I live in PNW and have lots of friends working at Microsoft. Despite the whole "One Microsoft" drumbeat, they're pretty much still the MS of old with little tribal infighting trumping customers' needs.
Windows in particular feels like a captain-less ship with no one overseeing the big picture and every little group pushing their own little shitty features to prove their raison d'etre and their budgets and promotions.
It's pretty sad really; they used to have a monthly "town hall" where the leadership team was answering real (sometimes tough) questions from employees, but they replaced those with fake / pre-scripted casts with softball "Q&A" meant to introduce a team or a feature instead of answering an employee's concerns; meanwhile, real employee feedback and questions are left to fester in the Yammer echo chamber.
Lots of people leaving core products, but hard to say if that's MS-specific or the industry-wide recent trend. I'm told managers recently did a "stay interview" asking ICs really weird questions about why you're staying at MS, why you'd be leaving, etc. so it's likely the attrition problem is pretty bad.
When I was younger, I saw companies as infallible constants. After being in the field for a while now I see that isn't so. Legitimate software can carry only so much bloat. We're witnessing the downfall of MS (Windows) and no one seems to realize. A new player will emerge to fill the void.
Mostly Mac. If apple were to come out tomorrow with friendly repair, driver support, and can be deployed on any hardware - Microsoft would be done. It would only be Google and apple. If I could simply just install osx on my desktop PC, I'd use it.
macOS (and Apple's macOS applications) have been on a slowly accelerating downward spiral too for the last 5..7 years, maybe not as obvious as Windows, but for a long time Apple user it's definitely noticeable.
As a consumer I never felt Microsoft was great at making software, They used(& abused) their monopoly position to stay relevant or perhaps even ubiquitous for software until the likes of Yahoo, Google and other members of FANG showed up and proved that they could make better software.
Now a 25 member startup (or) an alturistic/idealistic individual(s) sitting in the basement of their parents house does indeed make better software than MS to solve various problems.
But as an Entrepreneur I do have to acknowledge that making bad Software hasn't impacted Microsoft's ability to make money, Google although features in the aforementioned list of `Good software makers` has supposedly made lesser direct revenue with its own products(android) than MS made through it(patents) and Of course what's happening with GCP vs Azure is for everyone to see.
Perhaps that's why MS makes bad SW, It concentrates on making money through where it matters for it and an average consumer don't even know that the MS software they're using is buggy (or) will put up with it unless they have an opportunity to try something else.
I happened to read it correctly, but it’s definitely ambiguous. Little can describe the locality of the infighting or the amount of total infighting, where the former was the intended meaning.
This headline has nothing to do with the linked article. The article discusses a fix for Win11 on AMD processors. The article does not claim, or even imply, that "MS software has gone downhill."
I'm not a Microsoft booster, but it seems that submitter has an axe to grind...
That's an interesting anecdote, from a MS developer, which I hadn't seen. And certainly relates to the headline you posted.
Too bad HN won't allow the direct link, and apologies for assuming you were trying to misrepresent things.
Customers like me definitely noticed this happening.
We also noticed how documentation completeness and quality took a massive dive. Something like 90-95% of all Microsoft's "docs" these days are auto-generated from the code, and do not have doc-comments to provide English text. So the text, if any, is literally just the identifiers with space characters added between the words.
The only doco they have is some blog articles and maybe a few pages of overview docs for their flagship products. That's it.
I've seen docs regularly updated for each of the releases such as 2010, 2013, 2016, etc... and then just nothing for the 2019 or 2020 releases. Maybe a page or two, that's it.
I recently got an automated email sent to me by GitHub because someone started working on an issue I opened for missing 2019 docs. It's nearly 2022!
I've restored the URL. Sorry about that. But I don't understand how you arrived at the title - that language does not appear anywhere on the page as far as I can tell. In that case it would be better to use representative language from the OP itself. ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." is in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
That's an insightful post. What a pity it got lost because of HN's URL stripping.
So it's not empty words, Microsoft loves Linux. At least they they adopted Linux / open source testing organization. (Some projects are better than others, there is OpenQA, but quite often you get free (as in beer in this case) software and pay with own efforts that has not been systematically tested or documented.)
Disclaimer: Developer, have used only Linux for 13 years. Would never take a job again that requires me to touch Windows.
"Microsoft doftware has gone downhill" is not what the article is actually about, nor does it really touch on the topic. The title of this post should probably be changed..
Reading around the web, there are also a lot of complaints how buggy Mac OS is nowadays. Kinda obnoxious how the 2 companies are worth billions (or trillions?) but can't deliver polished software.
I assume people want features and eye candy over stability or performance? Or the companies think they do. But apple’s snow leopard was a tune up that was well received and effective. Maybe nobody likes doing hard work for boring stuff?
Damn code isn’t anywhere near as fast as it should be, either given the hardware advances (Wirth’s law).
