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So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.

So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.

I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.

Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...

That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.

The lack of QA isn't felt right away. They are accumulating tech debt, which mean problems are becoming more frequent and harder to solve over time until they fix the fundamentals, and it doesn't feel like they intend to.

1. "isn't felt right away" then what's the correct timescale? Is it 2 years? Is it 5 years? We are looking at 10 years now. Do you have any studies on this that you can quote to prove that at Microsoft scale and for the product they develop, 10 years is the time when things go bad?

2. "becoming more frequent and harder to solve" how much more frequent and harder? Things works pretty fine during Windows 10, but these days I run into a bug in Windows 11 every other day myself.

It would be a surprise if this has more to do with QA from 2014 than vibe coding.

Updates breaking stuff already started when they moved from the security/bugfix-only updates to the add-new-features-into-the-mix model with Windows 10. That was roughly 10 years ago.

For example: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-on-windows-10-annive...

These things have been keeping happening.

These are multipliers. First, the QA left, but nothing major happened for years, automated tests did suffice. Then, vibe code happened, that with the lack of QA, led to disaster.

I doubt "studies" exist and proving every little assumption takes too much effort as per Brandolini's law.

Windows 10 managed to mature in a way that 11 still hasn't over four years in, though.

Windows is like a fractal layer of progressive enhancements. You can drill into esoteric windows features and almost physically see the different decades windows has existed in, not unlike a physical tree (with leaves).

They won't fix the fundamentals, the next API layer will just be built over the broken one.

I'm waiting in morbid anticipation of the obvious next broken layer: They'll rename Windows to CopilotOS, and 90% of how you interact with the OS is through a LLM chat box. Of course, as is historically the case with Windows, there will be that 10% not brought into the new way, so you'll need to launch a traditional windows desktop+start menu to access that stuff. Just like 90% of the system today uses modern UI, but there's still that 10% using the legacy Windows look and feel, like the Run dialog and the Disk/Device manager.

Oh boy, in 2015 Windows 10 was released, and it was extremely broken, including endless reboot loops, vanishing start menu and icons, system freezes, app crashes, file explorer crashes, broken hardware encryption and many broken drivers – so really it was about the same as now. Embracing LLMs and vibe-coding all around made this even worse of course

Oh, Yes. Windows 10 had big issues on arrival. But this is also selective Amnesia. The Windows 8 UI was nearly unusable on release. Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable, the majority of technical users refused to give up Windows XP went straight to Windows 7. And even Windows XP that everybody fondly remembers was quite a mess when it came out. Most home users migrated from the Windows 9x line of Windows, so they probably didn't notice the instability so much, but a lot of power users who were already on Windows 2000 held up until SP2 came out. And let's not even talk about Windows ME.

The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista.

I'm sure that Microsoft greatly reducing their dedicated QA engineers in 2014 had at least some lasting impact on quality, but I don't think we can blame it on bad releases or bungled Patch Tuesdays without better evidence. Windows 10 is not a good proof for, consider Vista had 10 times as many issues with fully staffed QA teams in the building.

> Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable

Vista is different. Vista was _not_ bad. In fact, it was pretty good. The design decisions Microsoft made with Vista were the right thing to do.

Most of the brokenness that happened on Vista's release was broken/unsigned drivers (Vista required WHQL driver signing), and UAC issues. Vista also significantly changed the behavior of Session 0 (no interaction allowed), which broke a lot of older apps.

Vista SP2 and the launch version of 7 were nearly identical, except 7 got a facelift too.

Of course, the "Vista Capable" stickers on hardware that couldn't really run it didn't help either.

But all things considered - Vista was not bad. We remember it as bad for all the wrong reasons. But that was (mostly) not Microsoft's fault. Vista _did_ break a lot of software and drivers - but for very good reasons.

Vista was good by the time it was finished. It was terrible at launch. I bought some PCs with early versions of Vista pre-installed for an office. We ended up upgrading them to XP so that we could actually use them.

I have this vague memory of people being shown a rebranded Vista and being told it was a preview of the next version of Windows, and the response was mostly positive about how much better than Vista it was. It was just Vista without bad reviews dragging it down.

Yeah. I challenge the idea that Vista was terrible but 7 was peak. 7 was Vista with a caught-up ecosystem and a faded-away "I'm a mac, I'm a PC" campaign

It also doesn't matter. It doesn't feel like it, but Win11 released almost 5 years ago (October 5, 2021) and there's already rumors of a Win12 in the near future.

We're way past the "release issues" phase and into the "it's pure incompetence" phase.

> Win11 released almost 5 years ago

Oh wow, I hadn't even paid any attention to that. To me Windows 11 was released on October 1, 2024, when the LTSC version came out, and is roughly when I upgraded my gaming PC to the said LTSC build from the previous Windows 10 LTSC build.

> The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista.

IIRC Windows 7 internally was 6.1, because drivers written for Vista were compatible with both.

Windows 8 was an insane product decision to force one platforms UI to be friendly to another (make desktop more like tablet). Mac is doing this now by unifying their UIs across platforms to be more AR friendly

Speaking of XP. Windows XP SP2 is really when people liked XP. By the time SP2 and SP3 were common, hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and the ecosystem had adapted. That retroactively smooths over how rough the early years actually were.

Same thing with Vista. By the time WIndows 7 came out, Vista was finally mature and usable, but had accumulated so much bad publicity from the early days, that what was probably supposed to be Vista SP3 got rebranded to Windows 7.

Vista was allways trash.

As the tech person for the family, I upgraded no less than 6 PCs to Windows 7. Instant win.

EDIT: Downvote as much as you want, but it is the truth. Vista, ME, and 8.x are horrible Windows versions.

