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Comment by starsinspace | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is really shooting themselves in the foot with their terrible approach to privacy ever since Win10. Given that they earn money by selling actual products, they could stand right next to Apple as a defender of privacy if they wanted to (unlike Google, which has a business model which depends on data collection)... but they choose not to.

It's not so long ago, in 2011, they had this video, targeting Google's privacy problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0

Now they're no better than Google. What happened?

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What happened? Microsoft used to have an army of testers who would do a mix of manual and automated testing to help ensure the quality of the product. In 2014 they were all fired. Their strategy for testing Windows is now three fold: - Devs are expected to test their own code now - There is now a program where customers can use beta builds of Win10 and report issues - MS relies on telemetry to find and fix issues

Today there's lots of old code from the era before automated tests were widespread in the industry, and often automated tests which were previously maintained by the testers are now bitrotting. The culture of testing is not strong among developers in some parts of the company. The beta program can't catch everything either.

So telemetry it is.

And you need some telemetry. Minidumps/coredumps make debugging certain kinds of crashes much easier, and Apple captures that sort of data too. And I guess seeing whether people use some widget in Office a lot/not at all could be useful for improving the product. In practice it also leads to issues with the GDPR and governments, which MS does ultimately fix.

Apparently Win10 Enterprise users have a switch somewhere where they can turn off almost all telemetry, but not so for Home and Pro users, say what you will about that.

> Microsoft used to have an army of testers who would do a mix of manual and automated testing to help ensure the quality of the product. In 2014 they were all fired.

> ... Devs are expected to test their own code now

I'll never understand this line of thinking. A good tester doesn't think the way a good developer does. It's a different but equal and necessary skill in order to provide a strong product.

Fully agree! Development is about making things work, testing is about breaking things. Sadly, some managers think that 'developed' includes 'tested' and expect flawless results from developers. It's like being a dancer and a painter simultaneously - possible, but has its limitations.

> It's like being a dancer and a painter simultaneously - possible, but has its limitations.

And messy.

More like being a dancer and a demolitionist at the same time.

Not only messy, but also quite deadly.

> In 2014 they were all fired. Their strategy for testing Windows is now three fold: - Devs are expected to test their own code now

I was at a company that did the same (at roughly the same time) - this was a terrible mistake. But it's very hard to discuss, because any dev complaining sounds like they want to avoid testing.

Dear manager that I hope reads this:

QAs, at least the ones under discussion, aren't just mindless pressers-of-buttons. They have a skillset and domain knowledge just like (but distinct from) devs. A dev should absolutely test their own code...but they will do so with their domain knowledge which will be by definition more limited than someone for whom such knowledge is a key part of the job. Devs should test so that only problems worthy of the QA skillset make it to the QAs.

Asking devs to do QA work is asking them to build skills that are not their strength, and that will come at the cost of their strengths. It is asking them to build skills they probably don't enjoy, and that will come at the cost of their job satisfaction. Having devs do QA work is as bad as devs that test nothing and leave it all for the QAs - it's an inefficient and ineffective use of resources and time.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging Devs to deliver higher quality code to the QA/Test engs. There IS something wrong with thinking higher quality code from devs mean you don't need a QA/Test Eng.

From a recent comment around here I (re)learned that some software developers "just build to spec and they're done"; it's not their fault that some user presses a button and accidentally launches all nuclear missiles [or whatever], that wasn't stated as "don't allow it" in the spec so it's not their fault.

And then QA does their good job and gets hate for saying that accidental nuclear genocide [or whatever] might be a bad thing so let's fix that before release to the customer.

Sure, "code to spec and you're done". But are you actually really done? Are you sure?

Firing all your QA engineers because you can make your developers do QA is like firing all your operations people because you can make your developers do operations.

In either case, it's also like cutting off your left arm because you still have your right arm.

> like cutting off your left arm because you still have your right arm

This ignores that it discards specialisation, not merely quantity, and that testers are generally cheaper than developers.

Re: specialization. Most people aren't ambidextrous afaik and will have a hard time retraining to do things with another hand. So I think the metaphor still holds

It's like firing all your nurses and having expensive doctors work overtime. In other words, silly.

...and short term lucrative.

Long term, doctors aren’t nurses and patients suffer. Eventually someone dies.

This is such a perfect analogy for where I feel DevOps fails in some implementations.

My experience is across three different companies now, and in the first two (not my current employer who... still do it wrong but it's the best I've seen), they fired the Ops guys and expected the Systems Engineers\Software Engineers to take those roles.

No overtime pay in either company for the extra work load that was placed on them (e.g. me) of course. So the only cost the companies incurred was productivity and the quality of work. The burden was entirely carried by the staff and to a greater degree the clients who accept a shoddier product and service.

Fortunately I quit both jobs to get to where I am now, though the old timers no doubt are still working ridiculous hours and are too scared to ask them selves "can I find better else where?".

Testing your own code is quite a conflict of interest. Of course you are going to make sure that all your tests pass. And argue that the corner cases that you didn't test will never happen in production.

Regardless of this I expect, as a paying customer, to be asked and have that choice respected.