That sounds to me like the sort of things users will say they want. But when they imagine an OS, they just sort of take stability for granted. Like, if I say, 'picture your favorite food, now what can you to do make it better?' you didn't start by picturing it burnt. You pictured it the way you liked it.
They're saying "what do you want out of an OS?" then putting that crap on a burnt OS. People assumed the OS wasn't burnt.
I think there's profit in delivering what people actually want, regardless of what they say they want.
I genuinely don’t understand what people are referring to when they use PWA in this context. Do the latest versions of Google office suite apps qualify? How about Outlook in the browser, or maybe TensorBoard or Slack?
I would generally describe all of those listed above as providing a poor experience compared to even a decent native app. Maybe those aren’t what you mean, which is why I’m curious to hear which PWAs aren’t terrible.
Yes sure... the old song of « these new web apps like Google Docs are terrible, we should go back to MS office 97 ».
Meanwhile, customers clearly and massively choose web apps over more traditional apps. Think of the market share of web/electron apps now: Google docs, Gmail, Slack, Figma and others.
I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts.
The thing is that for a given budget, the development velocity of web based apps is 10x faster than native apps. I’ll get downvoted for that, but that’s the real reason why the web is winning.
> I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts.
I dont know how accurate this take is... I am currently explaining to our customers why we are shitcanning native iOS and UWP apps in favor of HTML5.
What device interaction is demanding everyone continue using native apps? We have no trouble with camera, barcode scanning, signature capture, etc in the browser.
You can literally mortgage a house on a webapp these days without touching a single piece of paper.
Other advantage of webapp is that it's a LOT harder for the vendor to fuck you over with OS updates. For our B2B product this is a massive deal.
Web is not winning. It is forced down your throath. Google "apps" are terrible. My former employer tried to use them but stayed with MS Office. Office PWAs are horrible. If 365 is a PWA why does an xlsx openned in sharepoint a different look (no ribbon, other fonts) than an xlsx opened in Excel 365 ? And MS Teams looks like an incompleted CS assignment for a first year college student.
15 years ago I used exactly zero web apps in my daily work and life. Today I use exclusively web/electron/react native apps: VSCode, Slack, Google Docs (which I’m perfectly happy with), GitHub, Figma, Miro, etc. And my retired mum also uses web apps while she used none 15years ago: Facebook, Facebook Mobile, Gmail, etc. And clearly these cases are representative of a large part of the population, judging by the revenue of companies with Web tech based UIs. So yes, web tech is winning.
> these new web apps like Google Docs are terrible, we should go back to MS office 97 ».
I didn't say that, and quite frankly, this almost sounds like a disingenuous interpretation of my comment. As I said, I'm genuinely curious if there's some PWA standard or threshold that provides a great experience.
> while clearly proven wrong by facts.
Which facts, exactly, contradict my poor experiences with the PWAs I named? I don't see an argument in your comment, let alone facts, that make this case.
Wait until you see native apps made by people with the same skills as those who make “shitty web apps”. At that point the word “terrible” does not even apply anymore.
Without Microsoft software, Ransomware would not hardly exist. I think the “downhill” has been a huge cliff for the past few years, but it’s getting worse. Nothing drives Azure business better.
That's just survivorship bias. Ransomware attacks are very low-tech and mostly rely on social engineering. (Unless you think the average hospital IT department is going to use an open-source patient tracking program and recompile it from source to pull in the latest openssl patches...)
People assume that if you just switch to Linux, you'll get world-class security no matter what you do. But, real-world use diminishes that significantly (non-technical users, IT teams who aren't command-line gurus, vendors who ship outdated patches, budgeting departments that won't approve expenses to move off out discontinued software, etc. Not to mention, Linux as a platform is battle-tested for server purposes only. Local exploits abound.
"Just use Linux" is easy to say, but I wonder, would it really improve things?
Whenever I see these kind of headlines, I expect some deep analysis of said topic, but it then it disappoints with your average article.
With that said I remember Barnacules Nerdgasm talking about this and essentially it came down to MSFT relying too much on tests and not real-life usage[1].
Windows in particular feels like a captain-less ship with no one overseeing the big picture and every little group pushing their own little shitty features to prove their raison d'etre and their budgets and promotions.
It's pretty sad really; they used to have a monthly "town hall" where the leadership team was answering real (sometimes tough) questions from employees, but they replaced those with fake / pre-scripted casts with softball "Q&A" meant to introduce a team or a feature instead of answering an employee's concerns; meanwhile, real employee feedback and questions are left to fester in the Yammer echo chamber.
Lots of people leaving core products, but hard to say if that's MS-specific or the industry-wide recent trend. I'm told managers recently did a "stay interview" asking ICs really weird questions about why you're staying at MS, why you'd be leaving, etc. so it's likely the attrition problem is pretty bad.