
What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective - ductionist
https://blog.usejournal.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-an-insiders-retrospective-f713ee77c239
======
tjoff
Vista was amazing.

I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation.

1\. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers.
nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority
of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a
device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up
(and they just continued creating bloat ever since).

Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the _perfect_
opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don't
count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things
rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did
not help.

2\. Pre-fetch/super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If
you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6
months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they
completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random
access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to
speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things
you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority
but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If
doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9
seconds if run in parallel etc.

After enough time this wasn't a problem as all your freely available RAM had
been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never
had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right
away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to
start the browser and office applications after boot.

Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better
tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows
7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit
systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster
and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.

~~~
T-A
I built a new PC in 2007, bought Vista Ultimate OEM, installed it and added
all patches up to that point. Two things became immediately obvious:

\- As others have pointed out, UAC was way too active. Just about any
application you cared to launch required permission dialogs to be clicked
through - irritating to everybody, scary to most users, and quickly
ineffective as everybody stopped reading and just reflexively went for the OK
button.

\- Lots of legacy applications broke for the most trivial of reasons: they
were written to store configuration and other data in their installation
directory, which defaulted to "C:\Program Files". This worked fine on Windows
9x, which by default allows user-owned processes to do just about anything,
but not on NT, where writing to Program Files requires elevation.

So new Vista owners would click through a bunch of obnoxious UAC popups to
install their favorite Windows applications, click through more UAC popups to
launch them, and then watch them crash or mysteriously lose all their data.

You got extra loser points if you went for the shiny new 64 bit version, in
which case your legacy 32 bit application installer was more than likely to
try its luck with "Program Files" instead of "Program Files (x86)". Would it
really have been so terrible to leave the old directory alone and call the new
one "Program Files (x64)"?

None of this was terribly hard to fix if the application was still supported,
but it did require the user to upgrade, often at a cost. Worse, if you were a
small indie developer, releasing an upgrade now pretty much required buying an
expensive certificate to sign it, lest UAC keep warning your users that they
were launching an untrusted file from the scary internet. So lots of small
free- and shareware apps which people loved were abandoned, undoing part of
the Windows platform's greatest advantage: its large library of existing
applications.

~~~
CydeWeys
> Would it really have been so terrible to leave the old directory alone and
> call the new one "Program Files (x64)"?

Or alternatively, why was breaking them out required in the first place? To
this day I frequently end up having to look in _two_ places to find something,
because it's never obvious which of the two Program Files it should be in.
Pre-64-bit Windows there was only ever the one place. This is a permanent
usability regression.

And of course, I wouldn't even need to be digging through there in the first
place if the Start menu launcher just worked, but no, they had to junk it up
with Cortana, which is so incompetent it can't even find installed
applications by name. More details on my Cortana rant here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758641)

~~~
njovin
I absolutely agree with this. There should have just been a 'Program Files'
folder and if a conflicting program was already installed, the architecture
could be appended to the name of the newer install's directory (C:\Program
Files\Foo, C:\Program Files\Foo (x64)).

~~~
pjc50
I tried to find an authoritative answer from Raymond Chen, and the closest I
can find is
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081222-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081222-00/?p=19763)
and linked [http://brandonlive.com/2008/12/22/why-does-windows-
put-64-bi...](http://brandonlive.com/2008/12/22/why-does-windows-put-64-bit-
binaries-in-system32/)

------
knolan
Windows always strikes me as a mishmash of ideas with very little overarching
vision. A somewhat superfluous example of this is the branding of basic system
tools; you have things like Task Manager, Device Manager, Disk Management etc.
On Vista and 7 you can access them by mousing about in the start menu a lot or
by trying to search (or using run, or right clicking on Computer and selecting
manage). But typing ‘Dev’ into search doesn’t return anything related to
Device Manager and only when you type the full name does search return some
long winded response like ‘Manage Devices and Drivers on this system’ in the
middle of a wall of result text. It shows no connected vision between the
ability of the search feature to surface succinct information and the design
of the OS to differientiate its core tools. Attempting to be helpful by
returning a list of tasks in long winged descriptions betrays the lack of
coherence of each tool and its purpose.

