
Microsoft’s problem isn’t how often it updates Windows, it’s how it develops it - okket
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsofts-problem-isnt-shipping-windows-updates-its-developing-them/
======
JoshuaJB
I spent this summer working on a Windows team at Microsoft, and this article
is incredibly insightful for an outside perspective. The dev process
internally is basically just waterfall sped up 3x. While my team only
permitted code commits after adding to and running the tests, that did not
seem to be the norm. Almost weekly one of our sister teams would not only
break a feature (that happened pretty much every day) but break the build.
Things got so bad that as we approached this most recent release, management
(under pressure to reduce the number of failing tests) just disabled the
majority of our failing tests.

While it might slow down some of the feature work, I think it's clear that an
always release-ready master branch is the path forward for Windows. Some of my
more enterprising managers were already working on splitting our subfeature
out of the Windows release tree just so that we could do that when I left a
couple months ago. I hope they succeed, otherwise I worry for the future.

~~~
alxlaz
Hey, do you accept congratulations from someone who's used nothing but Unices
for ages now?

The stuff you and your (now former) colleagues have put up lately is
remarkable. The last version of Windows I used on my home machine was Windows
2000, and Windows 10 is the first one I've looked at since then and said you
know, I could actually use this thing, I guess.

I don't trust your (former) bosses enough to make the switch, but you folks
have done some pretty amazing stuff lately.

~~~
_greim_
Ha! This makes me chuckle. I myself was a web developer during the decade of
IE6 dominance, advocating for Mozilla all the while. Despite it being trendy
and contrarian to praise "M$" nowadays, I feel like that ice is _only now_
beginning to thaw. Not so much the coming of spring, but a slight decrease in
the hoarfrost on the windowpane. Great shuddering booms as the lake ice
cracks. That sort of thing. Yes, if Microsoft continues being non-horrible, I
may _eventually_ warm up to them :)

 _Shuffles back to corner. Furtively plays with new TypeScript toy. Hisses at
passerby._

~~~
godzillabrennus
I remember installing Mozilla Firefox on family friends computers in those
years and changing the icon to IE so the average person wouldn’t notice and
the world would have one more Firefox user.

I was a teenager.

~~~
gear54rus
interesting. did it work?

~~~
seba_dos1
From my experience, it usually did.

~~~
zaphirplane
Not with my hank and other banks

~~~
ungamed
Did your hank sell propane and propane accessories ?

------
pmontra
Microsoft could have a flawed development process but the slowness of the
update procedure and how it seizes control of the machine is much worse in
terms of UX. My Ubuntu laptop gets updates almost every day. I could make them
happen in background but I want to know what's going on so I make it display
the list in a window, check it and click OK. From now on it takes little time
to finish, even if there are new versions of the kernel. I recently updated a
Windows Server 2016 VM switched off since September and it was a half day long
nightmare of downloading / updating / rebooting loops. If I ever considered to
move back to Windows (I never did) that would have made me change my mind.
Anything but Windows.

~~~
netheril96
One of the cause is that Windows by default does not allow you to remove or
replace opened files. So to update anything you have to close all applications
holding an handle to it.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
The many lockdowns on opened files (even just reading) is one of biggest
design flaws in Windows and has cost me many hours dealing with it. It makes a
lot of things needlessly complicated: from updates over file based backups to
sometimes even just reading a fscking logfile or config file.

~~~
selimnairb
Yes, pessimistic file locking is a fatal design flaw in Windows. Where did
they get this idea, VMS? What problems is it meant to solve? Unixen seem to
get along fine without it.

~~~
forapurpose
> pessimistic file locking is a fatal design flaw in Windows. ... What
> problems is it meant to solve?

How else do you prevent people from overwriting each other's changes to the
same data? Whether the lock is at the file level, field level, etc., how else
do you manage collisions? It seems so obvious that perhaps I misunderstand
your question.

~~~
corrigible
... versioning with NTFS ADS?

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Oh dear, the next "let's squeeze some more arbitrary complexity into a thing
that should be simple" fuckup is supposed to be a solution? One has to be a
horribly inexperienced engineer not to see how ADS is a _very_ bad idea.

------
chmln
Windows update is probably one of the worst engineered parts of the OS. On my
quad core i7 with a dedicated GPU it used to take anywhere from 45 mins to two
hours to install the big updates and around 30 mins for smaller ones.

Not only they take ridiculously long, eventually you are forced to update upon
booting in or shutting down. Never mind that you turned on your PC to, you
know, get something done potentially urgently.

In contrast, I can upgrade my months-stale arch Linux box in under 2-3
minutes. After seeing how much better the same hardware can run, there is no
going back.

