It's crazy just how… unfinished everything involving Windows 10 seems to be. Half-assed UI concepts implemented clumsily, supported by an unsupported store, updated haphazardly at a pace that makes enterprise scream bloody murder… and all Microsoft does is trying to trick more users into accidentally updating.
What are they thinking? They can do better than this. Much, much better.
MS has some very talented programmers. They're not very common, but they exist. The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products, giving them completely unrealistic deadlines, and then shipping software on those deadlines no matter how half-assed or buggy it is.
The idea is that everything is serviceable over the internet now, so they can just "fix it later", except they never do. This perpetuates a duct-tape culture that refuses to actually fix problems and instead rewards teams that find ways to work around them. The talented programmers are stuck working on code that, at best, has to deal with multiple badly designed frameworks from other teams, or at worst work on code that is simply scrapped. New features are prioritized over all but the most system-critical bugs, and teams are never given any time to actually focus on improving their code. The only improvements that can happen must be snuck in while implementing new features.
As far as M$ is concerned, all code is shit, and the only thing that matters is if it works well enough to be shown at a demo and shipped. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore.
It's not just Microsoft, but this "update culture" is pervasive in software today. New features make for exciting marketing but in the end what most users probably want more is stability. All the stories of forced updates and accompanying reboots (with not even a chance to save work?) remind me of the old criticisms of Windows being so unstable it needs to be rebooted frequently, and how uptime was a highly-valued result of good system design.
I personally think near-daily updating to fix bugs that should've been discovered and fixed before actually shipping product is absurd. It's been argued that this is because systems are more complex now, but maybe we don't actually need all that complexity...
Most users say they want stability but when it comes to actually paying, unfortunately most users will only pay for features, especially new shinny ones that demo well. This is the challenge faced by software companies.
I pay twice the price of the hardware to be able to use Mac OS X, which is stable. Except, since 10.10, it kernel-panics once a week. I'd pay 100-200€ per year for a good OS.
It's a very, very long shot, but could it be that you have virtualbox 4 installed?
With 10.10 and 10.11 I had the same issue, caused by the kext from virtualbox. Removing it and installing version 5 solved everything and haven't had a kernel panic since then.
If not virtualbox, I'd look at other kext you might have there.
End users have (mostly) never paid for operating systems. I use Windows mostly because that's what the applications I use require. There's nothing about Windows itself that is compelling and frankly, Windows has been good enough for a long, long time.
I really wish Microsoft had stayed the course and maintained separate desktop and mobile operating systems. Windows CE had problems, but they could have fixed that without messing with Windows.
Yeah. Everyone needs to justify their existence. While quite a lot of people thought Win7 was great and that Microsoft should just stop there, maybe with a few minor improvements (e.g. fix CMD.EXE), they decided to completely change it in response to the tablet "threat".
I have a cheap Win8 tablet. It's weird. Quite slick in a lot of ways, but you can go back to the old UI and see where all the bodges are.
I develop daily on Windows and Visual Studio. The latest versions of both are so horribly unstable and buggy that our team's productivity is being seriously damaged. What the hell happened to Microsoft's quality control? In Windows 7 and earlier versions of Visual Studio you didn't feel like you were walking on thin ice all the time.
Mac is a much more viable choice today than in the past, and I think the Mac's slowly but steadily increasing market share has something to do with the perceived reliability and stability of the platform.
I'm only basing this off of personal experience. I have Windows at work and Mac at home.
I'm sorry, if we're talking about features being buggy, OS X is not something you exactly what to point a finger at as a good example of an OS that has features implemented in a stable way.
Thankfully, OS X is cheap/free. I use OS X, Windows, and Arch literally every day of my life, both at work and home.
To be quite honest, I blame consumers for all this non-sense. No one wants to actually pay for software. I can go into this in a more nuanced fashion, but I seriously think software across the board is a good bit cheaper than it needs to be. From OS's to games and everything in between.
>they are able to charge a higher price due to having OS X as part of the product, and they do.
That's a suspect claim. I am not saying the cost isn't accounted for, but claiming that they charge a premium simply because they have OS X is dubious at best. I don't consider OS X a selling point in any regard and I'm not sure even Apple could. Of course this is largely my opinion. I would find it kind of funny if they really considered it a selling point.
I always thought that having OSX sorta was the selling point. If I'm only comparing computers just based on the parts inside them and their capability then there's little to no reason for me to buy an Apple computer because other than some sorta neat things like the hybrid drives or some of the Thunderbolt integration, they're generally much more expensive than building or buying another computer.
But for people who value specific software that is OSX-only or some of the features only found in OSX (like CoreAudio for music stuff) or the general interface polish and perceived stability, it doesn't matter if the Apple option costs $2000 and the other brand/build with similar core components costs $1000. If it doesn't run the platform you want/need then it doesn't matter that it's more bang for the buck.
