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Unless I'm missing something, this article really seems unreasonably harsh. He cites two bad updates within the past months (one for Windows 7, one for Exchange) that have had to be pulled due to issues, but it seems like well over half the article is devoted to complaints about patches for Windows 10 - an (officially) unreleased product.
The title seems to apply to Apple, too (see iOS and Yosemite WiFi bugs), and could probably be applied to Google, too (Hangouts bugs, Lollipop problems, etc). But mistakes happen and many bugs are less obvious to reproduce than others, so I wouldn't point fingers too hard, personally.
It's a testament to the usefulness of lawyers that the big players in the software industry don't even pretend they can work at the level of professional and managerial competence offered by almost all other consumer and B2B industries.
Since the HN guidelines ask for linkbait titles to be changed, we changed the somewhat baity title to a representative sentence from the article.
dang, have you considered aggregating these kinds of notifications onto a separate page, or maybe using a specific account for administrator action? It would be helpful for those of us who value transparency (and thank you for your continued transparency - it has been great).
Unless I'm missing something, this article really seems unreasonably harsh. He cites two bad updates within the past months (one for Windows 7, one for Exchange) that have had to be pulled due to issues, but it seems like well over half the article is devoted to complaints about patches for Windows 10 - an (officially) unreleased product.
The Windows 10 piece is stupid - it's a pre-release OS, these things happen. It's why they haven't released the OS yet, so I'd say their QA process worked. Pre-release OSes don't go through the same level of QA - if you don't like it, you should use a supported OS.
Second, with Exchange updates, there's kind of an unspoken understanding that there is no way MS can test every scenario their users will throw at Exchange. So updates are often released that can cause edge case issues, with the understanding that their large customers will test the updates in a test environment before deploying them. If issues come up, Microsoft can pull the update. These kinds of retractions are not uncommon with server software.
Some articles that capture the whole timeframe:
I hold out hope that Microsoft has bigger plans for it's operating system than simply pandering to the tech-media's demands for, of all things... the start menu to return.
The title seems to apply to Apple, too (see iOS and Yosemite WiFi bugs), and could probably be applied to Google, too (Hangouts bugs, Lollipop problems, etc). But mistakes happen and many bugs are less obvious to reproduce than others, so I wouldn't point fingers too hard, personally.
I've had a lot more serious problems with my Lollipop-updated Nexus 5 than I have with my Windows 8.1 desktop PC over the past month.
Software quality in general is IME pretty bad these days and the problems go way beyond just Microsoft.
This is exactly what I thought would happen when they gutted their QA staff and reassigned the surviving testers as developers. Your employees act in accordance with their incentives, and the incentives aren't there for QA. Microsoft made it clear that they only value feature development and shipping, and their employees now associate "doing QA" with "being fired en masse". To corrupt a phrase, they've crapped their…
I'm curious as to what has shifted inside Microsoft. Part of me believes I'm seeing the work of new devs as the old devs have left. Another part believes this is the result of agile taking over. I liked my visual studio with waterfall releases. At least it worked without constant hangs, locks, and crashes.