> but it is the truth

It's a very superficial "truth", in the "I don't really understand the problem" kind of way. This is visible when you compare to something like ME. Vista introduced a lot of things under the hood that have radically changed Windows and were essential for follow-up versions but perhaps too ambitious in one go. That came with a cost, teething issues, and user accommodation issues. ME introduced squat in the grand scheme of things. It was a coat of paint on a crappy dead-end framework, with nothing real to redeem it. If these are the same thing to you then your opinion is just a very wide brush.

Vista's real issue was that while foundational for what came after, people don't just need a strong foundation or a good engine, most barely understand any of the innards of a computer. They need a whole package and they understand "slow" or "needs faster computer" or "your old devices don't work anymore". But that's far from trash. The name Vista just didn't get to carry on like almost every other "trash" launch edition of Windows.

And something I need to point out to everyone who insists on walking on the nostalgia lane, Windows XP was considered trash at launch, from UI, to performance, to stability, to compatibility. And Windows 7 was Vista SP2 or 3. Windows 10 (or maybe Windows 8 SP2 or 3?) was also trash at launch and now people hang on to it for dear life.

It delivered a terrible user experience. The interface was ugly, with a messy mix of old and new UI elements, ugly icons, and constant UAC interruptions. On top of that, the minimum RAM requirements were wrong, so it was often sold on underpowered PCs, which made everything painfully slow.

Every version of Windows released was an unusable piece of garbage, back to the beginning. MS put it out, it was crap, but somehow managed to convince users that they needed to have it, patched it until it was marginally usable, then, when users were used to it, forced them to move on to the next.

The main difference is that Windows 11 is already 4 years old.

Just because it’s getting worse faster doesn’t mean that it wasn’t getting worse before

The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:

Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”

Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?

The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.

Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.

> Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?

I think you're underestimating the QA burden for large parts of the company. When I worked in payments at MS, the ratio of QA to dev after the cuts was probably on the order of dozens to one, if not a hundred or more once you threw in Xbox/Windows/etc accessibility QA from across the organization and all the other people like lawyers involved in handling over a hundred jurisdictions. I was little more than a frontend line cook and even I had three QA people reporting directly to me; two of them helping write tests so they ostensibly should have been automating themselves out of a job.

There is a lot of manual testing when you have a complex system like that where not everything can be properly stubbed out, emulated, or replaced with a test API key. They also have to be kept around to help with painful bursty periods (for us it was supporting PSD2, SCA, or 3DS2, forgot which). Payments is obviously an outlier because there is a lot of legal compliance, but the people I knew in Cloud/Windows also had lots of QA per dev.

I wouldn't be surprised if the degradation in feature parity of newer Windows software was a result of this loss of QA. Without the QA, the developers have to be less ambitious in what they implement in order to meet release schedules, and since they don't have experienced QA they can't modify the older codebases at all to extend them.

Remember also, they were doing an enormous amount of testing with third-party devices and software*. Which is what seems to keep blowing up most spectacularly. Even if something works on 99.9% of computers, with a billion installs that's a few million dissatisfied customers

* Stories like this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250610-00/?p=11...

In writing life critical systems like the Space Shuttle's operating system, effectively 99.9% of all work is QA.

MS had the dominant operating system in the world, and keeping its userbase and its ~monopoly dividend would have been more profitable as a business than doing... everything it's done in the past twenty years. Selling software that all the people use all the time just has a lot less opportunity for growth than making new software, according to Investor Brain.

>In writing life critical systems like the Space Shuttle's operating system, effectively 99.9% of all work is QA.

Similar in automotive safety related systems like brake, steering or powertrain.

Few is writing function code to how much is requirement engineering, FMEA and writing tests and testing.

The Windows ecosystem is insanely complex. And they supported it, because of the focus on QA and testing the company adopted 20 years ago after the Blaster worm.

I have a few pretty awesome teams stuck managing windows. They find bugs all of the time. The process of fixing them now practically requires a detachment of druids and Stonehenge to track where in the windows/lunar/solar cycles we are and how to deal with the bullshit & roadblocks the support and product teams throw up. If you fall for their tricks, you’ll miss the feature window… no fix for 18 months.

It used to be much easier as a customer in ye olden times, and I never felt that the counterparty at Microsoft was miserable or getting punished for doing their jobs. We feel that now as customers. You didn’t establish relationships with engineers like with other vendors, but there was a different vibe.

The focus of the company moved in to Azure, service ops, etc.

I worked in the windows org around that time and the Dev/QA ratio there was closer to 1:1. QA did both manual testing and much of the automation, quality gates, and did regression testing against older versions of windows. Given the complexity of the product is is fairly easy for an inexpensive change to require an expensive test effort.

I had a QA engineer who gave me feedback on designs, great code reviews, and who wrote tests that I could also run.

It was a partnership. I miss it.

And honestly, that person deserves the same pay grade as a "normal" engineer. But sadly, most QA staff are underpaid and somewhat even an inferior class.

Instead, if the QA role was the dominant and better paid title, you'd immediately see an improvement in that partnership. I don't think that you need subordinate staff in the QA role at all.

And for what its worth, I'm that guy. I am a strong technical software developer, but I would much rather test and poke at code bases, finding problems, working with a "lead" developer, and showing them all their quality mistakes. If I could have that role at my pay grade, I'd be there.

Quality testers are so extremely valuable.

In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.

Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.

When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.

> Two QA per dev??

QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy.

* Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.

> QA is a lot cheaper than dev.

QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.

I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.

> QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all.

The classical joke is: (this variant from Brenan Keller[0])

A QA engineer walks into a bar.

- Orders a beer.

- Orders 0 beers.

- Orders 99999999999 beers.

- Orders a lizard.

