Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control
theregister.com122 points by pjmlp 5 hours ago
122 points by pjmlp 5 hours ago
The auto-translation by LLM on https://learn.microsoft.com/ is horrible. Because it has no idea what is explainer text and what part of the syntax of a command, programming language, class members, ... It translates reserved words that when taken at face value lead to errors. E.g. for https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/windows-hardware/drivers/d... you get /gerät-aktivieren for what should be /enable-device which must not be translated. For this reason I made a bookmark to switch to English:
javascript: (function() {
var url = window.location.href;
if (url.match(/de-de/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/de-de/gi, 'en-us');
} else if (url.match(/en-us/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/en-us/gi, 'de-de');
}
})();lol I really despise it when corporations try to be "too" smart/helpful and automatically translate their shit to the local language guessed from your IP, which is a major pain when traveling.
Google absolutely sucks ass at this: You can't set your default language without having a Google account which I refuse to sign in except on YouTube, and there's no easy way to change the language on some of their pages.
> In 2014, the company decided it could do without many of its testers. Mary Jo Foley reported that "a good chunk" were being laid off. Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
There were of course even more roles in the prehistory, but if we think the 2000s, I can count at least: RDB design and management; planning and specification work; interfacing with the customer; testing; merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack"; merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and, as such, sacrosanct.
Even early in its history, Microsoft was famous for merging these together into a single role: "developer". I remember reading (but can't find now) an article about how IBM has all these fancy roles like designer, architect, tester and the lowly programmer, and Microsoft's approach of integrating then is what allowed then to succeed over early competitors.
Remember Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, developers, developers" (in about 2000)? That's why.
I'm not saying I totally agree (although I think I do at least a bit), just that this is hardly new.
The “developers” mentioned in the monkey boy song were actually third-party developers. Ballmer wasn’t talking about Microsoft’s internal teams or nomenclature.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/the-real-story-behi...
> At one point, Microsoft's QC was legendary
I have been Microsoft-adjacent for 30 years, and at no point in that time have I been aware of Microsoft having a reputation for "quality".
Yeah, the "Microsoft Works" product was considered an oxymoron
I think they went too Moneyball and figured telemetry and metrics could solve everything. McNamara fallacy and all that
A pretty thin opinion piece, I was expecting more details. But there are a bunch of comments under that article which is probably juicier than the main text.
The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
They seem to be very slowly losing to Apple on the laptop / productivity market and first signs of losing to Linux on gaming.
In the same way that their incompetence has been very slow to move the needle, once they lose the market it’s going to be almost impossible to get it back.
I don't think Linux will ever fully take over gaming regardless of effort unless competitive multiplayer game companies decide to give up on assuming total control over your system in order to make cheaters undetectable to the average gamer*.
It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".
But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.
* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.
Only on markets where folks can afford Apple margins.
As for Linux, I keep waiting for the return of netbooks wave, in something that isn't a constrained Chromebook or Android tablet with keyboard.
Ordinary people buy what they can see on the local PC stores, not buy over Internet, importing System 76 and similar.
More than anything, once people realize that they can be fine without MS because 5-10% of the non-Apple market has done so (and the alternatives has figured out the kinks with the mass influx of users) it could move from a trickle to an avalanche.
The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
I think they already know and have been trying not to lose to Apple for a long time, as evidenced by their awkward attempts to embrace “good design” and “cool”.
There will be consequences, but long term. Everyone at my startup hates MSFT products and Teams especially. We've talked about switching.
Everyone hates teams, but every company uses it and will keep using it because it's bundled with office anyway.
lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).
The startup I work at uses Teams. It's the whole "Microsoft for startups" package deal they do means we're on all things Microsoft.
Why "talked about switching" is irrelevant. If it is cheap enough, you will take it.
Most people dislike their government, they however comply with it in the dimensions that matter.
The difference is that every time a new company is founded, it's a clean slate for which tools are used.
Yeah. I know this one.
Its the same story since like 15+ years now.
Well, with the windows 10 support ending, it is different now. To some extent staying on windows requires more effort than switching, which is an interesting place to be. I have "switched" people to macos or linux that before would not even bother and hear such stories everywhere. The linux ecosystem has matured and windows is no longer the easy/bugfree experience that was. Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago, linux worked out of the box while for windows I had to go troubleshooting mode and find/download/install drivers manually. 10-15 years ago or so it was always the opposite.
I don’t get the Teams hate.
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
I can’t imagine going back to a time where I couldn’t just throw an excel file or ppt in a discussion and get collaborative editing straight away.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
The only thing I really like about Teams is that the AI-optimized audio codec is the only video call audio that doesn’t cause some people’s voices to become physically painful to listen to.
Visio was built to be acquired by Microsoft. It was the best office family app pre-acquisition. Every subsequent release is worse than the one before it.
Lucid is a better tool in every way.
Teams works fine for my limited needs. Though it feels sluggish, sometimes a chat or calendar takes 3 seconds to load.
Even loading a command prompt or the calculator takes more than 3 seconds on Windows 11 so maybe they've just lowered the bar so much it passes internal testing.