MacOS largely succeeds in this regard. I can access Disk Utility simply by
typing ‘du’ (or even just ‘di' or just ‘d’ since it learns your preference)
into spotlight and hit enter. I can launch any app this way without the need
to clutter by desktop, dock or taskbar with shortcuts. Disk Utility and the
various other utilities generally get large well branded icons and names that
set them apart. Many of the Windows tools just use pretty bland and similar
looking tiny icons making the visual aspect of search useless.

Worse still is that if you can have several Device Manager programs installed.
I’ve a lab system that requires Win7. The frame grabber is accessed through
its own Device Manager and my flow control system has something similarly
named.

Reading the article it is easy to see why this behaviour is the case. There is
clearly very little time for polish and for a singular vision on how
everything should look and feel (taste?). It not surprising to see new Mac
users delight in the attention to detail of MacOS. Windows often is obtuse and
gets in the way.

Windows 10, for all its sins, makes some big improvements. Right clicking the
start button or pressing Super-X instantly returns a list of all these system
tools.

~~~
tinus_hn
A major problem with Windows 10 is that its search is basically retarded. It’s
easy to get into a situation where the query ‘printer’ will find the Devices &
Printers applet, but the query ‘printers’ will not.

~~~
pfooti
Please avoid using the r word conversationally.

~~~
klibertp
Why? Asking as a non-native English speaker, please excuse me if it's obvious.
Is "retarded" somehow worse than "fucked up" or simply "shit", which seem to
be accepted in casual conversations around here?

~~~
pfooti
Yes. It is considered by the mentally disabled community to be similar to the
n word. It is a word that was used to marginalize an entire population, now
used to describe something bad.

Consider, as a non native speaker, if English speakers used your language of
origin to mean "terrible". I don't know your language, but imagine it was
Latin, and kids would taunt each other saying, "ha ha you're so latin" on the
playground, and "windows search is simply latin". This is a constructed
example, of course, but the issue is not that the word is offensive (fucked,
or shit would have been fine), but that the word derives its power from being
linked to marginalizing and othering people.

For more:

[https://www.r-word.org/default.aspx?viewfullsite=Y](https://www.r-word.org/default.aspx?viewfullsite=Y)

~~~
klibertp
Thanks, I didn't know that. I'm Polish, and, of course, we have such words;
not even swear-words per se, just words consistently used over time in a
derogatory manner, while also being associated with a group of people. We also
have a very insulting word for mentally disabled people, equivalent to the
English word "retard", but it functions only as a noun (so no direct
equivalent of the "retarded" word) and applies only to people. It's
interesting because both noun and adjective versions of a word for homosexual
people exist, just like in English, and the same is true for many other
insults, especially ethnicity and sex-based ones.

Anyway, I agree that such words should be avoided and not used. (Although it's
hard to avoid it completely when talking _about_ the word, without using it.)

~~~
ersii
Please don't treat pfooti's comment too seriously though, most people would
not react to the way the original poster used the word and would disagree with
the purported disrespect the usage implies according to pfooti.