- Orders -1 beers.

- Orders a ueicbksjdhd.

First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.

The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

[0] https://xcancel.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232?...

That's just a bad dev. Good devs don't think of just the happy path. My experience of QA as a quality focused dev has not been good.

The purpose of QA is to identify the unhappy paths that the good devs missed, not to compensate for bad devs.

I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.

If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.

Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.

The irony here is that the market is willing to pay for quality.

I don't have time to deal with phone issues-it should just work so I can get on with my day.

Hearing that Apple were dedicating time to stop features and go after stability is exactly what I want to hear.

The saddest here is "were". iOS 26 is every day showing us that quality left Apple few years ago.

I'm pretty sure that the recent shitshow (at least in iOS land) is the failure to have tentpole Apple Intelligence features, so scraping the bottom of the barrel and shipping things that were in no way finished (e.g. Liquid Glass UI/X).

Important to note MS used to have 2 types of QA:

1. SDETs (software design engineer in test) - same pay scale and hiring requirements as SDEs, they did mostly automated testing and wrote automated test harnesses.

2. STEs (software test engineer) - lower pay scale, manual testing, often vendors. MS used to have lots of STE ftes but they fired most of them in the early 2000s (before I joined in 2007).

An ideal ratio of SDETs to SDEs was 1 to 1, but then SDET teams would have STE vendors doing grunt work.

Having STEs as full time employees benefited MS greatly. They knew products from the end user and UI/UX perspective inside and out in ways even the SDETs didn't.

UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.

Imho, there are two key values that I've seen QA bring to software companies.

1. Deep user/product expertise. QA (and support) almost always knows more about how users (including expert users) actually use the product than dev.

2. Isolation of quality from dev leadership politics. It should be unsurprising that asking an org to measure and report the quality of its own work is fraught with peril. Even assuming good intentions, having the same person who has been developing and staring at a feature for months test it risks incomplete testing: devs have no way to forget all the insider things they know about a feature.

The best places I've worked were places where QA reported up an entirely different leadership chain than engineering, and where they got their own VP with equal power as the engineering VP, and their own seat at the same decision-making table.

When QA is subordinate to engineering, they become a mere rubber stamp.

A good question to ask when joining a software company is "Does QA have the power to block releases over the objection of engineering?" I have found companies who can answer YES to this put out much better products.

2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)

It's a lot easier to write code than to make sure it doesn't break something you didn't account for.

Microsoft's quality control used to be: release a buggy new OS then forge a solid next release.

Going backwards in stability is out of character.

I've never known M$ to be lacking on the sales front, personally!

> Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me.

The only person I heard was writing perfect code was Donald Knuth. And even he had bugs in its code.

> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.

We know this was the correct move because Microsoft's stock price has gone up tremendously since 2014, those in the c-suite received massive bonuses and the worlds most efficient system for resource allocation has deemed it so.

> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department

A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.

According to Microsoft's top brass, Copilot (one of them) should easily be able to handle QA. So OP's point remains.

There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.

There's always Windows Server...

Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!

Accelerationists seem to think the world after a vacuum is going to be some utopia

I think more competition is better than less

More competitionis better. If you take the market share and revenue off the table and spread that around in a competitive market you'd be in a much more interesting spot with respect to technology advancements. Instead we continue to stagnate with bullshit like Windows 10 --> Windows 11. Windows 11 was never supposed to exist, but $$$$$. There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. But Microsoft knows it can milk businesses and schools out of ridiculous profits for, essentially, the same garbage and also collude with hardware manufacturers to sell more PCs.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...

I think Windows 11 in particular is a confluence of two other problems with respect to competition:

1. Subscriptions instead of discrete paid versions removes the incentive to put out a good product. In the past, if the new version was bad it was a direct financial hit. But now there's no direct financial feedback loop, as long as it's not so terrible that you leave the subscription entirely

2. I think Windows 11 is the first time there's no other version of Windows still in support you can use to "ride it out"

> There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade.

Well there is the violations of Fitts law with the movement of the start button to the centre of the bar?

But it does make it look slightly more Mac! They should make sure the next upgrade moves the corner to grab away from the actual corner, and that the cursor change for grabbing it doesn't always trigger if they want to really rip it off.

It's not only MS with an interest in maintaining these misfeatures in consumer tech. It's not even only private industry.

Indeed! I'll wait on the penguin or fruit side with some pop-corn and see where the things are going to.

Seems like the fruit vendor is on the same train as MS if not just a few cars behind yet still arriving at the same destination.

And MS is on the verge of adopting the penguin completely. They are currently still in the "extend" stage.

Extending the draw bridge to let their prisoners out.

>A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors.

thank god microsoft is the only entity on the planet that uses telemetry or violates privacy. get rid of them and we're in a new age!

The shift from an engineer-led corporation to an MBA-led corporation has brought Boeing close to the brink of collapse.

There seems to be a lot of internal factionalism that's showing up in the final product. I think this is a chromic disease that flares up every couple of years and is then clamped down on... but for whatever reason the lessons are never learned for long.

I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.

> Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one

I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm.

It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.

> It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.

This is a feeling commonly shared here.

I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years.

Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting).

Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it.

Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.

> I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market

Companies continue to pay the IBM tax, but the way IBM writes support contracts incentivizes customers to work very hard at moving workloads to Windows/UNIX. IBM is choosing "Better to reign in [mainframe], then serve in [commodity compute]."

(All apologies to John Milton)

You are missing 8.0. When Microsoft in its incomparable wisdom decided we needed a tablet OS in the PC.

At least we get Visual Studio Code for free

Yeah they baited everyone, blocked Python and C# plugins and then closed down their marketplace to 3rd party editors. Classic EEE tactic.

