Why quoting Robin Williams is relevant here?
He seems some kind of actor. Are you quoting his fantasy how Bill Gates thinks?
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 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.
Its the same story since like 15+ years now.
I realized this too. I recently installed a dual boot Fedora/Win11. The fedora installation was literally pressing 4 times "Next" and was done after 5 minutes.
Windows took well over 1 hour (offline account) and installing drivers and taming edge & co was over 2 hours at the end.
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?
Lucid is a better tool in every way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For now.
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.
There is a lot of signed malware for Windows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
my thinkpad was around 20,000 Swedish krona
Not quite ThinkPad level, but the keyboard, pad, screen etc are very good and it runs Linux well.
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 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 question is what can obviate Excel.
And the Steam Deck is clearly that. I’d happily recommend the deck to normal non tech users. It’s just that good. One of the things I think they did exceptionally well is using a read only image based OS, meaning the system is always in a known state, and if an update ever breaks something, the bootloader shows the previous working images letting you boot back in to those and wait for the broken update to be yanked and replaced. You never need the user to reinstall after a broken OS.
No one is using products from Microsoft due to their quality.
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.
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...
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
I have not used Azure for a few years now; back when I did use it, it seemed pretty good.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/the-real-story-behi...
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
Sure, we were "webmasters", but there is a huge difference between tinkering with some PHP, MYSQL, HTML, and Apache, and being an expert on the latest cloud offerings, security practices, etc. One could spend six months in analysis paralysis these days without writing a line of code.
The software dev supply market is absolutely saturated.
Only biggest companies were able to have that. If you have a single application to run there is no work for DBA as FTE, in big company where you have multiple projects you can most likely have DBA as a department that handles dozens of databases and running infra. Same with Ops, you can have SRE or OPS doing your infra if you have dozens of applications to run.
Problem is having separate QA/DBA/Dev/Ops departments was breaking because people would "do their stuff" and throw problems over the fence. So everything would go to shit and we have seen it in big companies.
Other thing is - I have read about multiple companies trying "to be professional" burning money on exactly having separate roles, but in reality you cannot simply afford FTE or having full department of DBA or QA or OPS or just Dev - unless you basically are swimming in money.
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.
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.
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 think the constant content downgrade has been going on for a long time.
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.
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.
Are we there yet?
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.
And their vacuum cleaner. /s
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.
also, qa is simply not optional, and agile actually stresses that pretty strongly.
Is that legendary QC in the room with us right now?
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
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.
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".
I think they went too Moneyball and figured telemetry and metrics could solve everything. McNamara fallacy and all that
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.
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.
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.
Ah the fond memories of playing 16-bit native Linux games in 1987
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).
But apart from NT I can't think of a lot more solid products that came out of Microsoft.
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.
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.
Maybe they should read bug reports posted by the end users, and not have half-baked solutions posted by Very Ignorant Persons.
Unfortunately their audience is probably too big.
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.
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.
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.
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');
}
})();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.
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?
Polish video titles get translated to English, and English video titles get translated to Polish.
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..
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...
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!
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...
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.
Read more about Microsoft's Excel Functions Translator here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-functions-t...
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.
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.
If India and Nigeria kindly did the needful and exported more English-language cultural content, the situation would be more similar to Spanish.
Turns out, the web becomes a more interesting place when you do. First of all, Google apparently makes a logical route from "Latin" to "Rome" to "Italy" to "Italian" and routinely displays login screens and such in Italian. hCaptcha breaks into a thousand pieces and displays (or displayed then) prompts in a broken mess of two to three different languages within one sentence. Several websites wouldn't load at all because they automatically request a translation from their backend server as the first order of business and after a Latin translation returns a 404, they just croak with an empty page.
I've encountered multiple websites actually translated to Latin with a language file, i.e. not live via Google Translate or similar. Probably still an automatic translation, but still I had the chance to applaud them.
But my absolute favourite are Google Maps embeddings. Turns out, every time you visit an embedded Google Maps instance, your account settings don't matter, your location doesn't matter, all that matters is your browser's language -- and Google Maps actually have Latin data for countries and cities! Granted, not for everything, but many many things are translated with Latin names, some of which directly correspond to the Latin names used in centuries past. You can browse the world for hours, sometimes trying to remember which city is behind a Latin name.
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.)
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.
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).
If Linus Torvalds of all people is complaining about how much of a pain in the ass Debian can be to install, it's going to be a pain in the ass. Hell, Mint had countless issues I had to monkey patch and would break if I looked at it funny.
You cannot expect a beginner user to touch a command line or even think about desktop environments. We're computer nerds here but sometimes the expectation that booting from an ISO or making disk partitions is easy for the average person grossly overestimates the average person's desire to debug and fight with their computer.
Seriously, ask your Grandma to install Debian on her Windows computer by herself and see what happens.
When I do, I give them a flash drive and if necessary help them change the boot order, then they just answer what they understand and accept defaults on the rest. This typically works well and they are surprised that when install is done, it's really done, no messing about with license keys and downloading install binaries and whatnot.
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.
This is common knowledge. If something does not work in Windows, reboot. If it still doesn't work, reinstall.
Testers have been under attack in big tech since 1989, within my own experience. Maybe before that, as well.
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.
Forget QC- question becomes has a human looked at it at all
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.
MS is pulling scam like maneuvers to get folks to pay for Copilot.
They really seem like they're racing to the bottom :(.
- 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.
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?
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.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/october-28-2025-kb...
To really rub it in they combine not testing with treating their customers like garbage. Their support actually tried repeatedly blaming my ISP as if somehow connectivity would impact user account specific issues. I eventually sent them URLs of articles pointing out the problem. Then - crickets.
dude250711•2mo ago
jillesvangurp•2mo ago
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.
TheOtherHobbes•2mo ago
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.
wartywhoa23•2mo ago
Wow, that was like a hell of vibe alone!