The world is a big place and everyone does not (thankfully) live in the
liberal US coastal areas :-)

~~~
pfooti
Speaking objectively, I linked to an appeal from a broad coalition of
disability rights activists to stop using a particular term in the vernacular
that has a demonstrable link to the othering. This is not just me, nor is it
"liberal coastal areas".

A little more concretely: it's not up to the person saying anything to decide
whether or not the thing they say conveys disrespect or harm. It is up to the
people harmed by those words to decide. You can, of course, choose to ignore
the harm done and continue on as before.

That said, I'm sure the OP's intent was innocent enough - this is the kind of
thoughtless use of the word that I (and many other people) work to
problematize. I had intended to do so publicly but without much fanfare (one
quick sentence), to draw attention to this fact in hopes that we could all
work to shift the language.

Speaking subjectively, I find it troubling that the notion that basic decency
toward other humans who have a relatively simple ask (use "terrible" or
"garbagefire" or "shitty" instead of "r_") is viewed as a "liberal US coastal"
practice that should be avoided out of sheer tribalism. Not sure there's much
else to say rather than "troubling".

This whole thread is OT at this point, but I'm simply not willing to let this
go. The lexicon has plenty of synonyms for "is terrible and unintelligently
designed and frustrating to use" that we can afford to drop one.

------
oblio
To be honest, these days I think if we want a proper OS and if we want the
incentives of the vendor to align with ours, we need subscription OSes.

Right now we have:

* Android - basically ad supported, therefore misaligned incentives

* iOS/macOS - locked into Apple hardware

* Windows - old school licensing until 10, with the problems they mentioned for Vista; new licensing which seems to be more like Android adware

A cheap yearly subscriptions would realign the incentives: I am the client, I
want frequent feature updates, I want fast security updates, I want to be the
client and not the product, I don't want the company to go under or force
development teams into stupid feature development or release trains cause they
need to make sure there's a revenue stream.

Basically I pay them for providing timely security and regular feature
updates, preferably in an incremental fashion.

Everyone who's not happy with this can either lock themselves into hardware
(Apple) or go DYI, basically, with Linux/BSD or just accept that being tracked
isn't that bad (Android).

I'd be really sad if the anti-tracking forces within the Windows division
lose. There has to be a better revenue model than tracking users and providing
ads, somewhere.

~~~
kowdermeister
I'm using Win10 for years now and never noticed any ads. I don't think the
Android comparison really stands.

~~~
tinus_hn
It’s full of ads for Edge, OneDrive, Office and some more of their own
services, and then it’s automatically installing and wasting the space you
paid for on Candy Crush and other games, even if you tune the Start Menu so
you don’t see the tiles.

I understand that you don’t see it if you don’t look but you certainly are
paying for it.

~~~
sparcpile
For my home PCs, I purchased the MS Action Pack subscription so that I could
install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB and not get ads and Cortana. With it and
ClassicShell, it serves me nicely.

I prefer my FreeBSD box running Motif as my daily driver though.

~~~
oblio
Aren't those Windows licenses upgrade only?

~~~
sparcpile
Yes. It's upgrade licenses only. but as with all MS OS media, they can be
installed on blank machines.

~~~
oblio
Yeah, but don't they get deactivated afterwards?

~~~
orbifold
No they ask you to activate nicely with a grey overlay in the bottom right
corner. This can be disabled but is not that annoying in practice.

------
zvrba
Ha, the truth about AV vendors back then:

> that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the
> Windows kernel — the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer
> systems. Our “friends”, the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us,
> claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power!

~~~
proactivesvcs
"Back then?" We haven't quite come full circle with the Meltdown registry
compatibility key being set, because of anti-virus vendors hacking their way
around, but it's close. All it needs is one of them to throw a sueball and the
circle will have been completed!

------
geokon
Man, even a guy on the team felt like WinFS wasn't a great idea... I still
think it's potentially revolutionary and that the POSIX filesystem is just old
and clunky

I think most people would expect

/home/geokon/program1/src/

and

/src/program1/home/geokon

to have pretty much the same content

A tag based file system that made the two equivalent would eliminate all sorta
of annoyances where you can't decide how to structure your file hierarchy
(should you have bin/program1 bin/program2 src/program1 src/program2 or
program1/src program1/bin program2/src program2/bin? both layouts have their
advantages).

Something like a "path/path/bin/path/path/bin" wouldn't work.. but it's hard
to find a case where you really need it. Currently I do from time to time come
across 'include' folders inside of 'include' folders, but not for any good
logical reason.. more b/c an in-source build vomited something up

You could also have tag based permissions so sharing files between users
becomes a lot more sane (file1 has tag 'bob' and tag 'bill' so that they both
can access it, instead of having it in .. /home/bob/ and then sim-linked to
/home/bill/ or whatever other workaround you'd do in POSIX)

Yeah, the filesystem wouldn't work so great if you have thousands of tiny
files... but I'd probably argue that you shouldn't have thousands of tiny
files in the first place. If your program needs tens of thousands of tiny
files then it should probably use something other than the filesystem

~~~
pritambaral
Purely tag based filesystems are not better than hierarchical filesystems
because hierarchy is meaningful. The 'pritam' in `/home/pritam` has a
different meaning than the one in `~/Documents/taxes/pritam`.

