a rather strong inverse correlation of quality with these announcements and layoffs.
Furthermore, with modern MBAs at the helm, the concern is only pumping figures for the next quarter - five years be damned.
It's also completely possible to do agile with QA. One place I worked had 1 QA per 3 devs, and they were able to maintain a single (2 week) sprint behind cadence.
Scrum was always how Agile was sold to behemoths. It necessarily makes several compromises that deeply undermine it.
agile is a mixed bag with some quite good ideas and practices, but imo the main selling point for industry is that it allows complete dillution of compromise and responsibility, and it shows. this is why companies have bought en masse into the snakeoil and imo that's the main reason for quality problems: follow these rituals (without any regard to the core concepts behind them) and everything will be fine, and if it doesn't it was not our fault, "change is inevitable and shit happens".
also, qa is simply not optional, and agile actually stresses that pretty strongly.
Anti-agile is the operational ideology of those who will conquer the future. :')
Maybe the situation would improve if they laid off more workers.
This change did not happen in 2014. It happened about 14 years earlier, when they began to adopt their so-called “engineering culture” that really meant “testers shut up.” It then happened at Google in the early oughts.
Testers have been under attack in big tech since 1989, within my own experience. Maybe before that, as well.
It's getting out of control. Just yesterday, I was turning on remote desktop on Windows 11. It showed as enabled, with a label indicating that it was listening on port 3389, but it wasn't accessible from a remote host. I checked on Windows, and it turned out it wasn't actually listening on the RDP port at all. I tried toggling it off and on again, still nothing. Only a reboot helped.
A few weeks ago, a family member had Notepad stop working suddenly, showing an error saying it couldn't execute the binary or something similar. Reinstalling it from the Microsoft store or even downloading other official versions didn't help, they had to restore Windows from a backup.
> Only a reboot helped.
This is common knowledge. If something does not work in Windows, reboot. If it still doesn't work, reinstall.
Shit article, late and zero contribution. Everyone knows exactly why Microsoft is failing and you're not allowed to mention it.
Apple: hold my beer.
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"Robin Williams on Bill Gates"
Why quoting Robin Williams is relevant here?
He seems some kind of actor. Are you quoting his fantasy how Bill Gates thinks?