Some useful tech has come out of the development of VS Code that every other editor has been able to benefit from but I don’t rate it much as an editor any more.

It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.

Other than what they're doing to the whole Open Source ecosystem by buying github, stealing all the code for their AI regardless of license, renaming multiple adjacent things to "Github *".

So essentially, they need to turn quality around or suffer the thousand cuts of death like Intel?

Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?

> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene).

I will never ever understand this. Development and QA are two different mindsets. You _can_ do both, but you* can't be great at both.

* There's always exceptions, yes, yes.

> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.

Yes, yes, "agile" everything...

I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.

No one is blaming LLMs.

Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.

On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code?

Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.

Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry

Why not both? It's not this industry, it's everything. Fuck Jack Welch, fuck the Chicago School.

Yes, it is both. If something is forced top down as a productivity spike then it probably isn't one! I remember back in the days when I had to fight management for using Python for something! It gave us a productivity boost to write our tooling in Python. If LLMs were that great since the start, we would have to fight for them.

Wholeheartedly agree.

I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.

That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.

Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.

It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.

Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.

Is that true? I've heard both sides of this.

Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise:

https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl...

On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.

That’s a cop-out though. Company boards are legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders, and plenty of shareholders would agree that running a business in a sustainable way that can deliver profits over the long term is more in their interests than a business trading its future for some short term profits.

It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.

Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.

They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons.

Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.

Windows has been losing market share for years now.

> Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.

Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.

Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one

Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.

If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).

The argument I usually hear is that you only truly get the 10x improvements with <new-model> (right now, Opus 4.5), so they've only had a few months, not years. In a few months, it'll turn out that <new-model> wasn't actually capable of that, but <new-new-model> is, and as that's not been out long its unfair to judge so early. And so the cycle begins anew

Very true. Look at the wikipedia article for "AI Winter" to see how old this cycle truly is...

Its a misunderstanding of costs. Its the same misunderstanding of thermodynamics applied to dieting. Inputs do not equal outputs, or even scaled outputs. In any dynamic system there are costs to storage and costs to processing. This is how you can increase your calorie intake and still rapidly lose weight, yes, I have lost 30 pounds that way.

In the case of LLMs the only way LLM use becomes profitable is if this condition are achieved:

    processing + storage + input + validation + maintenance < manual output + manual support

People are pointing their fingers at QA, and while that is a big part of it I think the bigger issue is, like you said, them not really caring about some of their core products. Windows 11 seems to exist purely so that they can earn passive ad revenue while vacuuming up user data, Office 365 is now just a pile of mature applications that are slowly getting worse and new applications that are too unfinished to be actively useful.

I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.

The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.

So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.

I think they keyword is "highly skilled." However, not everyone using the LLM will be highly skilled, especially juniors new to the industry.

They weren't great before LLMs either.

Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.

So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.

They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.

Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.

Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.

On a whim I gave my 14 year old an old System76 laptop with ElementaryOS on it then sent her back to her Mom's house on the other end of the world. Then she switched schools and ended up requiring a laptop instead of an iPad to do her work. I about crapped my pants but she's been using that laptop almost problem-free for two months now (two glitches with Firefox that she got around). She even figured out how to install Sober so she can play Roblox. While that probably says as much about my parenting as Linux's progress I have to say, I'm pretty impressed.

Have you tried Windows 11? The WSL2 integration works really well. And the work that is being done in regards to safe vms so games can move away from kernel anticheat is also exciting.

As someone that was really into WinRT, pity that the whole UWP stack went bust, it was so mismanaged that outside Windows team themselves no one else cares any longer.

As was the case with Windows 7, I'll move off of Windows 10 when they pry it from my cold, dead hands (or some new hardware is no longer compatible). Each "upgrade" from Microsoft is a regression.

I have to use Win 11 for work. It's terrible.

I have to run several windows debloat tools and powershell scripts to both remove AI and spyware, apps that I do not want or need, and to also force windows 11 to not reinstall the apps and spyware that I have removed.

It's fine as long as you don't mind Microsoft recording everything you do, every game you play, every keystroke you make, all for the purpose of selling to other businesses so they can invade your life and sell things to you, and for them shoving their terrible microsoft software and their microsoft preferred way of doing things, not taking no for an answer, and even when you forcibly pry their invasive shitty fingers out of your hardware they just force them right back in on an update or a random reboot.

Fuck Windows 11. 10 was pretty shit, too but at least once you ran scripts to remove the microsoft bs from it it stayed out.

They still need to land on consumer PC shops for regular users to take notice, until the trend of online only, and zero OEM support, rather reverse engineering even when there are systems out there like Dell XPS, Windows and macOS will keep being what most regular users buy.

Either that or a mix of tablets with detachable keyboards or Chromebooks, none of them GNU/Linux powered.

Oh it did help.

Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.

Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away

Or LLMs weren’t good enough yet years ago, but the growth curve looked so promising that an investment seemed a good idea.

Also: do you have a reference for “a couple years ago Microsoft [made] LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production”?

I know they started investing, mentioning future benefits, but don’t remember them saying their Windows development team (heavily) relying on it.

Everyone should read "The Bear Case for AI" thread:

"The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it."

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/2014255931215716545

I think it's naive to believe AI is used primarily for productivity boost. It's used mainly for cost reduction and to increase profits, even if quality and productivity take a hit in the process.

exactly my thoughts as well - if LLM really were massive productive booms - then we would see the number of bugs in major software platforms going down - we would see more features - but neither is happening

so yeah we're being sold a bag of air

this reasoning is flawed.

wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?

some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.

Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]

[0]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/msft/employees/

It's not LLMs. It's returns-driven-development.