Basically I default to Windows because for the things I do on a computer, it's got the most flexibility and options for hardware and software. Linux is missing too many applications I need/want and OSX only runs on machines that cost a good deal more while offering nothing I really need enough to justify the cost. But when I've needed or wanted to run an OSX application in the past (Final Cut Pro in my case several years ago) it just wasn't a question. The stuff I wanted to run and the hardware I needed to hook up required OSX so that's the only reason I shelled out for an Apple computer. If I could have done it without OSX I'd have saved the dough and put it into something else.
I can't help but avoid but sound like an Apple marketing drone, but hardware wise quite a few the selling points for me for a MBP have been the form factor and how "it all fits together." Personally, there still isn't really a comparable windows-esque laptop from any other manufacturer that makes me not want to rip my hair out when I'm using their product. I enjoy the weight and weight distribution of the laptop, the keyboard is okay, the trackpad should be the target of corporate espionage, etc etc. And it certainly looks nice.
Admittedly, a good selling point for OS X is how well it handles the hardware -- the battery life is consistent and lasts long enough for my needs. I definitely use OS X more often when I'm traveling, and will relegate my development to that environment just to make sure the battery lasts.
The software ecosystem is definitely a selling point for some. I am not involved in multimedia production but I certainly can appreciate paying a premium amount to get the tools you want/need. Although whether this aspect can be fundamentally attributed to the OS or just a product of other things (audience, marketing, corporate deals, etc) is another conversation.
Well without OSX a macbook pro is just another Intel laptop. And I've seen them with Linux installed, and using bootcamp variations of Windows. But OSX is certainly part of the appeal.
Most of the people who own Macs got them because of OS X. It helps that the hardware is quite good, all in all, and for that you can also charge a premium. But if Apple stopped developing OS X and just sold MacBooks with Windows preinstalled, I think their sales would decline drastically; if they ported OS X to regular PCs and sold it seperately, their computer business would probably take a large hit, too.
It's non-zero, but essentially right next to zero, the number of people buying Macs who do not at all run OS X. So yes, it's bought as a whole, people want the product experience, the integration of hardware and software. That's why they buy it. If they really didn't care about OS X, or really didn't care (a lot) about industrial design they'd buy something else. And on industrial design, Dell's XPS 13 is neck and neck (bit better in some spots and not as good in others) with the Air.
> I would find it kind of funny if they really considered it a selling point.
Good point, but I'm trying to stay completely agnostic of what Apple thinks: it's not Apple's cost that determines the price of a macbook (aside from setting a lower bound), it's what people are willing to pay.
I assume that people are willing to pay significantly more for macbooks in this universe, than in the parallel one where they have no OS. At least as much more as it costs Apple to develop it in the first place.
You are right, though, that I can hardly "claim" it :)
I'm always a bit shocked when I see people express this. I work in a office with roughly 100 macs and 100 windows. The macs are FAR more stable and less buggy. I've had this experience three different times at various companies. Yet online I see people saying that OS X is just as buggy but they never point what part is.
Well, for example, with the most recent updates I had problems with wifi stability and thunderbolt peripherals not working properly. They've been fixed now, but it's still kind of surprising they creep up given the limited amount of hardware the OS has to target.
Are the macs running the latest version of OSX? From what I've read and experienced, OSX declined in quality when Apple stopped charging for OSX and started using it to drive hardware upgrades. These days OSX works fine if you have the latest, greatest, most expensive Mac hardware but if you try to upgrade an existing machine, that's when you get errors.
I use to love the Mac and OSX, but the whole freezing up while spinning a colored ball thing has got me too pissed off to use a Mac any more. I switched to Linux a year ago and only use Windows for playing games. As for the increasing market share, I think that's more of the perceived coolness factor of a Mac. But man, I love the MBP keyboard! I can't wait to try a Happy Hacker 2.
My mom (55 yo) always tries to get me into her computer buying arguments with my dad. She recently called me and stated "Macs never break compared to windows, so I should get a mac." I use Linux almost exclusively these days, so I can't really comment, but anecdotally speaking Apple seems to be known for it's reliability (at a cost) to at least some people.
To add to your point, Valve and Jetbrains both seem to be suffering from exactly this. Do you think it is Agile gone too far? Minimal viable product being too broadly scoped? Modern programming culture / lack of resources?
Yes, I can also see that happening in many other companies. I think that this urge on putting something new out quickly (Innovation?), regardless of being stable or not, is what they think they can win market with. And sure they can.
This might be yet another enterprise trap set-up by the fact that the people deciding what software to buy are different the people paying for the software and different from the people using the software.
