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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

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Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#31

Post by andrewfong »

theoutlander wrote: post #7

I can relate to this. It was a common theme across Microsoft. In one instance, the team I was part of was responsible for the initial integration of Bing and Facebook. We had about 24 dedicated people on the team (a few partner/principal group managers too!). Our team was considered agile because we released most features every 4 months (this was around 2009 I think)!!! Anyway, we had a hackathon at Facebook with Zuc…

I worked as a lawyer on a Microsoft acquisition once. We had once a week 40-person conference calls for status updates. The company being acquired had a total of 9 employees I think.

The calls were scheduled for an hour. But, with 40 people on the line, the calls always ran late. At least 4 of the people of that call were billing $400+ / hr.

Most of the things I had to present during the call could have been resolved with a quick email to the relevant party that said "Hey, this looks funny. Do you care about this?" But the person running the entire thing insisted that I prepare Powerpoint slides for the meeting. And after I showed off my slides and everyone on the call had a chance to ask questions and discuss, the conclusion was almost invariably, "No, we don't really care about that."

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#32

Post by andrewfong »

bradford wrote: post #16
KiwiCoder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the focus on data simply shift the problems you describe to telemetry decisions?

Yes, and, I might be misunderstanding your question, but I view that as a good thing. I don't ever want to spend my time in a meeting witnessing people bicker over where to position a dialog button, when you could just run an A/B test and let data guide the decision process.

Yes, but now you get to bicker about how to structure the A/B test and whether the results are statistically significant.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#33

Post by feelin_googley »

"I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stupid shit" wasn't a result of any one programmer making a dumb decision; most of it was a result of an architecture and a mindset which tried to prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot by gratuitously abstracting away "dangerous" things like memory management. Again: needless abstraction will bite you in the ass if you're not careful. My lead and I spent months going through the Outlook code exorcising "stupid shit" -- removing code which hid what it was actually doing, getting the code cleaner and closer to the machine, making everything more explicit, tighter, and less generic."

The above is excerpted from a later blog post by the same author.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#35

Post by drzaiusapelord »

feelin_googley wrote: post #33

"I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stup…

On the flip side, removing safety from MS Office devs has led to a pretty significant quality and security decline. Pretty much every Office version we upgrade to is tested to hell and back and we usually delay adoption for three years. By then its barely functional after three years of service packs and hotfixes. We just migrated 100 people to 2013 and are still finding issues. Worse, this mentality spread to updates, which we have to delay by 2 weeks or more due to breaking things, ironically usually Outlook.

Would I trade a slower start time and less perky performance for security and stability? Absolutely. Maybe those old timers knew what they were doing. Maybe the care vs quick equation makes more sense to lean on care than quick for many types of software, especially in our connected world. Maybe the trade-off didn't make too much sense during the age of Pentium II, but in the age of i5's and i7's on every desktop with 8+gb of ram? I doubt it would be as noticeable.

I think we're dangerously experimenting with a "do it quick, ship, and maybe fix it later" mentality that might make sense with startups hurting for dollars and a MVP, but for dinosaurs like Microsoft, its a liability. I wonder how many "previous employees didnt know what they were doing so we fixed everything" anecdotes end up with unhappy customers in the end? Perhaps most.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#36

Post by WorldMaker »

mrguyorama wrote: post #17
olyjohn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

AFAIUI, Windows took the philosophy that the user should be the god of their system. By running software, the user has indicated to the OS that "This code is blessed and I want it to run". Where this becomes relevant is that when you shut down, Windows doesn't just kill -9 everything (which it is totally capable of doing), but instead, politely informs all running processes of the imminent shutdown so that they can c…

I feel like that mindset is still there, but the goal posts have just moved. As you point out, in Vista and 7 the "takes too long" was often just a few seconds (the reported goal in Vista was listed in milliseconds). 8/10 continue to tune that based on telemetrics and user decisions in aggregate on one side and developer/application opt-in to more aggressive app shutdowns on the other side. That app is taking too long to shutdown screen still occurs in 8/10; it's just slower to appear and more likely to only appear in cases where an application has truly stalled out.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#37

Post by com2kid »

ajross wrote: post #27
com2kid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power states are much more complex than this. In reality, CPUs and SoCs have multiple levels of sleep, some of which are standardized for a platform. ACPI at least tries to specify what should happen on x86/x64 systems. ARM has some standards, and then each SoC implements a lot of their own, which, to be fair, are sometimes really cool. For lots of the power saving modes, hardware drivers have to opt in. This is wher…

Sure, but the interfaces are more or less as described, and that's what MS has to deal with. I mean, yeah, you could make it into even more of a messy description, but from the start menu's perspective the PMIC or EC interface to power management isn't particularly important.

> Sure, but the interfaces are more or less as described, and that's what MS has to deal with. I mean, yeah, you could make it into even more of a messy description, but from the start menu's perspective the PMIC or EC interface to power management isn't particularly important.

Now days, the majority use case is "shut the lid". If software works (hah!), then users shouldn't ever have to manually shutdown or reboot, or worry about power state at all.

Perfect world and all that.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#38

Post by rhencke »

dingo_bat wrote: post #23
whowouldathunk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on the Windows team. Things are very different now. Source control especially: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large... It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. And I think that's a good thing.

> It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. Hasn't prevented the travesty that the win10 UI is, though.

Travesty is a bit hyperbolic, no?

The Win10 UI works. It's stable. It's reasonably efficient at getting things done. It's reasonably compatible with people's expectations of how Windows works. (no Win8-style revamp of Start, etc.)

There's parts of it I dislike greatly, personally. (Cortana, the Settings/Control Panel split.) It's annoying and unpolished on parts like that, but I can't say it's a _travesty_.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#39

Post by mrguyorama »

WorldMaker wrote: post #36
mrguyorama wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIUI, Windows took the philosophy that the user should be the god of their system. By running software, the user has indicated to the OS that "This code is blessed and I want it to run". Where this becomes relevant is that when you shut down, Windows doesn't just kill -9 everything (which it is totally capable of doing), but instead, politely informs all running processes of the imminent shutdown so that they can c…

I feel like that mindset is still there, but the goal posts have just moved. As you point out, in Vista and 7 the "takes too long" was often just a few seconds (the reported goal in Vista was listed in milliseconds). 8/10 continue to tune that based on telemetrics and user decisions in aggregate on one side and developer/application opt-in to more aggressive app shutdowns on the other side. That app is taking too lon…

I meant the mindset seems to have changed on a grander scale. IE with respect to forcing updates on users and aggressive telemetry collection.

I understand how Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to OS updates, as a majority of systems being up to date helps with herd immunity to prevent worm-scale attacks lack the past few ransomeware attacks, but at the same time, I hate desktop systems coming closer to mobile phones with respect to being locked down. With some updates even changing system settings, it's obvious that Microsoft no longer trusts the user, and that unnerves me.

When it comes to telemetry, I was always for it before, purposely selecting the "yes send telemetry" for any Microsoft product I installed, as I was very much a fanboy for most of my life and I enjoyed helping to make the product better. But the way they've handled the privacy aspect of it, along with not allowing you to opt out in any real way, other than disconnecting the network makes my hair stand on end.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#40

Post by bo1024 »

bradford wrote: post #10

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opin…

Very interesting and thanks for the post. Does Windows 10 actually conduct ongoing A/B tests and use telemetry to evaluate them? (for example the interface used by two people on two different computers might look different, or something)

I'm intrigued but still very skeptical about the effectiveness of the data-based approach to UI design. That seems to be an area where local, hillclimbing optimization can lead to a mess of conflicting decisions across the OS.

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