> Yeah, the filesystem wouldn't work so great if you have thousands of tiny
> files... but I'd probably argue that you shouldn't have thousands of tiny
> files in the first place. If your program needs tens of thousands of tiny
> files then it should probably use something other than the filesystem

That's dismissing a core feature of many production file systems today, some
of which are used precisely because they support this feature.

~~~
geokon
That's a valid counterexample! :) The first implies ownership and the other
just designates folders with information about 'pritam'.
`~/Documents/taxes/pritam` could be a folder on your accountant's computer and
then it'd have a different meaning than on your machine.

You're not wrong, but I think that that situation is rather rare and rather
harmless. In the vast majority of cases the context doesn't change the meaning
of the name much. The converse situation, where you have many folders with the
same meaning, is a lot more common. You probably have dozens of 'src'
'include' 'build' folders on your machine; and you could have dozens of
folders called "June" "August" "September" \- all which carry the same exact
meaning in their respective contexts. But we've been forced to recreate these
redundant folders b/c the system forces us into use a tree structure for
concepts that don't necessarily conform to it.

~~~
acoard
>In the vast majority of cases the context doesn't change the meaning of the
name much.

It absolutely does, and in a vast number of cases I have duplicate folder
names.

I probably have a hundred different folders on my computer called "src".
Knowing that it's ~/dev/projectName/src/ helps me know which src folder it is.

For a non-software example, I always organize my client folders somewhat like:
~/clients/A/contracts, or ~/clients/A/designs, ~/clients/A/notes

------
lozenge
> I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from
> 2002 to 2006.

>-The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on
Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year
working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in
a week.

[http://moishelettvin.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/windows-
shutdown...](http://moishelettvin.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/windows-shutdown-
crapfest.html?m=1)

It was brave to reset after Longhorn but it seems not all the bad ways of
working could be shaken off.

------
ebbv
Man people love to rewrite history. I ran Vista. It was ok. But the constant
asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement, annoyed most
users a lot. They were introduced suddenly without fully explaining why they
were necessary. Additionally requiring device manufacturers to write new
drivers meant lots of people’s printers went obsolete without warning. That
was a PR nightmare.

Also the fancy Aero UI looked cool but was taxing for the average user’s
computer. So a lot of people when they installed Vista didn’t get the
experience they had been shown in commercials and screenshots.

On top of that literally everything in the OS had moved around from where
people had been expecting it to be as far as settings and configuration stuff.
Keep in mind people had a pretty consistent experience from 95 to 98 to XP.
Vista flipped the script and users no longer knew how to do things. A mistake
Microsoft repeated and was similarly punished for in Windows 8.

The whole world was not delusional to say they didn’t like Vista. When all
your users say something sucks then you should listen.

Windows 7 was mostly PR but the big thing is that it had device support on
rollout.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement

It wasn't a security improvement. For one, it mostly just got in the way and
trained users to ignore it, negating the purpose of its existence, but it also
never protected the user from anything. Case in point: ransomware needs no
elevated permissions.

~~~
rossy
> _Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions._

That's the result of how we drew up the security boundaries on desktop
operating systems. You don't need admin permissions to rewrite your most
important documents, so ransomware running under your user account doesn't
either. See also: [https://xkcd.com/1200/](https://xkcd.com/1200/)

Linux and macOS have this problem too. The solution isn't to remove the
security boundary between the user and admin accounts and to go back to the
Windows 9x-era of having zero OS-level security. The solution is to create
more security boundaries, so that not every program running on your behalf has
the permission to rewrite all your documents. UAC was an unpopular, but not
totally ineffective step in the right direction.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I disagree, because it's the user's system and they should have permission to
change anything they want in the system, that security boundary serves only to
annoy the user for no gain whatsoever.

What our real goal is, is to prevent misbehaving applications from
compromising the user's work. Obvious conclusion: permissions boundaries
should be on the applications. On this we agree.

------
slipstream-
Relevant: [https://longhorn.ms/](https://longhorn.ms/) \- a website containing
research about pre-reset Longhorn.

------
julienfr112
My two cents : I use linux for like ten years, and never touched a ms-windows
during this time. Recently, I wanted to use windows only software, so I took a
Nuc (intel small computer) I own, and install windows 10 on it. While ubuntu,
xunbuntu, alpine and so on work out of the box with any nucs, with windows,
there was no wireless after install.I had to download a intel driver installer
(in another computer, copy the .exe to a usb key, and install it with a gui
setup program (click yes yes yes agree yes yes).

I had the clear impression that right now, Ubuntu is the friendly way while
MS-Windows is the diy/hacker way.