Growth at any cost. Once growth is unable to increase the wealth of the shareholders the money has to be diverted from elsewhere, via cuts. Money gotta keep flowing upwards.

But the second was always the case, windows and everything else is getting shittier so fast it would require a prompt explanation if we didn't have one.

Rose tinted glasses.

Windows 2000 may have been bearable but windows has always been shitty.

If they used copilot and it was years ago, I'm actually impressed there are no reports of Windows PC's exploding

Microsoft is not even using dotnet core and what not, internally. SLT is very hard on adopting AI, but not much on getting results

(1) a couple of years ago, LLMs for coding sucked pretty bad.

(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.

(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.

If anything, we see a decrease, not an increase.

Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.

Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.

The distance between the promise and the reality really is huge. On some level I wished they'd just promise less, because it's not like LLMs compleatly useless. I don't find much use in them, but some clearly do. They do them. But since the entire economy has apparently bet the farm on AI, underpromising isn't really an option, while underdelivering is a problem for future Microslop and co.

Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"

I guess you haven't tried ZZK-5.6 with Maverick Agent? What prompt did you use? If it doesn't work, you can always try a swarm of agents with model hot-reload and re-spin. That will solve all your problems, write all your code and then make you a cup of coffee.

Can it detect sarcasm?

But web people can write css faster so I think it is a net positive?

Yeah, but I'm very worried about subtle errors getting introduced

[dead]

> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.

That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.

> That productivity may not be visible.

I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.

If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.

Reality has a way of showing itself eventually.

Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.

Thanks for the heads up, I was not following closely.

Unrelated to the article itself, but I'm really not a fan of websites like this one hijacking the back button to show more articles. It feels like a mistake to have ever allowed websites to modify behaviour of the back button like that, although I'm sure it leads to some usability improvements elsewhere.

Just browse with JavaScript off, or with NoScript. People think it's inconvenient, but it's really not.

The whole form-resubmit-on-back thing is always annoying, but a proper redirect after submission fixes that.

does not happen on brave

I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.

Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.

MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.

[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.

+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.

OneDrive slows my directory navigation to a pace reminiscent of mid-90s computing.

Double-click folder name, wait 5 seconds, douhle click next folder name, wait another 5 seconds. As such, I've moved my working directories out of the bubble in which OneDrive is (corporately) configured to operate.

This is 2026. All this processing power, storage and memory capacity and speed, network bandwidth, and we're regressing thirty years of performance gains. Bang up job Microsoft. I'm glad I managed to personally extricate myself from that particular squirrel grip a while back.

+1 for Syncthing so that I can take the opportunity to correct the very common mis-PascalCasing of its name.

They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.

If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.

A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.

I think system programmers are supposed to come under a more strict standard, simply because they are system programmers. There are programmers, and there are system programmers.

I'm not saying that people should be sacked for just one mistake, unless it is a pretty large one (criminal e.g.). But I'd say system programmers should be allowed to make the same mistake three times maximum. I think that's pretty generous. If the culture does not allow enough time for reflection and education, then that's a different story.

The other programmers do not need to hold the same standards simply because their code (presumably) impact less.

System programmer can crash your system

Web dev can leak shitton of valuable data

If you knew what kind of software runs on Java, C# and even VBA you would shit bricks.

I actually know. A lot of financial software ran on VBA. I heard from a friend that about 15% of option market-making sits on some 30 years old VBA code...Yeah they should be treated as critic software, too.

There are fewer and fewer 'David Cutler' types and more and more 'Pavan Davuluri' types at Microsoft. Wonder if the blame is really down to AI or indeed a lack of attention to detail from a new kind of workforce.

'David Cutler' types are definitely not popular, in his prime time or in nowadays. My only regret is that I have never worked under such a person.

People assumed they could "modernize" software engineering, but, at the end of the day, it's still mostly engineering and very slightly about software. People optimized for the wrong thing.

Yeah, system programming is especially similar to real engineering I guess, which requires a certain characteristics.

On his garage interview, he mentioned nowadays having fun with XBox Cloud hardware running Azure Linux.

https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10730

Yeah I think he moved away from Windows some 25 years ago, after Windows 2000. He gave me the vibe of trying to build something really solid and then move onto the next important target, never lingering in one place for too long.

Same thing happened to me last year: some files on OneDrive where deleted. It was random txt files that I use to log ma progress on projects. I moved everything out of OneDrive and I backup on hard drives. That is a shame because OneDrive was a very good product.

"OneDrive was a very good product." - Was it though?

I’m not 100% sure if this will solve the problem, but I recall that if you open the explorer folder viewer and right-click on the pinned shortcuts on the left (Desktop, Documents, etc.), then in properties > location you can move the folder target.

Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?

[flagged]

Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:

Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.

So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761870

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

I seriously wonder if everyone in the Windows development team(s) are just vibe-coding everything now. I feel like all of these are rookie mistakes from the POV of working on an operating system. This is also the consequence of eliminating all QA and testing and forcing your users to do that for you. Admittedly there are some things that are hard to test (or impossible to) in an automated way, but that's what the old Windows hardware lab test machines were for.

That's why I live very well with Win 10 without updates. I downgraded in May last year from Win11 after months of frustration and headaches and since then everything works smoothly and peacefully.

Windows 10 LTSC IoT 2021 is the way to go, if you have to use Windows. Gets security updates until 2031 but no new "features".

You can't just pay for it like the Home or Pro edition because Microsoft is not interested in actually selling an OS as a product to users, but https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend.

I will say that 11 LTSC is also a solid option. I run it myself and I don’t have any issues with it, and it lacks a lot of the crap that Microsoft has been trying to shove in.

At some point there might be compatibility issues with Windows 10 (especially with it now being EOL) so if your a gamer 11 LTSC might be the better choice.

