Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait Windows isn't working – and Microsoft urgently needs to change how it develops the platform, and jettison three filthy practices it has acquired in recent years. In 2014 Microsoft decided it could do a better job if it discarded a lot of software testers. This bright new dawn was lauded at the time by Peter Bright at Ars …
"Why would they, they have your money and they know you'll be installing Windows 11 as soon as it's out"
That would mean a pretty big rethink (although it might be the only way to get out from under W10's reputation). They made it clear that everything from now on will be W10 even if the rolling upgrades mean not a single line of the original code remains.
I think the problem is Google.. Before you switch off, let me explain.
Over the years, Google has released several beta products for large scale use by the general public (yes, they had a system where you had to be invited to use it, but lets face it, invites were not hard to get) They did this to generate publicity, but it also got the public used to the idea of using Beta products.
They (and Mozilla) also started a sort of version number arms race, where they'd release several new versions of their browsers each year, each with a relatively minor change. With the result that Firefox, Chrome and Opera all have version numbers in the high fifties, where if they stuck to only updating the major version number with major changes, they'd probably still be on version 12 or 13.
My concern isn't so much the nonsense version numbers, more that the race for ever higher and higher numbers is causing companies to rush development. It also seems to be causing companies to reduce things like proper beta testing (public beta testing is OK as an addition to internal professional testing, but it's not a good substitute). It's likely Microsoft are being affected by this. Adobe certainly are, as are Apple. On a related note, I know that Microsoft, back in the 90s, spent a lot of money on designing user interfaces, even to the point of using products like Macromedia director to create a models of new UIs and testing them before implementing them in products. With things like the ribbon, and start screen, it feels like they've given up that step, and are just trying new ideas on the public now.
I'd like to see all software companies take a step back. They need to slow development, They need to cut the number of releases (preferably to one a year), and they need to do their utmost to ensure that new versions are as ready as they can be before release. The current method used by all software companies (certainly by Microsoft, Apple and Adobe) seems to be release the new version as soon as it's ready, then require the customer to download patches to fix the inevitable bugs. That's fine if, like me, the user has a relatively fast and stable network connection, but a lot of people don't. They don't want to be spending several hours downloading a patch just so they can get their Word processor working.
On a related note, I know that Microsoft, back in the 90s, spent a lot of money on designing user interfaces, even to the point of using products like Macromedia director to create a models of new UIs and testing them before implementing them in products.
When this shit slide impacts on bottom line, MS will realise the error of their ways.
But it may be too late then, my daughter works for a global company and uses Windows 7. There are no plan to change to 10 as its not suitable. The company has moved everything they can server wise to Linux. They are currently looking at alternatives to Outlook, Word & Excel and once thats decided they wil look at desktop versions of Linux.
Only if MS were to continue to support for 7 would they remain MS.
When this shit slide impacts on bottom line, MS will realise the error of their ways.
Unfortunately, Windows is just a sideline for Microsoft now. Unless MS wrecking Windows somehow harms their cloud offerings, MS is happy to keep letting Windows flail about. It's all about the cloud now. People keep thinking that MS is going to wake up when they realize that their actions are slowly destroying Windows (as a product, it's already destroyed, but MS only cares about it as a source of revenue, and it's not totally destroyed in that way yet), but that's not going to happen. They already know. And they don't care.
"MS is happy to keep letting Windows flail about. It's all about the cloud now."
Why would anyone use an MS cloud product if they weren't beholden to Windows on their desktops? There are other cloud vendors, maybe better, maybe worse, but certainly *interchangeable* and (in the event of a sufficiently serious screw-up by one of them) *replaceable*. If this really is Microsoft's long-term strategy, then it is corporate suicide and I can only hope that billg finishes spending his cash on good causes before his shareholdings become worthless.
"Unless MS wrecking Windows somehow harms their cloud offerings, MS is happy to keep letting Windows flail about."
But that's the thing -- Microsoft's cloud offerings are really only attractive to people and companies who are invested in Windows. I don't think Microsoft can disentangle the two.
A little background to my comment:
I am not a software professional. I am a grunt that uses software to do my job, but I like to know a bit about the tools I use. So, for good or ill, I read The Register. And for good or ill, I read the comments.
