It's not really a case of "allowing" Android apps. It would take a monumental engineering effort.
It wouldn't have been so monumental if instead of locking everything into Direct3D they'd used OpenGL instead. Here their own lock-in mentality will eventually bite them hard. If MS will outgrow their dinosaur lock-in approach, they can start supporting GL-Next on all of their platforms when it will come out.
Very few mobile apps need OpenGL. The larger problem is the lack of Android APIs.
It wouldn't have been so monumental if instead of locking everything into Direct3D they'd used OpenGL instead. Here their own lock-in mentality will eventually bite them hard. If MS will outgrow their dinosaur lock-in approach, they can start supporting GL-Next on all of their platforms when it will come out.
Very few mobile apps need OpenGL. The larger problem is the lack of Android APIs.
Mobile games do. And if you want to translate it into a broader context, what about having OpenGL on Xbox? Didn't MS want to unify their OSes across different devices? So it's really all related.
Very few mobile apps need OpenGL. The larger problem is the lack of Android APIs.
Mobile games do. And if you want to translate it into a broader context, what about having OpenGL on Xbox? Didn't MS want to unify their OSes across different devices? So it's really all related.
Last I checked, MS wasn't having problems persuading people to make games for the XBox.
In fact, if Windows Phone ever got decent market share they'd be in a great place for gaming, if they made Xbox -> WP ports easy.
"He's hit all the low-hanging fruit -- that said, these things were not easy to do" I don't think low hanging fruit means what Brad thinks it does.
I had the same reaction. I always thought the saying meant low hanging fruit is always the easiest to get to since its. . you know. . hanging lower than the rest of the fruit on the tree.
Mobile games do. And if you want to translate it into a broader context, what about having OpenGL on Xbox? Didn't MS want to unify their OSes across different devices? So it's really all related.
Last I checked, MS wasn't having problems persuading people to make games for the XBox. In fact, if Windows Phone ever got decent market share they'd be in a great place for gaming, if they made Xbox -> WP ports easy.
This wasn't about persuading, but about them not being jerks and making life easier for those who develop cross platform applications like games. I'm sure many developers would appreciate using portable API.
Your comment harmonizes with the word on the 'street' from in-person conversations from MS employees & people who know them. Testing as a role evidently has been disintegrated and QA turned into SDEs in general. I believe the goal is to force quality onto the developers responsibility instead of making it QA's responsibility. We'll see how that plays out; it sounds like the first iteration has been brutal.
Disclaimer: MS employee/don't speak for the company etc; Yes, SDET has been (at least in my division and those I talk with) dissolved and integrated into SDE. I raise an eye at the parent-parent post not because of the impact this will have (certainly some of the concerns stated here echo strongly with me) but that it's been a relatively recent change and I'd be skeptical that you can attribute any recent failures to…
I went through this in 2006 or so - SDETs were turned into SDEs overnight in my part of MSN. Some survived, I didn't - one thing it did was completely discount the skills of a tester. The other SDEs were not expected to be up-to-skill on testing, but we were stacked against all the other SDEs.
"He has changed the way engineering teams are structured, largely eliminating testers to speed software releases,... " What could possibly go wrong? Ok.. the sentence continues : "and adding data scientists and designers to the engineering teams to ensure all features are informed by rigorous testing and good design principles. " I don't quite understand, how can data scientists help to catch bugs? Automated testing?
It's a confused sentence, but I think it means he removed "testing" as a separate group of people, and made "testing" something inherent to the design process.
"He has changed the way engineering teams are structured, largely eliminating testers to speed software releases,... " What could possibly go wrong? Ok.. the sentence continues : "and adding data scientists and designers to the engineering teams to ensure all features are informed by rigorous testing and good design principles. " I don't quite understand, how can data scientists help to catch bugs? Automated testing?
They are not eliminating testing. This was really bad wording. When I interviewed in Redmond with Microsoft, I was told that Microsoft used to hire SDE's (software development engineers) and SDET's (software development engineers in testing) as two distinct positions. Now, if you are hired as a "software engineer", you are responsible for writing software as well as writing tests. This was done to decrease friction between what used to be the "software development team" and the "QA testing team", and hopefully lead to faster software releases.
I feel there is good and bad. I am glad he moved to a more data driven and agile culture. He is also empowering engineers in his organization. The bad is that they all suffer from the windows mindset and spend a great deal of time building for windows. With all the patents they own they literally own android and yet they are not willing to allow android apps on windows phone or surface pro 3. It feels like a slow mar…
This is tricky. From a developer standpoint, if Android apps were to become first-class citizens on WP, it would make no sense to bother making WP-only apps.