The problem is that Windows isn't a purely enterprise product. Although it gets little money from the end user market, it needs dominance on that market for strategic reasons. So, MS will ensure it dominates end user market, whatever it takes.
Yup, It is a way to add more 'perceived value' than there actually is. Lowering the investment required for creating something that _seems_ worthy enough for people to buy it.
From a customer perpective, it looks like an evil spiral more and more companies tend to fall into.
I really agree with this. But I have to say it's not just companies. Look at the fast pace of open source software, web frameworks, etc.
So much focus on "getting there quickly." A few keystrokes and a marketing page, and everyone's using "Foo.js" v0.0.1.
And then you're spending time as a developer dealing with deprecations because APis changed.
But as painful as that is, I believe we need external feedback to deliver better software. Trying a thing, seeing how it's used, and improving it is a good way to go.
It is just going to result in bad times in the short term.
Bah, you think that's bad? Currently there's a nasty bug in iOS 9.2 where any webpage with an overflow:hidden style in the body tag will cause the viewport to be way too large, and consequently the webpage zooms out to far too large a size.
Apple can't fix this until the next update, yet it's a problem in Safari. Now we have to wait till the next update to fix a pretty bad problem.
You can see this, incidentally, if you browse to Libreoffice's opengrok.
I only started referring to MS as M$ after I had been working there for a year. I joined them with cautious optimism, because the new CEO had finally gotten rid of that atrocious stack ranking system.
That optimism did not last long. I only stayed there as long as I did because of how much they were paying me. Referring to them as "M$" is disturbingly appropriate given that all they do is to throw huge amounts of money at problems until they go away.
Have you ever seen how much Microsoft will pay you? Those sort of people often end up as very good programmers. Not that surprised that people in this camp end up working at Microsoft and then quit because they don't like working there.
I think it's largely a dog fooding problem. Visual Studio is a superb piece of software, and you can tell that its designers are the primary users. Microsoft's consumer apps are awful.
That's fair (re: 64-bit) and I'll amend: VS2015 should be able to handle a solution with (say) 1,000 projects without crashing. If that can be done in 32 bits, hurrah.
its not that uncommon to find VS solution files consisting of 100+ projects, especially in finance. The most I've worked on was 132 projects in a single solution (roughly a third were test projects). It was slow and sluggish at times but still workable nevertheless...
Wow, I'm impressed! What do you work on where 1,000 projects in a solution is a thing? With just one developer per five projects you've got a team of 200 developers. What are you working on? Please give us a few details.
I'm working on a legacy desktop app (~25 years), currently around 600 projects. Maybe one developer per 7 projects. Common workflow is to create custom solutions around your working set of projects, but that's not ideal for whole code analysis/debugging.
Does that mean that there's a lot of duplicate projects? It seems like there's an opportunity for consolidation. I've seen a few solutions where a developer created a Project for every class library and then only ever referenced them from 1 other Project. I was able to roll up a 30+ project solution into 5.
We had ~150 projects across about 1M LOC and 4 developers because they were being used like folders - they weren't really separate codebases, just a means of organising the code. We cut that down for a drastic improvement in speed.
Most "serious" users are now uninstalling ReSharper. Visual Studio 2015 adds most of ReSharper's key perks and JetBrains has done little or nothing to resolve ReSharper's laggy/hoggy/unstable code (and has said they aren't going to re-write it for Roslyn).
Honestly back in VS 2010 I'd call ReSharper a core tool. In VS 2015, eww.
I've never liked ReSharper, have felt that the "advice" it offers is often over-rated and seems commonly to be wrong for C# (not unexpected given that JetBrains primarily focuses on Java outside of ReSharper, I feel like ReSharper is a Java developer's approach to C#). These days what's baked into VS and the Roslyn compiler platform blows ReSharper out of the water.
Just about everyone I've worked with that had daily complaints about how slow and laggy they felt Visual Studio was didn't seem to understand that ReSharper was 99% of the slow-down, excessive memory use, and UX lag...
I never liked it either, but I've worked in places where it was like the eleventh commandment and you better not say anything against it! :) I'm glad to hear it's loosing popularity.
Not moving to 64 bit has been a pragmatic decision [1]. As for crashing, I used it for over 10 years at my previous company and it never crashed once. At my current company it only crashes when I am using the Stylevision plug-in, which is really, really, buggy.
That pragmatic decision was made 7 years ago. A lot has changed since then and I don't think the arguments hold up. What developer machine doesn't have at least 16 GB of RAM these days?
Thanks for posting that (although I didn't see any benchmarks).
My big problem with the first article was that in my experience, the extra registers available in 64-bit make all the difference in the world. In the comments for the article you posted, he says that isn't true with VS. Surprising, but I'll take his word for it.