Same here. There's a good chunk of users who've downgraded back to 10 on their gaming rigs.

If you're open for it, try Bazzite. I have it on my HTPC and it's a Playstation-like experience, absolute smooth.

Month after month I read this stuff (along with the seemingly neverending gaming issues with MPO?) and think, yep, I will stay off Win 11 as long as I can

May as well use the Win 10 extended security updates though, right?

Just checking into this thread for the record, I commented in one of these "update bricks windows" threads maybe a year ago about how I don't let my Windows 10 update, still haven't updated and everything is still working great!

If your device is working, after an update there are only two options, either it keeps working or it doesn't. Why roll the dice?

Security patches

Realistically, what's the threat to me if I don't patch Win10? I know in theory if there's some big vulnerability discovered my system would be in danger of getting pwned, but realistically what are the chances of that happening? And if it does, how likely am I to even be affected by it if I'm not doing anything crazy, I don't even do much banking on my PC other than the online shopping.

I think the more realistic danger is that software eventually stops supporting Win10, but I'm still playing XP and Vista games here, so even that seems far fetched.

I think it's more likely you become a danger for others. A safe space for malware

Denial of Service is an attack, is it not?

How can a company this big fail so hard in what one would consider their main* product still baffles me.

*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.

Because they no longer see windows as anything more than a delivery platform for their subscription services, IMO

You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.

If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.

"maintain" meaning keeping it somewhat workable or actually improving it?

ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.

I believe Microsoft can skate for a long time with just bug fixes and security updates. It makes the drop in Windows' quality all the more baffling.

They literally tried that strategy with Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago where they didn't really update it for years, only doing the bare minimum. The result was a downward spiral in market share that they were unable to stop once they started trying again, ultimately resulting in IE effectively becoming obsolete.

Because browsers are one of the very few components that actually need to catch up to the rest of the world, but they've already outsourced most of that work to Chromium.

True but it is still their moat. Without windows they will lose a lot of appeal to their cloud products like Intune, Azure AD, M365 etc

If this is the case, Windows seems like it should be very important. Otherwise they can't deliver their subscription services. I'm not going to subscribe to cable TV if my TV is broken.

It just has to be good enough to be able to deliver the service.

Their moat, for now, makes this possible.

Yup. The same thing is happening with Apple. With software mostly moving to the cloud, operating systems are getting short shrift.

There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.

At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.

If you're good enough at killing lighthouse projects you can defer that.

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...

Weird that they've decided to switch to Linux in 2004 when Windows XP was great.

The switching cost keeps decreasing, because more and more stuff is being migrated to the browser and/or cloud.

Combined with some digital independence movements outside the US, I have some hopes that Windows monopoly starts to crumble.

Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.

The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.

Yes it wasn't until recently that I understood why people ran Windows Server as their home operating system.

The competition is more fierce than it has been since before Windows 95 started the complete domination of the desktop market.

Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.

You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.

You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.

I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.

I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.

Apple prices are out of reach in many world regions.

OEM laptops with Linux distributions pre-installed are only available on online shops known to HN/Reddit demographics.

You can buy Dell machines with Ubuntu or RHEL installed on Dell.com, same thing with Lenovo and their site.

Way to miss my second paragraph, people are always touchy to reply when comes to Linux, some things never change since Slashdot glory days.

If you think only HN/Reddit users know the spell to buy computers on Dell.com or Lenovo.com, I don't know what to tell you.

edit: if it doesn't translate well, I'm just fucking with you

There are many reasons Windows has 72% market share, this is one of them.

The cheapest machine with Linux in the Australian Dell store is 13000 AUD (~9000 USD). You can buy many things for that money.

Weird. The cheapest in the UK seems to be this one https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-m... at £647. It even helpfully tells you that choosing "no Windows" takes £100 off the price.

Not at all, last holiday season Best Buy was selling brand new in-warranty M2 MacBook Air systems for $699.

Apple has close to 20% of new PC marketshare globally which is too much to represent only the high end of the market.

Lenovo and Dell are not some fly by night unknown PC manufacturers.

The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.

The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.

Because they know everyone who's still using Windows has no choices to switch to. They won't use Linux or Mac.

No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.

Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.

If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.

Those people don't even have Windows–compatible computers. They have phones and tablets.

Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)

Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.

Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.

I think you’re missing Active Directory, that’s a major reason why corporations stick with Windows.

Windows server compared to any linux server os is extraordinarily inferior in every regard except for the AD Domain services interface, which is a leftover from probably Windows NT that they haven't screwed with in the interim so it still functions.

The funniest part about Windows Server licensing that I find is the requirement to have CALs (Client Access Licenses) - $5/mo a pop for each device using _any_ service provided by the Windows Server.

You run your Windows Server as a DHCP server? That's $5/mo for the clients to get a DHCP lease.

Of course, one CAL covers all services for the entire client, but it's still funny to me.

If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.

Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?

Correct. IT departments want Active Directory.

Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.

Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.

I think Excel is better in Sheets in ways that are important for a lot more users, but it isn’t the same ways for each user.

Also, which I should have said, is for that small group, the missing Sheets features are a show-stopper, not just an annoyance

Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.

I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.

I’m mostly not running Windows, but I dislike web apps, so GSuite is out. I could use Numbers, but I need cloud file storage that works on Android, and Office 365 vs Google One are roughly the same price for the storage I need, so I don’t see any particular reason to put the effort in to migrate from Excel/OneDrive to Numbers/Google Drive.

LibreOffice

Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?

I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.

Realistically it's because a good chunk of their work is outsourced abroad who then in turn outsource their thinking to ChatGPT.

Ask anyone who was a power user of dBase or Lotus 1-2-3 back in the '80's.

I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.

