The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:

Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”

Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?

The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.

Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.

It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.

Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.

It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.

They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.

Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.

Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.

Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.

Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"

If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.

A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.

There are fewer and fewer 'David Cutler' types and more and more 'Pavan Davuluri' types at Microsoft. Wonder if the blame is really down to AI or indeed a lack of attention to detail from a new kind of workforce.

You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.

If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.

True but it is still their moat. Without windows they will lose a lot of appeal to their cloud products like Intune, Azure AD, M365 etc

At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.

The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.

Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.

Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.

If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.

Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?

No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.

Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.

If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.

The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.

There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.

Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).

If not for being forced off, most people would never have left windows xp… many medical practices and industrial facilities still are in it.

Windows Key + P to change monitor configuration quickly.

Forkbombing into resource exhaustion aside, W11 is the only system that left me unable to as much as log in

Dual boot with Fedora on my laptop, and my desktop at home is a Mac mini M4. I really like Fedora, it's my Linux distro of choice, but the experience is not as nice as on W11 in my opinion.

I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.

I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].

Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.

Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.

Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.

For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...

[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...

Not slop but sophistication.

[dead]

Only 12 year old boys 25 years ago. Use Linux or MacOS, just move on.