~~~
mkohlmyr
I've had the same experience installing Ubuntu on a computer with a broadcom
wireless chip. It all just comes down to chance unless you buy a hardware + OS
combo, which generally actually means mac or Windows. If you install your own
OS you have to expect there may be driver incompatibilities, that's just how
it is.

~~~
swebs
Ubuntu comes with drivers for Broadcom chips. You just have to select "yes"
when the installer asks if you want to use proprietary drivers. Otherwise you
have to open to the Software and Updates app, go to the Additional Drivers
section, and manually check it.

------
ancarda
>[anti-virus vendors] just wanted their old solutions to keep working even if
that meant reducing the security of our mutual customer — the very thing they
were supposed to be improving.

Wow. Is there a backstory here in regards to the development of Windows
Defender? I think that was introduced with Vista?

~~~
oblio
I don't know, but honestly, most antivirus companies are such clowns that it
wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft created their own antivirus just to force
everyone to be up to par. Which they still seem to be failing at...

------
shusson
> An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product

Interesting point, reminds me of [https://laughingsquid.com/organizational-
charts-for-tech-com...](https://laughingsquid.com/organizational-charts-for-
tech-companies/)

~~~
geraldcombs
The sentence after that ("Open source doesn’t have that problem.") is
absolutely wrong in my experience. Team communication and dynamics aren't
somehow magically different with open source, and pretty much every piece of
open source software you use reflects the organization that produced it.

~~~
jrochkind1
Yes. And sometimes that's chaotic and disorganized ball of mush.

------
cm2187
For those interested in the history of windows, I also recommend a recent
episode of .net rocks about the parallel history of windows and .net:

[https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1500](https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1500)

------
Pamar
Anectodata, so “caveat emptor”.

I helped a non-tech friend migrating from a crumbling XP laptop to a newly
bought Vista laptop.

Took us the best part of an afternoon, because I was really careful and she
was paranoid about losing her stuff.

Two things did not work for her: 1) No way to migrate groups (address lists,
not sure of the name) from Outlook Express to Vista mail standard app (I also
tried Thunderbird and/or another free email app and in the end had to cobble
together a small utility to get the addresses out of sent email headers). 2)
Word had to be updated (paid) - I don’t remember exactly what the problem was
but I think it just wouldn’t run.

On top of that the UI felt alien and non-intuitive to us both.

So while technically it might have been a jewel, in terms of user experience
(including the fact that third-part stuff worked, while MS apps were the only
ones giving us problems)it really looked like great advertiing. For OsX...

~~~
proactivesvcs
It's always been a massive pain to get email + metadata into or out of
Microsoft products. It's so frustrating as it cannot be difficult to implement
half-decent import/export but my heart drops every time I know I have to do it
for a customer...

OOI, what parts of the UI did you find non-intuitive? I found the new Start
Menu odd, but it wasn't long before I was more used to pressing Windows, then
typing, to launch a program, rather than find it manually. I can't believe I
used to spend so much time manually organising my Start Menu! (And I'm usually
the type that doesn't like this sort of change)

~~~
Pamar
It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I
used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly
WinNT, Linux, Solaris...) so I cannot recall what specifically felt odd (apart
from the UAC that at least for the first hour or so were cropping up with
alarming frequency - the person I was helping lives far away from my hometown,
so the idea of leaving her with mistery pop-ups wasn't really encouraging).