I see Microslop's "AI" coding mandate is continuing to go well

> After the Power-On Self-Test (POST), and you see the blue Windows logo (if applicable), press the power button again to shut down.

> Repeat steps 1 and 2 multiple times to trigger the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).

What exactly was wrong with pressing f8?

This makes me wonder what the testing method is for this sort of thing. Presumably you'd do as much as possible in VM's to get repeatable states with updates from every conceivable starting point.

But what about physical machines? Exactly how many repeatable update tests on physical machines are done? You get a combinatorial explosion if you need to test on 100 different configurations for hardware and you have 100 different starting points in your pre-update OS image. But something like that (10k tests on physical machines, millions for VM's) is what I would _expect_ they are doing.

I expect this too, but at such insane scale, it won't catch everything, and no one should expect this. The only solution (as far as I know) is very slow releases (starting with something like 0.01% of users) and watching what happens.

At this point Microsoft needs to go back to service packs and a three year OS version cycle. Rapid development doesn't seem to be working.

Heaven forbid any company ever come to the conclusion that shoving updates down your users' throats against their will might not be the best idea humans ever came up with.

Updated Windows 11 on Parallels: Has been stable since 2021.

Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.

All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".

Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.

Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.

I haven't _needed_ windows in over 5 years, and I game pretty hard (though not much in the realm of anti-cheat compatibility drama). Bazzite is my daily driver now for development and pleasure.

Arch is really good. Between Wine, Proton, and QEMU/KVM there isn't any need for me to boot windows anymore

> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]

Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.

Modern Windows... It's like having your own DoS adversary baked into your PC.

Elon's MacroHard initiative will replace all this in the next 18 months.

i hope that whoever caused all those bugs doesn't move later into developing Azure.

(part of me actually wishes it would happen, ngl).

I tried Win11 out for maybe a week before upgrading (I refuse to call it a downgrade) back to Win10. Explorer of all things being slow as molasses on my very beefy system was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, but also idiotic decisions like not letting my move the damn taskbar without hacky 3rd party software certainly didn't help me feeling frustrated with every minute of use.

I dunno what the fuck they're smoking at M$ HQ, it's truly baffling.

That's terrifying, as I currently have no boot stick. Does someone know a reliable free system backup tool for windows, in simplicity comparable to Timeshift on Linux Mint, which I can start from an USB Medium to restore a broken system? (I need to able to exclude some folders, like Steam games)

So happy being on supported, stable version. Every other Windows release is a nightmare and when I saw W11 empty task manager (yes, the bug still persists, of course no response from M$ and some private contact saying to "just reinstall it"), bootloop after defender signatures update and other funny stuff - waiting for Windows 12.

Previous discussion:

>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061

As they wrote it. It only affects physical computer. It seems we now have to learn that win11 is only for VM. Lesson learned

It didn't need Ai to create something as horrific as windows vista.

At least they're shipping a million lines of code per month per engineer. That's what counts.

Guess 30% AI generated code isn't good enough.

LLMS are a farce of productivity, one of the largest companies in the planet with Azure (cost reduction) AND their own inhouse chips and LLMS still can't get anything meaningful out of it, trillions of dollars spent, Lol.

Look on the bright side; at least "not booting" is better than "deleting all your files": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.

The only system where I had this happen was a Google Pixel 6a, where a system update irrecoverably corrupted all (encrypted) data which made it not boot on top.

It's particularly great Monday morning on your phone if you require 2FA to sign in to work.

They just keep digging

Open gpedit.msc, configure policies to disable automatic updates. At this point Windows is a virus that is useful for only playing computer games and should be avoided for any other purpose.

I'm still on Windows 10, and the only issue I have is the huge nag-screen promoting Windows 11 that appears sometimes when I boot up.

No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.

Switch to Windows 10 LTSC. It's easy to strip out all the garbage like the app store, it won't ever nag you, and is supported for longer than the regular version.

I managed to turn it off. But forgot the details. Maybe it was the “RUXIM” binary? I think I unchecked the executable flag for that .exe, or I removed it from the task scheduler.

Anyways, it is possible!

Why doesn't Fedora suck, but windows does? Serious question.

Why is windows literally worse than Fedora? I'm not exaggerating, I just can't understand.

One is an operating system maintained and run by a diffuse community of people, (albeit a flavor of linux with the explicit backing of at least one large company), whose primary goal is to create and maintain a functional operating system that can be used by many people for many different purposes. The other is a product whose primary goal is to convince investors that the company is on a growth trajectory that will continue into the next quarter by extracting value from that product's customers. We've now seen decades of data that suggest disparate results stemming from these priorities in a lot of contexts. I think viewed through that lens, the reason is obvious and was inevitable over time no matter what your threshold of "sucks" is, so long as it has something to do with the thing's function as an operating system

It turns out that most of this stuff is not difficult if you're just trying to make a good computer rather than make billions of dollars for your investors.

Fedora also sucks, if your yardstick for suck is "Sometimes after some updates some users experience errors"

Despite news to the contrary, the majority of Windows updates don't break anything for the majority of users. You only hear about the breakage

I can't wait for vibe-coded TPM implementations.

TPM is apparently so broken, it might as well have been vibe-coded.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531925

> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.

I think I might know...

Cutting QA on your core product is a very Boeing choice.

I have never once in my entire life equated quality of software with headcount of QA department, I tell you that.

Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.

There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.

Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.

> I think I might know...

I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.

I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.

I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].

Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.

Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.

Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.

For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...

[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...

How was the Crowdstrike outage caused by a lack of testing on MS’s part?

(FWIW, Crowdstrike has also crashed Linux systems: https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2024/04/msg00202.html)

It isn't and I am apparently suffering from some very early onset dementia, so thanks for correcting me.