~~~
blattimwind
Windows Update is based on packages, which can be installed or not installed
and depend on other packages and also conflict with packages. Unlike Linux
packages, these packages act more like ... patches, I guess. I think Windows
Update spends most of its CPU time on building and solving a big dependency
graph.

~~~
craftyguy
I don't buy it. I just updated an Arch Linux machine that had been powered off
for a while, ~3GB of packages (~200 packages IIRC) were updated (along with
new/changed dependencies for some of them) in about 10 minutes, not accounting
for download time which is totally dependent upon inet connection speed.
During that 10 minutes, my system was 100% usable, and I was able to save all
of my work and reboot it at my earliest convenience.

~~~
Marsymars
Anecdotally, I recently updated my Arch VM after about a week of uptime, and
it somehow OOM'd mid-kernel update. Guidance online suggested it was
technically recoverable, but seemed easier to just blow the unbootable VM away
and recreate.

------
rixrax
I just wish we were able to time-warp back to Windows 7. And start again from
there.

I liked Windows 7 user experience. I had to boot up one in a VM the other day
to debug a legacy issue. I realized how much I really did like it. I liked the
control panel and all that. All that unified Metro(?) UI that has been
developed since Win7 with mobile and touch in mind (that never happened?),
with the new management tooling that seems to be only half way there combined
with the near death of native Windows apps has effectively driven me to Ubuntu
Desktop. Ubuntu userspace on Win10 is nice but then again, to me Win10 has
been reduced to just something I run Firefox or Chrome when needed. Even
Lightroom works well enough on Wine nowadays.

I get it - I am an old grumpy guy lamenting on change, probably off-topic
too...but still, oh boy I wish they had decided to go some other direction!
;-)

~~~
buboard
I use windows 7. I still get updates and nothing is forcing me to update. Life
is easy and I can enjoy my coffee.

~~~
jug
At least through next year, after which it’s EOL.

------
cpeterso
I've reported bugs to Windows Insider's Feedback Hub, but none have ever been
acknowledged or fixed. So I can relate to the recent stories about critical
data loss issues reported but never acknowledged.

An issue that affects me daily and would be easy for Microsoft to test: my
Bose Bluetooth headphones' computer voice knows how to pronounce all my other
devices' names (e.g. "Chris's iPhone"), but it must spell out my Windows
machine name letter by letter. Even if I rename my Windows machine to
something I _know_ my headphones can pronounce (like "Chris's iPhone"), they
spell it out. Perhaps this is a bug in my Bose headphones, but these are very
common headphones so I'm surprised no one at Microsoft or Bose has addressed
this problem. My hypothesis is that Windows machine names are UCS-2 encoded
and the headphones interpret the "extra" bytes as word delimiters.

~~~
p2t2p
Ha! CardDav and CalDav support tickets has been opened since 2014. Nope. I
boot my surface (probably I should’ve sold it long time ago) every once in a
while to see if it supports my calendar and contacts server yet. Nope. Every
single OS does it. But not windows. What is even funnier is that they actually
have support for iCloud which is CalDav and CardDav but nope, no custom config
for you.

~~~
bpye
Sadly Android doesn't do CalDAV or CardDAV either, at least without a third-
party provider.

~~~
cpeterso
If neither Windows nor Android, the two most widely-distributed operating
systems in the world, do not support CalDAV or CardDAV, then who is using
these standards? :) I guess Microsoft and Google want to promote their own
calendaring solutions, Outlook/Exchange and Gmail.

------
GnarfGnarf
Since switching to Windows 10, my Visual Studio debug Output console is
polluted with streams of debug statements from within Windows itself. Can't
find my stuff. Someone forgot to turn off the debug trace statements in the
Release version of Windows. WTF?

~~~
chrisper
Are you attaching to the kernel?

~~~
GnarfGnarf
Not that I'm aware of. It's just a plain Win32 app, nothing fancy.

------
bkraz
I disabled all wake timers so that the machine will never wake itself from
sleep Then, I set the Windows Update active hours to be early in the morning.
Now, when I use the computer I wake it from sleep with the keyboard, use it
normally, then put it to sleep when done. This has allowed me to install
updates when convenient for me since it effectively stops auto update
behavior. Sort of like how it should be.

~~~
rplst8
I like this answer. People who often complain about Windows just don't bother
learning how it works. I like Linux just as much, but both have pros and cons.

~~~
seba_dos1
This is not just "learning how it works", this is "learning how it works in
order to come up with silly workarounds".

------
tannhaeuser
I'm aware not everybody will be able to switch, but for me, 2018 is actually
the year of the Linux desktop as all my projects and customers in 2018 are
using it (plus a decreasing number of Mac OS notebooks still, but Windows is a
complete outlier in IT shops). And Ubuntu is not bad at all compared to the
alternatives.

------
Piskvorrr
The process seems to be "we have so much lock-in, that literally no matter
_what_ we do, we're driving away only a fraction of a percent of users. We're
erasing data left right and center, and users only bend over further." No
wonder all stops are pulled out with this attitude.

