It's not your imagination – Microsoft's sofware has gone downhill
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Windows in particular feels like a captain-less ship with no one overseeing the big picture and every little group pushing their own little shitty features to prove their raison d'etre and their budgets and promotions.
It's pretty sad really; they used to have a monthly "town hall" where the leadership team was answering real (sometimes tough) questions from employees, but they replaced those with fake / pre-scripted casts with softball "Q&A" meant to introduce a team or a feature instead of answering an employee's concerns; meanwhile, real employee feedback and questions are left to fester in the Yammer echo chamber.
Lots of people leaving core products, but hard to say if that's MS-specific or the industry-wide recent trend. I'm told managers recently did a "stay interview" asking ICs really weird questions about why you're staying at MS, why you'd be leaving, etc. so it's likely the attrition problem is pretty bad.
Do you mean that have much infighting?
Now a 25 member startup (or) an alturistic/idealistic individual(s) sitting in the basement of their parents house does indeed make better software than MS to solve various problems.
But as an Entrepreneur I do have to acknowledge that making bad Software hasn't impacted Microsoft's ability to make money, Google although features in the aforementioned list of `Good software makers` has supposedly made lesser direct revenue with its own products(android) than MS made through it(patents) and Of course what's happening with GCP vs Azure is for everyone to see.
Perhaps that's why MS makes bad SW, It concentrates on making money through where it matters for it and an average consumer don't even know that the MS software they're using is buggy (or) will put up with it unless they have an opportunity to try something else.
Turns out HN removes ?query and #fragment from the URL. The URL I submitted was:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/amd-and-microsoft-release-fixes-for-ryzen-slowdowns-in-windows-11/?comments=1&post=40343211#comment-40343211
We also noticed how documentation completeness and quality took a massive dive. Something like 90-95% of all Microsoft's "docs" these days are auto-generated from the code, and do not have doc-comments to provide English text. So the text, if any, is literally just the identifiers with space characters added between the words.
The only doco they have is some blog articles and maybe a few pages of overview docs for their flagship products. That's it.
I've seen docs regularly updated for each of the releases such as 2010, 2013, 2016, etc... and then just nothing for the 2019 or 2020 releases. Maybe a page or two, that's it.
I recently got an automated email sent to me by GitHub because someone started working on an issue I opened for missing 2019 docs. It's nearly 2022!
If you have issues getting a submission parsed correctly, please email the HN moderator team at hn@ycombinator.com
So it's not empty words, Microsoft loves Linux. At least they they adopted Linux / open source testing organization. (Some projects are better than others, there is OpenQA, but quite often you get free (as in beer in this case) software and pay with own efforts that has not been systematically tested or documented.)
Disclaimer: Developer, have used only Linux for 13 years. Would never take a job again that requires me to touch Windows.
Damn code isn’t anywhere near as fast as it should be, either given the hardware advances (Wirth’s law).
They're saying "what do you want out of an OS?" then putting that crap on a burnt OS. People assumed the OS wasn't burnt.
I think there's profit in delivering what people actually want, regardless of what they say they want.
Windows peaked at WinXP sp3.
Don't let the rushed, incomplete web apps of yesterday scare you away from PWAs!
Yet they mostly are.
I would generally describe all of those listed above as providing a poor experience compared to even a decent native app. Maybe those aren’t what you mean, which is why I’m curious to hear which PWAs aren’t terrible.
Meanwhile, customers clearly and massively choose web apps over more traditional apps. Think of the market share of web/electron apps now: Google docs, Gmail, Slack, Figma and others.
I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts.
The thing is that for a given budget, the development velocity of web based apps is 10x faster than native apps. I’ll get downvoted for that, but that’s the real reason why the web is winning.
I dont know how accurate this take is... I am currently explaining to our customers why we are shitcanning native iOS and UWP apps in favor of HTML5.
What device interaction is demanding everyone continue using native apps? We have no trouble with camera, barcode scanning, signature capture, etc in the browser.
You can literally mortgage a house on a webapp these days without touching a single piece of paper.
Other advantage of webapp is that it's a LOT harder for the vendor to fuck you over with OS updates. For our B2B product this is a massive deal.
I didn't say that, and quite frankly, this almost sounds like a disingenuous interpretation of my comment. As I said, I'm genuinely curious if there's some PWA standard or threshold that provides a great experience.
> while clearly proven wrong by facts.
Which facts, exactly, contradict my poor experiences with the PWAs I named? I don't see an argument in your comment, let alone facts, that make this case.
> recompile it from source to pull in the latest openssl patches...
Why would they do this rather than rely on their upstream distributor to push an updated OpenSSL shared lib, and just apt-get/dnf install it?
... things have gone extremely backwards in this misguided modern rush to statically link everything so we can install it into a container.
"Just use Linux" is easy to say, but I wonder, would it really improve things?
With that said I remember Barnacules Nerdgasm talking about this and essentially it came down to MSFT relying too much on tests and not real-life usage[1].
Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 - these are fantastic OSes, better than any Windows OS before or after on any metric I care about.
Exchange 2010 was an excellent product, Active Directory resolved some management niggles, Powershell reached version 3...
MS is peaking now, it started around 2017, just after Satya Nadella became CEO.