Still, it bothers me that he keeps talking about 4 GB of code and data should be enough. VS becomes pretty unusable for me around 1.5 - 2 GB. If it worked reliably up to the 4 GB limit, I'd be happier.
The limit is usually address space fragmentation and at one point not being able to find a piece of memory large enough for an allocation. Depending on the allocation patterns this may happen around 3 GiB but for some applications even around 1.7 GiB already. VS gets unbearably slow around 2 GiB memory, though, most likely because the native allocator has to piece together all free pieces of memory again and in the managed part the GC probably has fun trying to compact memory.
Did you even read the article? The arguments still hold up. It's clearly the case that it's not worth the effort to move VS to 64-bit.
- "First, from a performance perspective the pointers get larger, so data structures get larger, and the processor cache stays the same size. That basically results in a raw speed hit..."
- "The cost of a full port [due to the amount of code involved, not the quality of the code] of that much native code is going to be quite high and of course all known extensions would break and we’d basically have to create a 64 bit ecosystem pretty much like you do for drivers. Ouch."
- "A 64 bit address space for the process isn’t going to help you with page faults except in maybe indirect ways, and it will definitely hurt you in direct ways because your data is bigger...32 bit processes accrue all these benefits just as surely as 64 bit ones."
OK then let's compare VS to XCode, which doesn't even have half the features of VS and crashes twice as much. If not, which comparable product would you pick?
Running tons and tons of VS instances while debugging broken, memory hogging programs, modifying the XML for weird project types for third party plugins poorly, etc. Things that MS really can't do anything about.
I would have agreed that it's a good product right up to Visual Studio 2013. But Visual Studio 2015 is slow, buggy and unstable. They really have screwed something up, it has been months, and the update pack they released didn't make any tangible improvements. Meanwhile the "extensions and updates" area just continues to push Microsoft products I don't need, and every now and then I am not allowed into the IDE because my license has "gone stale". Everyone in my team has daily crashes, bugs and slowdowns and it is hurting us. How can Microsoft not have found any of these issues during all their testing?
I've been using various versions of Visual Studio since 1999. I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed, usually coincident with me doing something unwise.
Most things in VS run in-process (that was the case circa mid-2000s, at least). It only takes one bad component to bring the whole thing down, and there are many, many, many components.
IME, Visual Studio crashes are almost always due to misbehaving plugins. I'm in it all day every day, and once or twice a week it will develop some quirk that requires a restart to fix, but I can't remember the last time it actually crashed. The only plugins I run are Resharper, Xamarin, and PTVS.
Funny though that Visual Studio insists on defaulting to upper case menus. That must be a decision forced on them by a PHB somewhere, which just tells you that nobody is immune from the organizational rot.
Oh, I positively lurve the Microsoft design team's justification for all caps:
When we shared the RC design preview with you, we expected the uppercase menu would generate mixed feedback and emotions. We had seen similar reactions from early adopters and from our own internal users prior to posting about it. [1]
So then they said they had been "thinking about it" (why a lot of thinking was necessary is beyond me), and that "using uppercase for the menus was not an arbitrary decision" because they needed "to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences".
Then they tried to say that "some of you" won't like the change and that these people have "been very direct in expressing your opinions on this subject".
In other words: they got told it was an absolutely awful decision from the very start by beta testers and their own test team, but ignored it because, well, "consistency". Then they released it and they got almost total user revolt, but they can't back out now because, well, "consistency". But they now allow you to change to letter case with a registry tweak, after all - Microsoft know better than their end users, even when those end users are screaming for them to change a fairly fundamental UX error.
There is a very interesting book, "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody, who had the opportunity to observe a team at Microsoft very intimately over the course of a project. Back then, apparently part of the problem was that good managers were very rare, and as the company grew and grew, they put people in management positions that were not really qualified for (or comfortable with) the job.
Deadlines appear to have been a problem back then, as well.
I have wondered, how much of that has changed since. From your description, not much... :(
I also previously worked for Microsoft (Azure Active Directory). We took code quality very seriously. All new features required at least 80% code coverage from tests before commit (not a particularly high bar, but a pragmatic one). New features also required a test plan + review covering stress/perf, unit, integration, & system tests. Many features required threat models which were reviewed with the security team.
Progress/bugs were reviewed weekly at ship room. Live site issues were reviewed the next morning (involving the relevant on-call engineers).
So as with any large company which isn't a monoculture, things vary from team to team.
So, Microsoft has forgotten the concept of technical debt? That's hilarious. Also sad. Wasn't it Joel Spolsky (a former Microsoft employee) who actually coined the term "technical debt"?
Ward Cunningham coined the term "technical debt" according to Wikipedia. He worked for Microsoft for a short period of 2003-2005, but this was long after the term was invented.