I can agree that MS Windows has never been the most reliable thing. However, in the dim and distant past, when my computer crashed, it completely fell over. Now, it generally just wobbles. At no point in the past 20-odd years of using MS Windows have I ever been sure that it was the fault of Windows or the application that caused the crash.
Analogy Time:
Is it the fault of the driver of the vehicle for not swerving around a pothole it may or may not have seen, or the fault of the council for not patching the hole? Do we make allowances for the fact that the road is REALLY long, takes a long time to survey, and if you drive a big, heavy industrial vehicle, chances are you won't be able to swerve around every single road defect?
Back to the main thrust of my comment:
As an engineer, I use Autodesk Inventor and Vault, Microsoft Office, MathCAD and a few tiny but indispensable programs. None of these are fully supported (some not at all) on ANY other operating system than Windows. I can't imagine that I am alone in using software that is only developed to run on Windows. There simply is no alternative, we have to use it. And we have to upgrade to a fairly recent version because of corporate environment, security updates, support and so on.
Until there is another road that is wide enough, and well-maintained enough to accommodate the behemoths that companies use to get them to where they're going, or the vehicle manufacturers agree to support both left- and right-hand-drive models (perhaps a better analogy here would be to support wheels that are both round and those of constant diameter?) people like me are stuck using Windows at work. And because I use it all the time, it makes sense for me to use what I am familiar with at home as well. Plus, all my games, media players and editing software are supported.
I have tried Linux twice. Three times if you count running a SmoothWall box. I agree it is fantastic at what it does, and it keeps getting better. However, until I can drive my articulated lorry application on it, it will remain the cul-de-sac of this tortured analogy.
"At no point in the past 20-odd years of using MS Windows have I ever been sure that it was the fault of Windows or the application that caused the crash."
??? Unless you have VERY unstable power, it has to be the OS or application that causes a crash. But, in the case of Windows, Windows has had an extremely poor record of handling buggy drivers correctly (thus BSOD). But again, has the WinAPI been clearly documented? Not at all, hence buggy drivers.
As for the rest, yes, people use Windows for the applications and not the OS, as always.
Even today I went to open a PDF file and for some reason Windows tried to open it with Edge. I've never used Edge and never want to. I've always used Adobe to view PDF files, so why the change?
Not to mention Windows keeps trying to set Bing as my search provider no matter how many times I try to disable it. It's like a constant fight to keep MS from taking over my computer.
Not to mention the Microsoft update virus that deletes all your files. We need protection from MS now.
Sigh.
It is not your computer. It belongs to MS who graciously let you use it from time (when they are not slurping or applying broken updates...).
The can (and do) whatever they like to your system and there is SFA that you can do about it.
Go on sue them and see what that gets you... Zilch.
Windows has been broken from 8.0 onwards but 8.0 and 8.1 could be tamed with a bit of work but Windows 10 is a whole different level of shit/crap/dog-pooh when compared to what has gone before.
Before I retired, I had a sign on my desk that said, "Windows 10 NOT spoken here!"
even battling with systemd is better than what windows has become today.
MS should realise that W10 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and not an end in itself. It should be invisible, reliable, secure, bug free, easy to use, give us one or maybe two consistent ways to run programs or change settings, not many many, not steal our data, not force "upgrades" on us and, oh, do what an OS should which is lie there out of sight and let just us run the applications which we're actually using a computer for in the first place. Jeez I had to hack the registry yesterday to export a Powerpoint slide to jpg at a decent resolution. The average user can't even find that fix much less do it. My wife would have simply turned the machine off.
MS need to shift their entire paradigm and realise where they are in the product development curve and just settle for less. Apple is not a lot better, and getting worse. If I could have truly seamless app level compatibility with Linux, I'd be on Mint or Ubuntu like a flash, but unfortunately there are too many real-world mismatches, and the favoured answer of some to "just run Windows in a virtual machine" is also not real world simple. But Linux is not far off the ideal. No wonder it's used for web servers
"MS need to shift their entire paradigm and realise where they are in the product development curve and just settle for less."
Problem is, what if you're at the TAG end, meaning settling for less equals settling for NOTHING, meaning you cease to exist? NO ONE I know will accept the inevitable that gracefully, especially since most have unfinished business or simply want to live forever. Besides, they still possess quite a captive market out there (or we'd be seeing major developers switching over already).