In any case, the UI was only a minor concern: I was confident that everyone
can learn and adjust after a few hours of work with it. But what I could not
help to notice was that I still remembered clearly what happened when I
started my first Macbook (three years before the Vista episode): the UI felt
very different than what I was accustomed to... but it felt also much better.
Intuitive, empowering. When something unexpected happened it was, most often
than not, a nice surprise like "wow, the global search can find strings even
in a just-closed Word for Mac documents!" (compare and contrast with stuff
like Magellan on Windows) or how the progress bar on file copies worked
(compare and contrast with [https://xkcd.com/612/](https://xkcd.com/612/) ).

------
vondur
I believe the main issues was that Vista needed decent hardware at the time.
Many people were buying lower end PC’s at the time and they seemed slower than
their older XP based PC’s. However, it seemed to me that Vista SP1 fixed a lot
of the issues with the original release and worked very well.

~~~
navjack27
Pretty much. If you had a desktop that was worth a damn at the time you
sounded like a crazy person when you said that nothing was really wrong with
Vista.

I was that person in high school who was running a test version of Vista and
also the RTM on a pretty powerful Alienware laptop.

------
bbarn
> Windows XP had shown that we were victims of our own success. A system that
> was designed for usability fell far short in terms of security when
> confronted with the realities of the internet age.

Interesting point I'd never considered. Talk about a requirements shift.

------
protomyth
Vista was odd for our community college. None of our educational or testing
software vendors would offer support until Windows 7 was introduced. It was
very much like the whole Windows 8 release where we waited until Windows 10
was released. Heck, we still have one vendor who only supports IE and not
Edge. The people who did get it weren't real impressed, but at least it wasn't
the "get this crap off my computer" reaction that Windows 8 received.

It was the first time we ever held on while a new operating system was out.
Windows NT to 2000 to XP was just so automatic.

------
jancsika
> The chaotic nature of development often resulted in teams playing schedule
> chicken, convincing themselves and others that their code was in better
> shape than other projects, that they could “polish” the few remaining pieces
> of work just in time, so they would be allowed to checkin their component in
> a half-finished state.

I'd love to get clarification on what "checkin" [sic] means in this context.

Were they waiting for permission for their equivalent of a feature branch to
be merged, or were they actually waiting for their code to be added to the
repository in the first place?

~~~
chiph
I believe it means to be allowed to merge their code into a higher level
branch, which is on the path towards release.

~~~
jancsika
This sounds exactly like the problem Linus described with centralized version
control systems in his Google Talk.

~~~
dpark
No. The problem described is that the unstable code is being pulled upstream.
Merging into the root branch is equivalent to merging into Linus’s repo.
Nothing prevents a Windows developer from checking unstable code into a
feature branch without merging up, just as nothing prevents a Linux developer
from checking unstable code into a private clone without Linus pulling it in.
The difference here is simply whether the feature branch has a central host.
Decentralization doesn’t fix this issue. Proper code health practices do.

------
kevin_thibedeau
File search has been broken since Vista. It constantly fails to produce
results even when you _know_ the search string exists in an indexed directory
tree. Thanks MS.

------
throwawaymsft
I worked in security around the Vista timeframe, and remember the “think of
the children” logic for the UAC prompts.

It’s insecure to not warn people constantly. Full stop. (Never mind that
desensitizing people or any of a dozen predictable side effects are ignored).
It’s oversimplified black-and-white thinking endemic of many management
mistakes.

------
thriftwy
What really happened in Windows 8? I mean, it was virtually a BolgenOS, an
excercise in flying by pretending.

~~~
Macha
My guess as an outsider: The general consensus among techies (since, I think
we can say, disproven) was that the tablet would replace the laptop. I would
guess MS also bought into the hype and wanted to provide some continuity to
its customers in the hope of retaining them in this new tablet world, and was
willing to throw desktop use under the bus to make it happen. It doesn't
matter if your UI sucks on a physical keyboard and mouse if users rejected
those devices.

Instead tablets peaked, then bigger smartphones ate their share instead of
tablets taking out the remaining use cases for traditional form factors.