Agreed. I was bugged by several 'system notifications' the other day on my Win 10 laptop (it took focus over my RDP client in full screen, too) that various people were trying to add me to Skype, and that I needed to sign into Skype to fill in some details they wanted about something.
Thing was, I'd never installed Skype on the system or even signed into it for several years, and here it was out of the blue asking me to accept friend invites from a bunch of spammers. It's now part of the "desktop experience" built in I guess (it may have to do with using a Microsoft account vs. purely local account, in my discussions with others).
The feeling is I don't really have control over the OS anymore, so I think it's time to move on soon to alternatives.
> The feeling is I don't really have control over the OS anymore
This is a really good way to describe modern non-free OSes (Windows, OSX, Android, iOS, the gamut). They're all asking me to sign into their services and always be connected and let them monitor everything I do and make suggestions and store everything I own on their servers. And when you try to turn all that off, everything falls apart. This is OK on my phone, which is really just an Internet portal, but on my desktop I expect my stuff to be my stuff. I guess many consumers like this (?), but I sure don't.
These days, I use Arch Linux and laugh haughtily at the crap proprietary OS users have to put up with.
While you're mentioning Skype, fun fact: since Windows 8 (or 8.1, not sure), there's absolutely no freaking way to sign into Skype with a local account. Like, at all. You just can't use it what so ever unless you log in with your Windows account.
EDIT: about this:
> The feeling is I don't really have control over the OS anymore, so I think it's time to move on soon to alternatives.
I had the same feeling since Windows 8, then I moved to Linux-based distributions. Never regretted it. I still have to deal with Windows when someone at work screws something up with their computer, but that's about it.
Windows now comes packaged with a version of skype that uses their 'app' system. You can still get their non-app version on the site. That version allows you to sign in to whatever user you want - it's not tied to your windows account.
I haven't used Windows 8 much, but I do run Skype on my family Windows 10 PC. Microsoft has stopped updating the Skype Metro app. Users are encouraged to upgrade to 'classic' desktop app - which is what I have.
The desktop app does not pick up your Windows login - you actually have to log in and ask Skype to remember your credentials. This works on local user accounts as well as accounts authenticated with a Microsoft account.
> You just can't use it what so ever unless you log in with your Windows account.
Try downloading Skype Portable. My Skype account is still just a username (not tied to either a Microsoft or Facebook account) and works great without any integration into the OS.
I bought a new machine with Windows 10 for my kids the other day. It has secure boot, which is fine.
Via procexp (part of SysInternals) I checked the signatures of the running processes.
Only skypehost and ias (some intel security app) did not have verified signatures.
I've had to uninstall Skype on Windows a bunch of times because it defaults to install it in Windows update. You can hide the update, which I finally did. Very annoying.
Although Windows 10 on desktop is a bit of a mess, the Mobile edition is much worse.
Microsoft is now selling Lumia phones with Windows 10 Mobile, but even Windows Central thinks it's not ready:
"I'm relatively savvy with this stuff. But I was ready to throw it out of a window before someone pointed out the non-obvious thing that I needed to do. This wasn't the only piece of out-of-box jank, either, to which I was told a new firmware update should 'fix' most of. It then took 48 hours for the firmware update to show up, download and install to the phone."
It's a real shame. Windows Phone 7/8 was so great because it was like an Apple product done better than Apple: it didn't have "kitchen sink" features, but instead everything just worked and was holistically designed. In the original WP7 design, the borders between apps and the OS were faded to a degree that's unique. (This design was eventually lost as Windows Phone tried to catch up with app-oriented mobile rivals.)
In Windows 10 Mobile, everything has been rewritten as Universal Windows 10 apps that sort of look like the WP8 equivalents but work much worse (because they're really desktop apps squeezed onto a phone).
That kind of endless strategy-driven software rewrites are the plague of Microsoft today. The OP who is disillusioned with Windows Store mentions that the Store Dashboard got much worse when Windows 10 came around. Why? Who knows -- probably somebody at MS just decided that the Dashboard needs to be implemented using hot tech X rather than stale old tech Y.
This endless churn sucks and drives customers away. I quit using Windows Phone for good last year, mostly due to the customer-hostile Windows 10 plan and lack of new hardware. Can't say I've regretted it so far.
> In Windows 10 Mobile, everything has been rewritten as Universal Windows 10 apps that sort of look like the WP8 equivalents but work much worse (because they're really desktop apps squeezed onto a phone).
The even sadder thing is that when I tried using Windows 10 as my main OS for a while all the Windows 10 apps felt like phone apps stretched out to work on a desktop.