> And you need some telemetry. Minidumps/coredumps make debugging certain kinds of crashes much easier, and Apple captures that sort of data too.

I don't know how Apple does it, but crash reporters have been around for a long time (Netscape had one!) and would always ask you if you wanted to send a crash report.

Apple asks.

I worked at a place where we used to dog food betas, and Microsoft basically refused to accept any reports from them. They only wanted telemetry.

Then you have products like SCCM that are now forever beta, and they play games with release cycles so that you literally have about a 3 week period to report substantial bugs and get a fix. Before that, the product isn’t generally available. (You need to use “pre-release” to keep up with the quarterly updates) After that, you’ll be told that it’s too late in the cycle to fix bugs, because they won’t be fixed until after the support cycle ends.

Indeed, this is surprising for many reasons:

- B2B is a large part of their income, telemetry has probably damaged their reputation as a business vendor.

- They have mostly failed at social media (except LinkedIn and Skype, which they have bought). So, there is no strong need for them to collect all this data to profit off (otherwise free) social media.

- They have a strong developer story with WSL, Azure, etc. They could have replaced Apple as the darling of developers. But not with telemetry, start menu ads, etc.

- At least in the EU, more privacy is where the puck is going. They could take on Google's weaknesses.

And it’s hard to see any benefits of them collecting all this data. If I remember correctly, there was a rumor that their telemetry told them that nobody used the Start Menu, leading to the Windows 8 debacle! Have they pushed any new features lately that have been directly attributed to data collection?

Almost everything? Insider Blogs continue to make it pretty clear that in the Windows 10 "Windows as a Service" world, almost everything is subject to telemetry based development/focus/resourcing. Insider Builds themselves often have A/B testing experiments in play.

Even things like the giant Console rewrite and WSL apparently owe just as much to telemetry meriting their resources as the (return) of Azure and DevDiv's "developer-first focus" to Windows (after all these years).

(A fun irony of the "Start Menu debacle" to which you refer was more of a sample size problem than a telemetry problem. With Windows Vista-8 keeping telemetry primarily opt-in, they mostly only had interesting subsets of newbie/casual users that clicked yes during setup and power users with vested telemetry interests. Newbie/casual users tend to launch apps "Search only" or "Desktop only" keeping all their shortcuts on the desktop. Power Users tend to use alternate launchers or become increasingly "Search only" over time, especially if you count Win+R old timers, which Windows did. Microsoft had a good argument that trying to make the telemetry opt-out would avoid such biased sample sets going forward.)

> A/B testing experiments

I'm used to this on web and mobile - because arguably their apps are their private property which I'm using, but there's something incredibly uncomfortable about my operating system running an experiment on me. I get that Windows is also Microsoft's property, but it's the lowest level in the stack, which makes my hardware more theirs than mine if they're able to do what they want with it.

I'm not even against telemetry as long as it's transparent.

Maybe I'll go back to Linux soon.

So far as I know, the A/B experiments haven't happened in "RTM" (or "RTW" as more accurate) builds, only Insider builds (which are opt-in). The Insider blogs have also been generally transparent in which tests were performed, at least after the fact, but big ones were also announced well in advance to avoid confusing users.

The biggest/wildest example that was A/B tested to date was Sets. Sets was a feature/system where nearly every window in Windows was heterogeneous tab-capable. (Illustrative example: Open a Word document, add a tab for some OneNote notes, add a browser tab for some research. Save it all as a Set to the Windows Timeline as Set, open it all back up at once.) But ultimately Sets never made the cut out of testing (too many compatibility issues, not enough telemetry usage, too confusing a UX sometimes, not enough apps in the wild with Windows Timeline support, etc) and it sounds like the project is now dead.

(Supposedly it was partly dropped too because apparently they were piggy backing on Edge's UWP tab control and with Edge going "Edgmium" that tab control was considered less critical infrastructure to any team and less of an "in-box" control to piggy back off of. Microsoft Terminal got a version of the UWP tab control pushed out into the open source UWP control toolkit, but probably not in time to be reconsidered as an in-box control for Windows.)

(I was sad I never ended up in the group with Sets turned on. I wanted to play with it.)

(ETA: Also, I really hope as Edgmium gets closer to launch it uses a XAML Island to pick back up the UWP tab control where possible. That would be one great way to feel a bit more Edge and a bit less Chrome knock-off.)

Microsoft wants to be like Facebook, where they can make each and every pixel on screen a part of an A/B test, and gather ineffable amounts of telemetry based on that information, which they can then magically turn into amounts of money that would embarrass even God.

They fail to understand that "Be Like Facebook" is not a positive aphorism or outcome.

>B2B is a large part of their income, telemetry has probably damaged their reputation as a business vendor.

Don't their Enterprise and business editions of windows omit all the telemetry?

No, not even close.

> - At least in the EU, more privacy is where the puck is going. They could take on Google's weaknesses.

Ironically, it's Europe where privacy championing Apple is way less of a player than Google when it comes to smartphones and services, especially compared to the US market.

