Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others.
One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.
The only way to achieve performance metrics in a large org IMO.
Google Search is still fast because if you degrade p99 latency an SRE will roll back your change. Macbooks still have good battery life because Apple have an army of QA engineers and if they see a bump on their Ammeters that MacOS release doesn't go ahead.
Everything else (especially talking about "engineers these days just don't know how to write efficient code") is noise. In big tech projects you get the requirements your org encodes in its metrics and processes. You don't get the others. It's as simple as that.
Never worked at MS but it's obvious to me that the reason Windows is shit is that the things that would make it good simply aren't objectives for MS.
Then Microsoft made the brave decision that testers were simply unnecessary. So they laid off all SDETs, then decided that SDE’s should be in charge of the tests themselves.
Which effectively made it so there was no test coverage of windows at all, as the majority of SDE’s had not interacted with the test system prior to that point. Many/most of them did not know how to run even a single test, let alone interpret its results.
This is what Microsoft management wanted, so this is what they got. I would not expect improvement, only slow degradation as Windows becomes Bing Desktop, featuring Office and Copilot (Powered By Azure™).
Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.
And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly look at the output of such an org and infer what its "purpose" is, when defined as such.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
I don't have a good guess for the average age of software developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".
To my ears this is the equivalent of "some guy down the pub said", but maybe I am a luddite.
Also, the Office codebase is significantly larger than Windows (and has been for a while), that was surprising to me.
Microsoft need to update the spec for all new personal computers to include mandatory pre-load hardware. This would have a secondary CPU, RAM and storage used for pre-loading licensed Office products before your laptop boots. AI would analyse your usage patterns and fire-up Office for you before you even get to work in the morning.
Perhaps, this could even allow you to have Office on-hand, ready-to-use on its own hardware module, while you develop Linux application on your main CPU.
Further down the line. Someone see an opportunity to provide access to compatible modules in the cloud, allowing re-use of older incompatible hardware. But there would be the danger that service (without the support of MS), may go bust, leaving those users without their mandatory instant access to licensed Office products, forcing upgrades to even newer hardware.