My experience going from wp8 on a lumia 920 to wp10 on a lumia 950 is that mail, calendar and settings got better, the browser is a wash trading improved site compatibility for worse battery life, and everything else that changed got worse. The wp of old was slow to update, but it was rock solid and highly usable. The new one not so much with crashes, slowdowns and battery drain issues all over. For what i paid for this phone i could have picked any android phone. I probably should have.
They been battling the battery issue over several of the latest builds and its not working. I upgraded to WM 10 on my Lumia Icon and its been a mess.
8 and 8.1 were stable and snappy. 10 has been a nightmare for me. The UI is nearly unusable and clunky. Just to do simple things, I have two, sometimes three additional clicks to get where I want to go. Even with successive builds my Lumia still freezes, crashes and restarts A LOT.
A typical example was this week. Went to my nieces hockey game with a full battery. Went to take a video, it started recording, then froze, then restarted (crashed). I thought, "Well, that sucks." It reboots, I try again, same thing. Then when my phone restarts, and I get the warning, "Your battery is critically low, please plug in."
I decided this week I'm going back to Android, Windows Mobile 10 at this point is almost unusable for me.
The OS was good around the 8.0 time frame, reliable and highly usable. Not the whack-a-mole app dance that is iOS, and not the byzantine maze of android. The changes in 8.1 I did not care for, it made things more like iOS / android but at least the OS remained reliable. It seems like MS thought about the phone and what their strengths were, and decided to get rid of them.
I must be the only one that cares about design, because the inconsistencies they introduced in margins, dialogs, style of buttons, etc. in 8.1 really grinded my gears.
Wow. I totally get your point, however it used to be that the OS was simply a platform to USE apps with which you do actual work. We've come a long way to this distorted weird dysfunctional belief ...
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this - I keep finding bits in W10 which seem like a student's half-finished project - the print dialog in Edge's PDF reader was the latest mess I found after a recent update. I detest the UI, it's horribly unfriendly (to my eyes, anyway), and the fact that when I keyword search for an app I use every day (Notepad++) I usually get Notepad as a suggestion before it shows there's something wrong, to me.
I guess part of the problem is that Windows 7 had reached the same plateau as Word had - it does everything most people need and there's no real reason to upgrade, and that MS wants to grab a part of the app/user data market so has tried to shoehorn all that into the mess left by the "windows will be the new IOS" debacle that was Windows 8.
If some person seriously wants to dedicate their life to building something high quality and long lasting in the software world (1), they're probably interested in building and contributing to open source, open standards, open interfaces, publishing papers etc.
This might mean they would not want to dedicate their efforts to working on Windows. Same would hold for things like iOS as well. To me, architecturally, they seem dead ends that have to be completely binned at some point, leaving little useful legacy. Would you like to really put your life work into something like that, if there are alternatives?
I think this must affect the culture, and the people they can hire.
I have no idea how "open" Windows is nowadays, I haven't really used it in 8 years.
1: not necessarily building software directly, it can be algorithms, books, philosophies, languages etc.
If some person seriously wants to dedicate their life to building something high quality and long lasting in the software world (1), they're probably interested in building and contributing to open source, open standards, open interfaces, publishing papers etc.
"Interested in" and "can get paid for" are two very different things. Microsoft have a big reliable revenue stream.
The weird thing is that there are clearly some people inside Microsoft that "get it". There's a big open push from the C#/Roslyn team. F# is pretty sophisticated. Microsoft Research are the Xerox Parc of our time: lots of great ideas few of which make it into production.
But the Win8/8.1/10 cycle has so clearly been driven by panic over tablets and phones that it's produced strange chimerical half-solutions.
I must admit I was a little surprised when I first powered up my Surface pro. I had not used a windows machine since the early days on windows 7 but needed to start at least looking at my games on windows to make sure it worked there as well.
It's rough.
I really like some of the new apps designed for touch, but where are the rest? There is no file browser for example?
OMG the default explorer window is a mess of icons.
> It's crazy just how… unfinished everything involving Windows 10 seems to be
This is how the start up world functions. Ship early, ship fast and fix things later. Microsoft is changing how they operate and are more in tuned with the rest of the world. Why the outrage when this same concerns applies to most the software we see here on HN?
Right, that's how startups work. And that's why enterprises rarely buy software or services from startups. Microsoft is expected to be able to produce something more polished and reliable.
But everyone complained that Microsoft was slow to change and adopt the new software practices that the world wanted. Can't have your cake and eat it too. I agree the enterprise-y applications need more polish and stability but MS needed a massive change quickly and this is it.
Linux distros like Ubuntu and Debian address this issue by offering different update streams so you can choose whether you want all the latest stuff or a more stable experience. Microsoft could do something similar, but they're lacking the "stable" option since the big push to Windows 8 and 10.
