That's Windows strength as well as its weakness. For example, I've heard that Windows Shell (whose proud team member is Raymond Chen) has to carry the baggage of backward compatibility, heritage code base and stuff like that simply because some forsaken customer might be using a particular feature. It's really hard to innovate in the environment like that.
Why new, open, honest Microsoft is still doing it? Or, judging by this action, may be it's still the same, large company, and openness is just a facade?
Microsoft is not doing massive layoffs these days like it did in 2009. And apparently if they lay off certain number of people they don't have to report it.
I'm glad Microsoft is finally catching up with the major smartphone OSs. Virtual assistant is indispensable feature (I'm using Google Now with my stock Android), it's very helpful and combined with great integration between gmail, calendar, driving history, purchases, etc. etc. it's realistically my dashboard to go a check stuff. Is Cortana doing the same? Because I think Siri is more like a useless to y to brag about, but not really helpful at anything.
I seriously doubt that Microsoft has such advanced language processing capabilities that can work offline on a smartphone. For example, as of a year ago, Xbox speed recognition was still based on an ancient technology derived from Tellme networks, you can see it by yourself during Xbox One voice recognition demos. And now you're saying that phone has more processing power to do that better than a full blown gaming console?
I recognize the title of this post as a tongue in the cheek, because "Googler" is a nomenclature for the Google employees, which makes the title sounding really bad. Especially if posted by a Microsoft employee. Please correct me if I'm wrong in my paranoia.
That's what I meant. I personally hate interview questions revolving around "reverse a string" and alike, but really like open ended questions, which result in many options and discussions, AKA "design questions".
But do these "universal" apps still run full screen on 30" monitor? If so, then it's not a good UX. The benefit of a large high resolution monitor is to display lots of information at the same time, this frequently implies more than one app/window visible at the same time.
Haven't looked at the APIs, but are the APIs going to scale between phone, tablet and 30" 4K monitors? It's relatively easy to make the same app to be adaptable between phone and tablet, or even laptop, but to make it look good on 30" 4K monitor is a completely different UX, if full screen. Or in high resolutions the apps run in windowed mode?
one would argue that UX and installation are part of the system engineering. Small screw ups like these leave sore impression of the system and make it unusable.
"But once you start to get bigger, say the 15 person range, it starts becoming unwieldy."
I think this is a good indication that a team is getting too large, needs to be split into smaller teams. There is a notion of "two pizza teams" described by Werner Vogels (http://derivadow.com/2007/02/20/two-pizza-teams/) to keep things efficient and organized. For teams this small, open floor is very productive and efficient for collaboration, including software development.
I think you're missing the point. The problem described in the article is the expected behavior of the indirectly loaded component (mshtml.dll) which creates message loop (COM STA requirement), and because compiler runs as a low priority process, this message loop causes priority inversion which affects entire system. There are many wrong things here:
1. COM uses message loop and hidden windows to serialize calls. This is pretty stupid IMO, but I'm pretty sure Raymond Chandler would find millions of good reasons why it's done so.
2. Layering problem (XML parser uses mshtml.dll etc etc).
3. Why use config in XML file? Isn't XML so 1990s?