~~~
thriftwy
The fun thing is that there was never such consensus outside of, seemingly,
Redmond and wharever place Unity was developed at. Everybody else did not even
expect general-purpose Tablet to be a thing and were frustrated OSes tuned for
hardware that wasn't even available.

And pushing that agenda tooth and nail.

~~~
ch4ck
You forgot about GNOME...

~~~
thekingofh
Gnome 3 is where I lost faith in the Linux community's ability to cohesively
come up with a solution to user experience. Every time I log onto a system
with Gnome 3 it give me a feeling of dread and anger. Gnome 2 had become one
of the more popular, and fast interfaces and they threw it all away. Mate
seems to hold the torch, but I want progress, not to be frozen in time. But
Gnome 3 was just a complete FU to all the current gnome users. How arrogant.

KDE seems to keep it together. KDE plasma 5 seems an incremental upgrade from
what came before, getting rid of some of the weirdness and converging on
something sane. Progress at least. I can respect what they're doing.

Microsoft, in all it's bullshit, every few years seems to give the users what
they want. Licensing is a headspinner, and privacy is questionable, but
otherwise they still make an operating system that feels good to use.

~~~
SauciestGNU
I just can't agree with this. I used Gnome 3 with excitement when it came out.
I found that it was unpolished back then, and probably not ready for general
use. I switched to XFCE for a while, then openbox, fluxbox, and a number of
tiling window managers, then to MATE and finally back to Gnome.

I've been using Gnome now for about three years. I find the hot corner UI to
be intuitive (and I find myself trying to use that and the meta-key expose
function on other OSes). The favorites dock and the search are things that I
use frequently, and the title bar menus make sense to me.

I was a Gnome 2 user for years as well, and yes it was polished and
predictable. But it wasn't attractive. I think Gnome 3 was the next logical
step for the project as far as contemporary UI patterns go, and it feels very
"ergonomic" to me.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
> Would we make different decisions today? Yup. Hindsight is 20/20\. We didn’t
> know then what we know now.

From very far away, WinFS looked like a turkey even a dozen years ago. I don't
know how a smart cookie like Gates went for it. Probably was standing too
close.

------
nvr219
Is there any way to get rid of the annoying bottom bar on medium without
signing in?

~~~
SlySherZ
Using uBlock with Firefox, you can right click anywhere on the page and open
the "block element" thingy, which allows you to block anything on the page
that you don't like :)

------
yuhong
I was wondering what was happening to PatchGuard in Win7 when Skywing joined
MS.

------
dbdr
Obligatory xkcd with another explanation: the "Ballmer Peak"
([http://xkcd.com/323/](http://xkcd.com/323/))

------
mdip
It's fun reading these retrospectives, especially having lived somewhat close
to them. I was as much a full time developer back during the NT to Vista days
as I am, today. Most of my development career centered around Windows
technologies. I got my start, in the professional sense, writing apps in
C++/(cough)VB and quickly moved on to C# -- which I still really love. It was
both interesting and sad to watch Microsoft during these days. I'll never
forget the SCO(/IBM/Microsoft) vs. Linux(/TheGPL/etc) days. Such a strange
time to think back on Microsoft hating on Open Source ... or trying to create
a competitor in the MSPL/CodePlex mess. It was almost comical to see a company
that thrived in a world of "general purpose tools to solve many computing
problems" (a.k.a. Office)[0] live in their own NIH world.

It was a hard time as a developer to feel proud of being part of that world. I
saw a company that I admired behaving idiotically and under poor
management[1]. I _loved_ developing in C# (especially after .Net 2.0 with
Generics), but I was generally unsatisfied with my operating system (Windows
XP and later Windows 7 ... my company never went Vista). Because of the
massive numbers of competing factions that this author points out, Windows
tended to get everything but the kitchen sink and managed to do so in a sub-
par manner. Oh, how I loved, killing the file/URI associations to Internet
Explorer and Windows Media Player on my own PC in favor of Firefox and VLC
only to have to make sure that all of the crap I wrote played well with both
of those if they applied to the project[2]. The classic Bill Gates rant about
Windows Movie Maker summed up that time pretty well[3].

