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Comment by kailuowang | Hacker News Reader

You dont necessarily need to. I still use MS Windows from time to time and my perception is that fundamentally they still dont know how to write software properly: in windows 10, opening a folder full of large video files takes a painful long time, while all it needs to do is to list some file names. I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff. In their outlook, if the network is having connection problem, the UI will become unresponsive. These might be silly easy bugs to fix but it exposed that fundamentally they still couldnt figure out how to separate things properly in software.

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"Microsoft doesn't know how to..." is an unfounded disparagement.

Microsoft definitely knows how to write software, okay? They're really good at it. They ship a lot of it. There are many people there who are brighter than you and I and they know their stuff cold.

Microsoft is full of

- legacy stuff that is really hard to change (many, many reasons for this, few of them pleasant but all of them real)

- conflicting priorities (which bugs do we fix? will we destabilize the product if we fix them? are there more important things to do?)

- political bullshit, in the atmosphere of which it is hard to do the right thing

I left Microsoft three years ago, having spent 11 years there. I saw some howlingly bad software written (little of which shipped), and there are definitely groups there that are stronger than others, but I would never apply the phrase "fundamentally they don't know how to write software".

I go so far as to say, starting a bit over two decades ago, that one of the "secrets" of Microsoft's success is their long term ability to write software that basically works. As I mention in another part of this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352022), they beat their "Office" competitors in part by not losing that ability when all else but Borland did. (Borland didn't, but lost at higher levels of management, including buying one of those failed competitors.)

As far as I can tell, general management incompetence, including of course "political bullshit", is most responsible for their post-XP problems (along with becoming too toxic for healthy peer companies to want work with them, but I'm not sure that matters when enough of the people at the top are so bad).

Although ... what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn? Wasn't that in part technical? Or did that derive from higher up?

> what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn? Wasn't that in part technical? Or did that derive from higher up?

Bill Gates actually touched that topic in is Reddit AMA. If I remember correctly, the bar was set up too high (i.e relational file system) and within the constrains it was a big challenge and at some point they had to deliver.

I also remember that a lot of it was going to based on .NET, and it wasn't mature enough/they weren't able to get it mature enough. The whole process was also impacted by security issues reaching a crisis level.

But #1 would seem to be more ambition than Microsoft could deliver at the time.

> I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff.

That's weird, all the file-io operations in windows store apps are async for the very reason of not blocking the UI thread. How big was that folder? I'm geniuly curious.

I think he refers to File Explorer (explorer.exe) which has nothing to do with Windows Store Apps.

I know but it wasn't clear to me that he was using file explorer (I haven't seen the issue on none of my machines)

Explorer is not a Windows Store app.

I know but he didn't say he was using explorer to open the folder and inspect the files. I was guessing he must be using an app to show them since is the only dialog that's different (I have multi-gb video folders in my pc and haven't seen the issue). He did say he was using Win10 and the file dialog is back to be the same so my guess would be incorrect anyway.

Async ops can still take a long time. (Actually that's probably why they were made async.) GP wants to update the UI, but the data isn't available yet. Even if UI is still responding to mouse clicks, it hasn't yet fulfilled the user's desire to display that data, so it is blocking in a sense.

What explorer will be doing is calling into a shell extension to generate the video thumbnails. Under some circumstances it ends up blocked on the shell extension.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/2... (not precisely the same thing, but related)

I've personally seen opening a folder full of photos produce a crash dialog pointing the blame at an Nvidia DLL.

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