I have a surface tablet, and I love it as a device and Win10 is definitely a great step in fusing desktop and tablet UI... But there are some serious head-slappers. When running in"tablet mode" many apps open in the background invisibly, only accessible through the task-switcher button. Without even a taskbar you can't even know that anything happened at all.
Is this due to a lawsuit in the EU or someplace that requires Microsoft to specifically to ask the end user for permission to update/install files on the user's machine? This might not be on Microsoft.
Is there such a thing? I don't think so - last time I checked, there was about 6 GB of MS-supplied malware trying to download and install itself on eeeeeeeeevery Win7 computer through Windows Update (where not prevented by technical means such as GPO or GWX Control Panel). So no, that's either a) a fictional requirement, or b) ignored by MS.
Wow, as I Microsoft hater I kind of laugh when I read this. My opinion of Windows has always been low.
Unfortunately, somewhere over the years I came to realize that the entire industry is really being hurt my Windows consumers dragging their feet about upgrading browsers and operating systems. Microsoft might be rushing too fast but you're probably still better off moving forward with them.
75% of iOS users are on Apple's latest major release. That's worth a lot. If 75% of Windows users were on 10, the Windows community would be much better off. I'd say ignore the perceived warts and get behind upgrading.
> 75% of iOS users are on Apple's latest major release.
That's because wealthier people tend to keep up with the latest technology. And Apple has always made a conscious decision to target the wealthier customers.
Walk into any Best Buy and compare prices for Apple machines against the likes of Dell, Asus, Acer, and such.
Poor people buy cheap because of need and upgrade only when things stop working. Rich people are more likely to buy to optimize the and share the latest and greatest experience.
I'm not totally sure about your statement here, but it only really serves to reinforce what was just stated.
People who are picky about their tech (like those of us here on HN) are going to complain about the lack of control and forced updates. However, the population you're describing can only really stand to benefit from it all, since they do a poor job of updating on their own.
Where do you live? Maybe that has something to do with it?
I help support an app with just a few thousand users (US and Canada). It's about 9 years old but still actively updated. Coincidentally, it's user base is decidedly poorer people. In the years I've been involved there have only been a handful of people running macs and about the same number running Linux. Easily 99 percent run Windows. XP was most common until last year when Windows 7 finally took over. The first Win 10 users are just starting to show up.
My (admittedly limited) experience is just the opposite of yours.
I guess the plan is to just keep making "improvements" witch works well for keeping the platform fresh and interesting. Then monetizing it along the way. It's also nice that it will be able to run everywhere and a "Windows" app will work on all "Windows" devices.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I actually liked Windows 8.1 better than 10. It's hard for me to explain why, but Windows 10 gives me the feeling that I don't own the system - that Microsoft does and they're just letting me use it.
Windows 10 gives me the feeling that I don't own the system - that Microsoft does and they're just letting me use it.
The forced updates, meaning MS has the power to (and likely will) change your environment completely without your explicit consent? I completely agree. They've even stated a few times that Win10 is a "service" and not a "product".
If using a laptop or the like switch your WiFi connections over to metered connections.
My Surface Pro 4 was having stability issues when it slept, and updates seemed to be the issue. Switched over to metered connections and I haven't lost any work in weeks.
Doesn't work for desktops or the like with wired connections.
So it's got this malicious feature, but you can trick it into not working with some arcane (and conditional) configuration setting. I switched to Linux when XP started feeling too limiting, but this is just getting ridiculous. And without real pushback from the broader user base, odds are this is a trend that will continue.
I feel exactly the same. For me Win8.1 was the pinnacle of Windows. The whole "tile-world" part of the system was misguided but ignorable, and didn't harass anyone. Tile-world aside, it was one of the most stable and performant OSs I've used.
In comparison, Windows 10 makes my top-specced late 2013 Thinkpad feel like an overheating budget machine. All together I must have spent a few workdays trying to fix the machine, and despite being quite knowledgeable about Windows administration I'm still having performance issues and still have the feeling that the system really answers only to MS HQ, and has no intention of ceding control to its owner (me).
Just a thought...did you do an update or a full, clean reinstall of 10 over 8.1? From my anecdotal testing: 4 machines with update 8.1 -> 10. One was fine, the other 3 performed very poorly. Doing a clean install fixed my perf issues. The one that was fine had a almost stock (no additional software) install of 8.1 that was a few months old.
I also love playing some older games (right now I am in a SimCity 4 binge).
I am seriously considering the next time I buy a computer, to ditch windows entirely, and use only Wine, I am having in Windows 8.1 to put Wine DLLs in more and more game folders, also if you enter many serious gaming forums, people recommend you stick with Windows 7.
The reason is that Microsoft in their DirectX pushing tactics (that started when they said that WinXP would not be able to run DX10 features at all... despite hackers proving that it ca, also the Xinput vs DirectInput bullshit) they started to resort to stuff that sometimes I am not sure if is just bad coding or intentionally evil.