The other day I clicked "share" on a PowerPoint presentation saved in OneDrive, and it reverted to a version several hours old, losing that work. This is a typical experience using any of the Office products. Copilot is not "good at minutes and transcription" by any stretch of the imagination. It cannot understand a _simple_ word I say, with an RP-British accent, let alone many of the acronyms and terms used in industry.
Fortunately we have already switched away from Teams to Slack for chat, but since the best way to win is not to play, I just write text in vim and presentations in Keynote. Fortunately I have approximately no need for spreadsheets that aren't simple lists, though that appears to be the lock-in.
I'd rather use literally anything else. Google's stuff is probably best, but Quip was also fine.
Anecdotally:
I happen to use Windows on both personal and work laptop. Some of the bugs I see exist across Home and Enterprise version. Sleep remains a nightmare on Windows, and yes across laptops made by different manufacturers. I have created tickets and this, and IT doesn't have a solution.
I have decided that my next personal laptop definitely won't run Windows, and if I am allowed to ask for a Mac machine at work in the future, I'll jump at that opportunity.
That would mean two fewer Windows licenses and less usage of related products (good riddance, Edge!). And I am sure I am not the only one who is thinking about all this.
But of course I have no idea if that matters in the grand scheme of things -- after all, many people tolerate these bugs just like they tolerate all the ads by Microsoft, Google, Meta etc.
Time will tell if they'll hit the trust thermocline: https://xcancel.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
But I think it's the worst aspect of the subscription model. In the past, people just wouldn't buy the new version if it sucked
> At one point, Microsoft's QC was legendary.
Is that legendary QC in the room with us right now?
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
Not really a fair comparison since this was probably alpha-quality software, and the build they used was very likely build for that specific demonstration (that ok, went badly). Like the (in)famous first iPhone presentation where Steve Jobs had multiple iPhones and needed to exactly time when to change between them otherwise they would crash.
Complaining about Microsoft's lack of quality control is like complaining the strip club has poor lighting for reading.
Both Microsoft and Apple software quality has go down recently. What is going on. Is it the AI-produced code? It can't be that...
I don't know how are things in Google land; their apps and websites are just-OK; however GMail seems quite stagnant - yeah they slapped LLM on it, cool; but other than that... they added Chat? few years ago? But at least Google's stuff mostly works, even when it's boring.
There was a total revamp to GMail called "Inbox" that Google was working on for a while, but it got deprecated and cancelled before it was released. From what I heard, they were testing it internally and most people liked it. It just was more search focused so the backend costs were more than they thought they could bear and it was scrapped.
Patches have been a mess the last couple years. Makes me think someone or a group of people either quit, were fired, or got pulled into the ai side of the business. The mistakes being made are that of junior programmers without a proper lead or review and testing team. That plus removal of features and addition of too much telemetry into the os and office products.
As one MS Director put it out of frustration: "We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers. That's it."
More precisely: He said MSlers get paid by results, achieved Business Value. Testers exist and are called "End Users". Testing is mandatory and part of the core philosophy - they just must do it differently.
Reason: Fear of missing out if moving to slow.
I reminisce the times, where you put in a CD without internet connection. Actual Office is a mess. Thousands of half finished apps, subject to be cancelled anytime. Windows XP's UI was dubbed "glossy" - some of Office's apps UIs are LSD trips for kids. This is ridiculous. Nothing to work with and in no way usable for customer presentations.
> We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers.
Maybe they should read bug reports posted by the end users, and not have half-baked solutions posted by Very Ignorant Persons.
Not just that, but even their game studios. Take for example Starfield. Lots of hype, massive letdown. I'm one of many massive Bethesda fans. Starfield absolutely could have had so much more, but HN knows what happens with software projects. Deadlines aren't met, marketing / business depts start signaling that we need it out the door yesterday, and a bunch of things get cut. I have seen on reddit loads of comments about a ton of content being cut out of Starfield, which is ridiculous, Bethesda games are always content rich.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
Bethesda was notorious for releasing products riddled with bugs long before they got acquired by Microsoft. Morrowind has multiple fan patches, so does Oblivion. Fallout 4 used to crash a lot. I don’t think Microsoft as anything to do with their current sorry state.
Riddled with bugs is frankly expected for Bethesda.
Starfield's main problem was the shallow content which is very unlike Bethesda. Skyrim, for all its faults and issues, had so much to discover. As did the previous entries in the series. As did Fallout.
I don’t know. I stopped playing Elder Scrolls games at Oblivion which was significantly more shallow than Morrowind, itself less ambitious than Daggerfall. On the Fallout side, NV was great but not made by Bethesda and 4 is pretty much just a bad FPS with boring paddings in between the shooting.
I think the constant content downgrade has been going on for a long time.
My view is likely very tinted. Skyrim was my first Bethesda game and while I did the play the Oblivian remaster, I never touched Daggerfall.
From my view, assuming the remaster isn't too massively different content wise, the change was more in certain mechanics from Oblivion to Skyrim. Lore and story wise both games have incredible depth.