So I'm not sure if a privacy conscious approach would buy them much in the EU, at least among consumers.

Mostly due to 1 EUR = 1 USD pricing and other problems. Europe is a tier2 market for Apple.

>1 EUR = 1 USD pricing

Isn't that mostly explained by the fact that EUR prices have VAT included (typically 20%) and US prices do not?

I don't think so.

I was not able to find concrete sources but I think that has more to do with the expensive pricing of iPhones and Apple's former image as a somewhat invasive and consumerist company. I remember there being a decent amount of distrust against their vendor-lock-in techniques.

Overall, I would say consumers' privacy-sensitivity in Europe expresses itself largely in the increased usage of Telegram, Tor, Firefox, and Linux compared to the US.

I don't know why you've put "former" in there. Lots of people have iphones in Europe, but everyone knows it's an expensive commitment, and if you use all the nice integrations and Apple services it's hard to extricate yourself.

None of my friends stick with Telegram for long simply because of andorid's battery saver apps. Notifications simply wont show unless they open the telegram app.

I don't use Telegram or Android at the moment and so can't be sure, but I wonder if this would help: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-remove-android-a...

Because they sell their devices for US-based prices to people with EU-based income.

Ironically, it's Europe where privacy championing Apple is way less of a player than Google when it comes to smartphones and services, especially compared to the US market.

That's partly because Apple's rhetoric is not always matched by the practical realities of its devices and services. Are they better than Google/Android? Sure, by a long way. Are they actually good? Different question.

For example, assume that you do not wish to transfer any data to or from your Apple device via any third party online system, including Apple's own iCloud, at least not unless it is fully end-to-end encrypted and there is no realistic possibility of the external system reading the data. Instead you prefer to keep everything local, for example connecting to another device over your local network or directly using one of the secure wireless mechanisms. This should be an entry-level requirement for any genuinely privacy-focussed system, yet to this day Apple's lock-in effects and the lack of end-to-end encryption for many types of data using iCloud are in direct conflict with achieving that most basic of privacy requirements.

Connectivity is completely optional on iOS. You can operate without iCloud and securely transfer files through a variety of methods.

What methods would those be, please? I know a lot of people who would be very interested in the specifics of how to import or export things like calendar entries, notes, contacts and the like.

Apple has only just introduced the ability to transfer everything from one iPhone to another directly. You still infamously can't transfer many common data sets onto or off those phones through standard protocols, and Apple's proprietary software seems to have a poor track record, again pushing users towards iCloud.

Since local was in your requirements, just plug your phone in to you computer and drag the data files out of the apps with iTunes. There's a whole interface for doing just this.

If the particular app you have in mind doesn't support that feature (most of the ones I use do), that's not Apple's fault.

iTunes does not always work reliably, from direct personal experience.

And the fact that Apple's entire system uses a proprietary storage scheme and doesn't support standard protocols other than for a few specific cases like photos clearly is a decision that Apple has deliberately made.

iTunes does not always work reliably, from direct personal experience.

IME, wirelessly iTunes can be flaky, though better than in the past. My direct personal experience is that if you use a wire, as stated, it's flawless.

iMessage is pretty useless in Europe, because alternatives like WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, etc are pretty widespread. Aditionally a lot of Apple's new stuff is wither US exclusive or US first . Apple Pay is very new in a lot of countries and barely any banks support it (mainly because credit cards aren't as widely used I guess). Lots of Apple Maps features are only available in big cities, Apple stores are a lot farther apart over here. Asking Siri in German to play a song with an English name hardly ever works. Don't forget that US prices are without tax while their prices in Europe usually include VAT, so the devices seem a lot more expensive too

iMessage is useless because it’s just sms over internet but then it only works if the other person has an iPhone. It works fine but everyone uses WhatsApp because that works on all phones and you just can’t rely on everyone using an iPhone. There’s just not enough added value to justify that limitation.

Originally iMessage was supposed to be opened up for third parties but that never happened for some reason.

> They could have replaced Apple as the darling of developers

Hardly, from my perspective, but do you have sources for that claim, or for Apple formerly being the "darling" for that matter?

If one speaks from a Silicon Valley perspective, they call Apple a developer darling because it seems like every developer has an Apple laptop

True, but Apple has a huge developer fan base whereas Microsoft didn't until very recently, and that's only due to their massive course correction with WSL, VSCode, among others.

Microsoft, the largest software company with the most-used OS by businesses, most popular pc gaming platform and Xbox, maker of visual studio - The standard dev tool on windows, the biggest java competitor, one of the big SQL engines, one of the big web servers, has had a huge developer fan base since long before Ballmer’s famous “developers” presentation.

Much much bigger than Apple by having much much more marketshare of everything except smartphones.

B2B only cares if there is a compliance problem.

Office has sent documents in crash dumps up to Microsoft for a long time. None of the hand wavy security guys say much about it, because it isn’t an audit finding.

That's insane. Is it still happening? Docs being sent to MSFT?

I think the thing to understand about behemoths like Microsoft is that if the "others" are collecting data then your career will benefit if you hep Microsoft do what the "others" are doing.

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