For example for SimCity 4: The game uses DirectX7 (yes, it is that old :( ), and relies heavily on DirectDraw (that I still think is one of the most awesome pieces of tech MS ever made), on Windows 8.1, DirectDraw is completely emulated, partially with software, partially with D3D (or OGL depending on some dll combinations you have), and in a crappily coded manner.
Wine ddraw.dll instead translate all DDraw calls to OpenGL equivalent in 2D, still is not perfect, but the different is obvious, DDraw games run like crap in Windows 8.1 native, and frequently run even better than when they were designed in first place when using Wine (be it in Linux, Mac or in Windows using Wine DLLs).
Another game that works in Windows 7, but not in 8.1 or 10 without Wine, is the RPG "Arcanum" from Troika Games, also for the same reason: it relies on DDraw, and Windows 8.1 onwards DDraw emulation is so bad that this game renders most of the screen black, or in a wonky manner.
So if I am using Wine, on Windows, more and more, why nose use Wine on a NIX anyway? Also many of the newer games have NIX support by default too (source engine games for example).
Bullshit. Allow an actual user of Windows 10 to correct your statement, since I bet you haven't used it at all: Some things are unfinished. Mostly the consumer facing stuff (think Metro apps).
Other than that, Windows 10 has been rock solid for the past 8 months or so that I've been using it on my main workstation and my main tablet.
/r/sysadmin is full of Win10 horror stories for multi-user deployments in business environments. Your one anecdote just doesn't compare. I think Win10 is very undercooked, even by MS's standards. There are simply too many use cases where its a step down from Win7.
MS has more of less conceded that Win10 isn't business ready, so they have a special distribution called LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) of its Enterprise version. It doesn't auto-update, no feature updates, no cortana or edge, no support for app/modern apps, etc. Can you imagine windows 7 shipping with a lot of things stripped from it to make it more like XP? That would be crazy, but that's exactly what's going on here.
I think by 2017-2018 it'll be fine, but two or three years from release date to get something as stable as the previous versions seems really rough.
Right and last year it was full of Windows 8 horror stories and the years before that it was full of Windows 7 horror stories. In other news - StackOverflow.com is full of programming problems so programming must suck. Point being - /r/sysadmin is where people go to complain and ask questions.
Also, it's empirically verifiable, not an anecdote - that Windows 10 runs all the same apps that I've been able to run for decades on previous versions of Windows without issue. That's what I call rock solid.
As a steady reader or that sub, I can say Enterprise never got on the Win8 bandwagon and the reception to Win7 was a lot more positive. We barely had any issues with our migration to 7 and we did it same year release.
> /r/sysadmin is where people go to complain and ask questions.
That's /r/techsupport. This sub is supposed to be only IT pros. A lot of the issues I see are outside of the "I just need a facebook machine" use cases, so a home user like you may not ever have these issues, but trust me, your IT department sure as hell is having issues.
Sorry to disappoint you but I am my IT department and I'm not having any issues...and neither are the IT departments from several companies that I work with.
And as a steady reader of that sub and of the Microsoft multi-sub, I heartily disagree with your observation. Both Win7 and Win8 had loads of "horror stories", just like WinXP before it. People are pretty much going to complain about any new Windows version.
Internal testing with Win8, which is still in the casual testing stage of "lets see what breaks" has like 3+ showstoppers for us and a dozen bad but not showstopper issues. XP to 7 had zero.
That's ignoring the metro apps/store nonsense, which I imagine I would just disable outright when we launch with it.
I guess one could argue that 7 wasn't a "real OS" and just Vista SP3. Still, I think 10 took a lot of gambles and wasn't the refined and less tablety Win8 everyone thought it would be. It clearly was rushed to save MS's image.
> They can do better than this. Much, much better.
No they can't. It's just your selective memory from the time they were a big-ass monopolist that sucked the life from any competing platform to the point where you had to use theirs.
Now, when you are used to high quality design injected by Apple and then refined by competition in the mobile space, your standards have went up so high that you simply can't go back to the half baked buggy interfaces that Microsoft has always produced. The older systems don't /seem that way/ because you are familiar with them.
>when you are used to high quality design injected by Apple
Hmm, people do like to glorify Apple. Just remember that Apple is the same company that told us we were holding the phone wrong and that included copy and paste after three iterations of the iPhone.
Also using win7 right now (at work). While the practical differences aren't huge, I personally find the UI of both windows 8.1 and windows 10 an improvement (after a few tweaks).
Sure, Windows was never the pinnacle of good, consistent design, but it was still a lot better than Windows 10 is. The last time I was this frustrated with a Windows version was Windows Me.
What are they thinking? They can do better than this. Much, much better.