While I did enjoy Starfield, if found it to be flat. They stretched the resources too thin. Much of the content was too repetitive. It felt like a kids game. Neon, the supposed crime den riddled with drugs and gangs, may as well have been a kids amusement park.
Ultimately, the fact that Starfield came out over a decade later but offered so much less was a let down. Never mind that the game didn't really improve on the underlying mechanics. Modders solved a lot of loading screens in Skyrim decades ago, but Starfield is full of them. It felt dated at release already.
Bethesda has always been known for its abysmal lack of care about quality. Morrowind (2002) is riddled with bugs, a lot of them game breaking. They're all listed on the wiki, each article having several of them, with steps to resolve them using console commands (which you are expected to use if you want to finish the game).
It's not just their flagship products. It extends to nearly _everything_ they release.
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
The majority of Microsoft’s profit comes from Azure and Office, everything else is almost irrelevant to them now.
The quality of Office is very rapidly declining; it seems that the entire team has moved to forcing AI into every feature instead of fixing any issues. The web version is barely usable (esp compared to Google's versions) and the desktop is quickly getting worse seemingly every day.
I have not used Azure for a few years now; back when I did use it, it seemed pretty good.
That applies to all teams not only Office, even Aspire now has AI on the dashboard, and they proudly made use of AI building the new Aspire CLI experience.
Consequences of having early access to ChatGPT and getting AI knowledge debt?
Reminder: The UEFI/SecureBoot/systemd-boot stack is controlled by Microsoft as well. Microsoft signs our bootloaders.
You can add your key to most UEFI system and don't require shim to have it to boot (or disable Secure Boot). You don't require a MS signed bootloader if you don't want to.
It will get worse, the combined strike of HTML-based "native" UIs, outsourcing and vibe-coding will be too much for any remaining original devs to defend against.
You are complaining that developers can't keep up with vibe coded features. The solution might actually be more AI.
There's an opportunity to automate some of the QA traditionally done manually. I tried this last week on our main app (not some toy thing):
(turn on agent mode in chat gpt)
"Hey put on your QA hat and test <url> with <user> and password. Give me detailed feedback on UX, bugs, etc."
I got a pretty detailed report back and most of it was valid/constructive. I'm planning to do more of this. It beats developers doing QA (they are too biased usually and seem reluctant to do it) and we don't have any dedicated QA people. Manual QA can be very expensive. I don't think the need for that totally goes away, but you should probably focus that on the most valuable/hardest things to test.
In any case, it's pretty cool to watch Chat GPT explore a UI and attempting to use features. It's very thorough and it seems to figure out workarounds for UX issues as well when things don't work as expected. This is exactly the kind of stuff that developers testing their own UIs are blind to. They know where to click and don't even think about it.
A related issue is actually updating documentation and marketing material with up-to date screen captures and screenshots. Annoyingly, Chat GPT doesn't allow me to save the videos it takes of the AI using the browser. But that stuff could actually be documentation gold. Doing this manually is very tedious.
“slowly, then all at once”
Unfortunately the only thing about MS that doesn't suck is their sales prowess. Delivery and quality are optional, but getting companies to use their stack is not.
This is what so many people miss. Its the same with palantir, salesforce, oracle etc. These companies are masters of contract procurement. It doens't matter if the product is dogshit. It doesn't matter if the engineers are good or bad. It doens't matter if the CEO does a sieg hail, none of that matters. Even if they only sold literal empty boxes, they would still be able to find some corrupt fuck willing to buy 500 million of them for a kickback. The product is completely irrelevant, because the real "product" these companies offer is the ability to farm connections with the wealthy and powerful
Hot take but I seriously think both Agile/Scrum and "make a single dev do a ton of things that wouldn't necessarily count as software development" (like RDB design and management) is the direct cause of all of these problems. It is my opinion that Agile/scrum (or, at least, the "agile"/"scrum" that corporations understand) institutionalized the "move fast, break things, consolidate everything into as few positions as possible" mindset, in the name of things like "reducing expenditures" and "ship things really fast and damn the consequences". That includes, oh, I dunno, dumping QA/QC and putting all of that on the end-users. Maybe the real Agile might not do this, but I can't say because, from what I know, very few, if any, corporations actually use the real Agile at all, and instead repurpose the word to mean a completely different system.
While I largely agree, I do think a more significant portion of the problems are caused by Nadella's claims of 30% ML-generated code. If true (as a peddler of ML, there are many reasons for him not to be truthful) the is a rather strong inverse correlation of quality with these announcements and layoffs.
Furthermore, with modern MBAs at the helm, the concern is only pumping figures for the next quarter - five years be damned.
It's also completely possible to do agile with QA. One place I worked had 1 QA per 3 devs, and they were able to maintain a single (2 week) sprint behind cadence.
Scrum was always how Agile was sold to behemoths. It necessarily makes several compromises that deeply undermine it.
Anti-agile is the operational ideology of those who will conquer the future. :')
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"Robin Williams on Bill Gates"
Why quoting Robin Williams is relevant here?
He seems some kind of actor. Are you quoting his fantasy how Bill Gates thinks?