~~~
vezycash
I don't think it's this. It's more like they got bullied into this by the
media, Apple and the tech community.

For years people sang about the many vulnerability of Windows at every turn.
IOS spat out new features at a steady pace.

On the other hand, MS had to support the ever growing list of Windows versions
and their incompatibilities - slowing down their rate of development.

The tech community was singing the praise of Lean and MVP.

Everyone loved to shit on IE for holding back the web. While praising Chrome
for being chrome - having only one version to support.

And somewhere along the line, Google got the bright idea to remove the ability
to disable Chrome's automatic update.

Add all these factors and more that I didn't mention and you'll see how MS
came to the forced update decision.

Lest I forget, Nadella saw how he could fire Microsoft testers, reduce
expenses and raise stock price with a forced update stroke. Irresistible.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
> It's more like they got bullied into this by the media, Apple and the tech
> community.

Oh, yes of course they got bullied! They got bullied into having a totally
overengineered OS that is probably a nightmare to maintain, even without the
many special switches that keeps faulty big player software from crashing.
They got totally bullied into a naive design philosophy for their APIs and
into churning out new framework after framework. And of course they got
bullied into this by Apple and the media!!1 Google and Apple and all the rest
bullied them with their despicable efficiency in rolling out features! /s

Sorry, but painting Microsoft as the poor victim here is a bit rich.

Windows is probably a nightmare to maintain and test for. I can really
understand why the engineers wanted telemetry to track which API calls
actually are still in use. They probably dream of having just to deal with a
handful of subversions of Windows 10 and not with a zoo of rotting 7s, 8s, and
XPs. Hence the forced updates.

Many other platforms are lighter and more agile. This entire container thing,
e.g., would have been impossible to get started in the byzantine environment
of Windows. Heck, I have a hard time imagining the elastic cloud getting
started on an operating system that doesn't even allow your processes to
continue after logout, and has a footprint in the 10s of gigabytes. Just for
the basic needs.

And all of this is not caused by the inconsiderate craziness of evil
outsiders, but by how Microsoft operated and designed in the 90s and early
2000s.

~~~
illumin8
Well said. Microsoft has been churning out shit like this and poisoning the
entire technology industry for decades. I get a little bent out of shape when
people think they're somehow altruistic now because they released Windows
Subsystem for Linux. Their OS is still a shit product, and it gets shittier
every day.

If Microsoft really wants to do "the right thing" they need to burn it down
and start over. Something like ChromeOS with a Linux kernel and containerized
emulation for win32/64 apps.

~~~
vezycash
Windows RT, metro apps, universal apps, UWP... were attempts to restart and
make things better - didn't work, & pissed off existing users.

Remember how they rebooted Windows Mobile to Windows Phone? Didn't work as
well. In fact, they rebooted Windows Phone OS three times (7, 7.5), (8, 8.1)
and 10,[1]. Every single reboot cost them users.

[1](Microsoft's attempting another zombie resurrection with Core
OS/Andromedia. Let's see if they release it and how it fares in the
marketplace.)

I wouldn't even call ChromeOS a brand new thing. They turned an existing
product - Chrome, into an OS.

See how Google's dragging their feet with Fuchsia? If their internal
politicking (from the android team) is strong enough, Fuchsia will never see
the light of day.

Point is, unless Windows' market share evaporates, it'll be insane for them to
do the "right thing."

------
lawnchair_larry
Pretty predictable result when you decide your company no longer needstesters
because companies like facebook don’t have them.

------
samfisher83
I think chrome started that trend with the the auto update. I am just not a
fan. With software if you at least know the bugs you can work around them.
With constantly changing software you have incompatibility new bugs. At least
with pro version of Windows you can kind of disable auto update.

~~~
vezycash
>At least with pro version of Windows you can kind of disable auto update.

Since when? You can turn off Windows update service but it will turn itself
back on. Even with Windows update turned off, they still have a way of quietly
slipping stuff into your PC.

~~~
tmymt
>Since when? You can turn off Windows update service but it will turn itself
back on.

Use the Group Policy.

>Even with Windows update turned off, they still have a way of quietly
slipping stuff into your PC.

No.

~~~
TwoNineA
Which policy? Does it work on non Enterprise versions?