The last few years under Nadella have been something special to me. Windows
10, despite its flaws/spyware bordering on malware, is enjoyable to use. I
have bash (well, zsh, in my case) that functions far better than cygwin/msys
ever did, PowerShell -- despite my general hate for its syntax and performance
-- can basically handle any scripting task I need to throw at it and is _far_
superior to _cmd_. Heck, in Windows 10, I can even have a True Color
experience in conhost. Visual Studio Code, unlike Visual Studio, is an editor
I actually go out of my _way_ to use (as do all of my Linux-only coworkers).
Microsoft is developing .NET out in the open and has embraced open-source in a
way that a decade ago would have been met with suspicion related to "Embrace
and Extend". And when I mention that I write code in C#, I don't have to
listen to Java/other folks yelling at me about how _evil_ Microsoft is.

And then there's my home-computing life. Despite my previous statements about
Windows 10, some of my love for Ubuntu on Windows actually turned me away from
Windows. I'd always run Linux at home. All of my servers are bare-metal Linux
with one Windows host in a KVM virtual. I started _loathing_ any time I had to
do something that took me out of the tooling I use in the Linux world. Just
try fighting with gpg-agent on Windows to get SSH key-auth working using the
vanilla command-line SSH. It sucks and PuTTY/Pageant is far from a suitable
alternative. Jumping and moving things among hosts via SSH, shell and just
generally interacting with Linux is far less painful than Windows. So when I
got my new laptop this Christmas, I had no intention of ever running Windows
10 on it. I actually booted it and it hung on "set up Windows Hello". I'm not
even sure why I bothered to boot it to the hard drive in the first place. This
is the first time in a decade of running Linux that I'm actually running it
full-time on the machine I spend the (second) most time on. And I discovered,
much to my surprise, Windows 10 _flies_ in a KVM virtual with virtio drivers
set up in the relevant places. Any time I'd tried to run any Linux variant in
Hyper-V and actually _use_ KDE, Gnome or any graphical interface, I gave up
after swearing a bit. No clipboard support, and performance was unacceptably
laggy. The other way around, I can barely tell I'm in a virtual (I toss the
console off to Desktop 2 and I can flip between Windows and Linux) all without
doing fancy things like GPU pass-through. And I really only have it there so I
can compile a program with MSVC and test the Windows side of it. At this point
I don't _ever_ see going back (or switching to fruit). I love _endless_
configurability (even if it comes at the cost of things not being close to
"quite right" at the start) and having a mountain of good, free, choices at my
disposal. And that work computer is getting reloaded next month when I'm done
with the project I'm working on and have a free moment to do so.

[0] The bane of my existence being Excel and Access -- which employees at the
company I worked at at the time used to solve incredibly complicated problems,
incorrectly, and then panicked when their drive failed or the Access database
become corrupted to the point of no return and we discovered how many hundreds
of thousands of dollars was about to be lost due to worker creativity.

[1] Ballmer less so than Gates. That's my opinion, which I would normally be
happy to back up, but I'm leaving it alone, today.

[2] Don't use that particular CSS, or worse, mangle it in this manner in case
of IE 5/6\. And why do we have this massive extra video file, oh yeah, that's
the best format we can encode it in to guarantee playback on stock Windows
without additional codecs installed -- because expecting a codec installation
to work across all PCs always ends in tears.

[3] I'm not actually sure if that's urban legend or not and don't care to dig
into finding out -- even if it is, and wasn't spoken by The Bill, every
statement made described the mess that had become Windows at that time pretty
well.

------
saahtb
>By far the biggest problem with Windows releases, in my humble opinion, was
the duration of each release. On average, a release took about three years
from inception to completion but only about six to nine months of that time
was spent developing “new” code. The rest of the time was spent in
integration, testing, alpha and beta periods — each lasting a few months.

Funny he considers testing a problem. So this is the new Microsoft: testing is
not important.

~~~
ealexhudson
He's not complaining about testing, he's complaining about the length of the
iteration cycle. Taking 2 or 3 years to ship 6 months of effort is incredible
inefficiency.