I, for some inexplicable reason, totally forgot that the whole Crowdstrike debacle was so bad because they could directly distribute faulty code to running systems, bypassing MSFT, staggered roll outs, etc.

I, again total mistake on my part, somehow had the mistaken memory that the changes were distributed via Windows Update, when the opposite being the case was what made that so bad.

Basically, mea culpa, honestly simple error and thanks for calling it out.

> MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.

IMO, it's all traceable to their decision to lay off their dedicated QA teams in 2014

Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.

It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).

I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.

Everyone knows Microsoft’s pre-2014 OSes were oases of stability after all.

Fair point, outside my rose coloured memories of Windows 2000, it was likely never a beacon of stability. This is all purely subjective, but in my, frankly not always very reliable memory, I still have the distinct feeling that what has changed is the "in version progression" for lack of a better term.

A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.

8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.

There's a reason many call them Microslop.

Not slop but sophistication.

[dead]

Only 12 year old boys 25 years ago. Use Linux or MacOS, just move on.

I don't think Microslop was a common term 25 years ago.

Okay, Micro$lop.

"Uninstall latest lack-of-quality update"

Vibe-coding at scale.

The most impressive thing is that if they stopped putting out new features, and solely delivered security and optimization patches for Windows, it would unironically be the best no-frills platform. You could just keep milking steady upgrade fees.

But no, they have to go out of their way to accelerate the enshittification of Windows.

>nightmare gets worse

Gets?

It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.

That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.

Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.

Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?

Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061

no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.

The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.

Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.

I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours

It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?

It’s 2026 ;-)

Interesting. I bought a brand new Windows Arm machine the other day that was DOA: It booted with the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME message. I brought it back to Microcenter and exchanged it and the replacement works fine. I wonder if that machine was just updated at the factory before it shipped...

I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.

Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to

Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.

In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:

> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.

W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.

Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.

The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.

There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.

Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).

I don't think you ever tried using something truly snappy and responsive, this statement couldn't be farther from the truth.

Standby is broken since the push from S3 to s2idle, this was a wintel move. On windows my laptop would die after a day until I finally forced standard S3 behaviour. After the switch back to S3 it lasts a week again and the resume time difference is negligible.

My Lenovo dock ethernet has gone from not working on Linux and being fine on windows to the other way around.

I do not share your enthusiasm. And since dumped windows entirely after the latest update. Last time I installed windows it took me longer to disable all adds and spyware than to actually install it, another reason for switching.

But with standard S3, the OS can't install Patch Tuesday updates like this without your intervention while suspended! S2idle lets it do that regardless of hardware-level alarm support.

If not for being forced off, most people would never have left windows xp… many medical practices and industrial facilities still are in it.

The Start menu now allows me to do what I have been doing since, like, XP, using shellinks and folders in the taskbar: Sort the Program icons in categories (like "Coding", "Sys", "Tweak", "Web"), to find them easier. This is not totally buggy any more (On Windows 10 the start menu became unusable at some point).

In the taskbar I only have the most used icons. And the opened program instances are separated from the icons. That was doable on Win 10 and I think Win 7 too, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, which is now dysfunct. But the same author has created Windhawk, which does the same plus some other cool things.

The Explorer is useless as ever. I am still using Total Commander with its filter-as-you-type, rename tool and button bars.

What I still miss is a tool like Timeshift on Linux Mint.

For me, the start menu is often just blank, or the color is somehow completely off, if it's not showing "web search" result full of ads.

* notepad with multi tab (but without copilot!) * New screenshot/screen recording tool * Windows terminal

If I can get all these on Windows 10, that would be wonderful.

There are much better 3rd party tools to do these things. Why would you use notepad for anything more than quick, basic editing?

> Why would you use notepad for anything more than quick, basic editing

That's exactly it. I don't want to install third party software whenever possible. If I need to do more complex formatting, I open VSCode (already installed) and start to write in Markdown. In rare cases where I need a fully capable rich text editor, I use Google Docs.

Windows Key + P to change monitor configuration quickly.

I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey... So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.

That is also a Windows 10 feature

Wasn't that introduced in Windows 7?

Yes: https://winaero.com/switch-between-multiple-displays-monitor...

It certainly exists in my Windows 10.

I'm pretty sure that's been a shortcut well before W11, W7 iirc.

Well Windows 11 is much better than Windows 10 on ARM devices.

Otherwise off the top of my head I don’t find Win11 much better or worse than Win10.

It seems like partially moving an app from one monitor to another is improved. Previously, this operation was quite laggy as Win10 must have been doing some involved calculations balancing the DPI between different resolutions.

It just works.

I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.

With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.

Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.

So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.

The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.

Yes you've nailed it exactly. It sucks the least out of all options. It blunders the least. With Linux I would run into issues more frequently with things that worked "out of the box" (like display drivers) so I just switched back

Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.

If it were the best, I'd be able to drag a file onto a taskbar icon to do something with it, like I could with every other version of Windows ever (and Mac, and Linux).

But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.

Forkbombing into resource exhaustion aside, W11 is the only system that left me unable to as much as log in

I don't recall either a crash or a need to restart Windows 11 in the last years.

Except maybe when I was trying to use the XMP profile of my memory. It works now, maybe a BIOS update improved that.

I mean, if you have Windows Update enabled, your machine probably rebooted by itself a few times over the last year.

To be clear, I shut the machine down every night.

I understood the complaint to be a need to restart it during use because of bugs.

What other operating systems have you used?

Dual boot with Fedora on my laptop, and my desktop at home is a Mac mini M4. I really like Fedora, it's my Linux distro of choice, but the experience is not as nice as on W11 in my opinion.

Was your laptop windows-first or fedora-first? This makes a huge difference