~~~
tryptophan
No. Windows removed group policies for Pro users for some reason after win7.

~~~
Falkon1313
No, it works fine in Windows 10 Pro. I got Pro specifically for that reason.
When you alter the settings, then Windows Update shows "*Some settings are
managed by your organization" and a link to see what group policies are set.

------
captainmuon
IMHO the problem is how monolithic the whole OS is built. How the hell is it
possible that they "build Windows"? That includes things as diverse as file
system drivers or notepad.

If I want to make a small change to notepad, I should not have to check out
the whole Windows source code, but just notepad. Then you could have different
development methodologies for different projects.

They should rip everything out piece by piece, and make it an addon. Then
you'd have a minimal Windows core, a Windows shell, and the individual
accessories. The shell alone would still be a huge project that you'd want to
split up ideally.

The challenge with such a model is that you have to be really strict with
interfaces between components. You have to define these interfaces, you have
to quickly provide other groups with interfaces they need, and you have to
provide backwards compatibility as long as any other component uses your
interface. It's much more work, but it's better than the ad-hoc coupling you
get if everything is one monolithic build.

------
giancarlostoro
Yeah, if updates were reliable I wouldnt care, but not only are they
unreliable, but they autoclose all your important work. So many coworkers get
annoyed when they come back to work and Visual Studio and Chrome was closed
due to updates so now they have to go back and figure out where they left off.
I may see if I can suggest our (uncommonly competent) IT guy to install
Windows Enterprise instead for the sake of not being forced to update,
although I might run it by our team lead to be sure.

~~~
robbyt
With that attitude, I'll bet your IT guy thinks you're a bunch of complaining
idiots. If you're actually respectful to him, and work with him to fix
problems, your relationship will likely improve. Managing Windows 10 is hard,
and he sort of has an impossible job, as MS updates have become so awful.

------
acd
Future prediction.

Windows is no longer Microsofts core product, Microsofts cloud offering are
its main revenue base. As a side effect Microsoft decides to open source the
Windows code base. Microsoft is already the largest contributor of open source
on Github.

Windows becomes a application compatibility layer in Linux and are also ported
to Mac OS X. You can now run Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS X including
games without the update issue.

~~~
EpicBlackCrayon
I'm not sure why I keep seeing this repeated around the net, but that isn't
the case. They're working on a rewrite of Windows that is based around UWP
called CoreOS.

[https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-
os...](https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-
polaris)

------
johnchristopher
Reminds me of this [http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-
software....](http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-
software.html) (from 2005, during the longhorn debacle that would turn into
Vista).

> I would argue that Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the
> world has changed... The companies that "know how to ship software" are the
> ones to watch. They have embraced the network, deeply understand the concept
> of "software as a service", and know how to deliver incredible value to
> their customers efficiently and quickly.

------
nikanj
The Onedrive case seemed a bit weird, honestly. The complaint seems to boil
down to "beta builds contained bugs". That's the point of having beta builds.

It seems a lot of people are using a Google-esque vocabulary where "beta" just
means "new and fancy", and are really surprised when the beta release has bugs
in it.

------
codedokode
I don't like Microsoft's attitude toward users [1]:

> Windows 10 Home users will receive updates from Windows Update automatically
> when it's available. Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise users will
> have the ability to postpone updates. The amount of time that Windows 10 Pro
> users can postpone updates is limited.

Basically: unless you pay a ton of money, we will use you as a guinea pig for
testing.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/windows-10-specifica...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/windows-10-specifications)

------
oculusthrift
am i the only one that’s doesn’t notice windows updates at all? like a lot of
people seem to have this issue but i’ve never noticed it

~~~
emsy
You'll notice if you use standby heavily. No problem on my Mac. I think at one
point I had a year uptime. Windows will happily close my opened documents and
reboot on its own.

~~~
rplst8
I use standby/sleep all the time no issues.

------
cft
As a developer, Windows Home 10 became unusable. It is essentially an update
machine, it seizes control and just updates, restarts, i have no control over
the machine.

~~~
cheez
"As a developer, Windows Home 10 became unusable"

You're not the target market. I haven't had to help my parents with their
computers since they switched to Windows 10 home.

~~~
sureaboutthis
In the meantime, my restaurant chain's POS systems and my wife's laptop, which
keeps the books for us, are constantly having issues. Support for the POSes
say to restart the system every day to avoid problems. (Can you believe we
have to do that? It doesn't solve all issues, though.) Haven't a clue what to
do about my wife's problems except I hope, soon, to be able to just do a full
reinstall.

Even better, I hope to replace it altogether with a Linux desktop or, even
better, a Mac.

~~~
will4274
> my restaurant chain's POS systems

Just to state the obvious, home versions of operating systems aren't designed
to run POS systems for businesses. That's what professional and enteprise
versions are for.

~~~
volkl48
Well, those aren't either. That is the intended use-case of the special
versions (W10 Embedded or maybe LTSB)

~~~
nikbackm
The embedded and LTSB versions are practically the same.