MS should realise that W10 is an OPERATING SYSTEM
There's the mistake a lot of people make.
It's not really, it's a platform for gathering information on you in order to sell.
Much like ChromeOS and Android, which like Win 10 are certainly not 'the end in itself' but merely the Trojan Horse you've happily wheeled in and been impressed with how nice it looks. Or at least in theory, if you've wheeled it in and gawked at it, mesmerised by it's clunky lack of any grace or elan, it's general uselessness or how often it breaks, you've at least still wheeled it in.
Good article and a much needed wake up call to Redmond. Ars has an alternate take on this, which starts out with the same premise, that that Windows is broken, and suggests a complementary possible cause.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsofts-problem-isnt-shipping-windows-updates-its-developing-them/
Basically, the author says that new features are developed in isolation, often without using automated testing. The active coding interval is surprisingly short, 8-10 weeks. Then, near the end everything is thrown into the pot together, integration testing - a lot of it manual - starts and bugs are slowly brought under control.
His concern is that this process, barely adequate at the best of time, managed to somewhat work under 3 year cycles. Under accelerated, cyclic releases, there just isn't enough time to corral all the bugs.
It seems kinda hard to believe that this would be the case, but I know of at least one ERP system, by a one of the usual billion $ suspects, where the development pipeline of 200+ engineers regularly came to a crashing halt whenever a bug made it to the build: there is only 1 test server. Must do wonders for software quality, when every bug, no matter how complex, requires immediate fixing to unblock everyone else. Bug found at 9pm Friday has to be fixed by 8am Monday. Every. Single. Time.
In a way, that is even more worrying that this article's premise. Sure, MS has enough money to throw more people at testing, and it should. And, sure, it should stop treating Insiders as a serious resource: witness their assent in the face of the Windows 8.0 GUI changes. Everyone else hated it, so they obviously weren't an appropriate way to gauge user acceptance or suitability.
But these remain fairly simple problems to solve, given the will and the resources.
But if MS's culture and tooling is incapable of using a mature and efficient process to flag bugs early in the development cycle, including issues arising from interactions between features, then changing that culture would be extremely challenging for any organization, let alone one with a product with as much technical debt as Windows and one with such a rich history of interdepartmental conflicts.
MS can't go back to 3 year cycles, but it also doesn't seem like it is at all capable of making do with 1 year cycles, at least not with its current way to approach development.
I have to defend the windows insider testers here. Some of them may just approve anything that Microsoft does, but a lot of them just have the time and find some bugs. In general, once Microsoft has produced an insider build containing some feature, new interface, or relocated settings system, they are going to ship that. The insiders don't have the ability to say "That new interface is terrible. Go back to the last one." and actually have that advice taken. They can, however, report bugs. I think the blame can be placed on Microsoft for not listening to the insiders on bugs, which has been amply proven in recent weeks. The terrible interface and functionality changes were all Microsoft's initiative, and I would seriously doubt that any of them ever got run by someone external before they were implemented.
Even if Microsoft actually listened to insider reports (and I find it amazing that they apparently don't), the insider program still cannot adequately substitute for a real, internal, QA process. It can only supplement. This isn't because of some failing with the insiders, but because the fundamental concept of "crowdsourcing" QA is deeply flawed.
... of accumulating technical debt and political in-fighting within Microsoft.
A story: some years ago I was working for a consulting firm that was helping a healthcare company do a Microsoft Dynamics CRM rollout (note: I'm not a Dynamics CRM guy, my role on this was limited to getting some data out of the company's existing customer database into some custom fields in the thing). The Dynamics CRM instance was in the cloud which meant a federated Azure ActiveDirectory setup so single sign-on worked; also, because the company's Exchange servers were still on-premises and Dynamics CRM offers a facility where incoming emails are scraped for potential leads, this involved some complex orchestration between all the moving parts, but Microsoft even offered a little piece of "gateway" software specifically for this use-case to route your mails back out of your on-premises Exchange server to the cloud. Simples, right? Every single piece of the puzzle (Exchange, ActiveDirectory, Dynamics CRM, Azure, the little "gateway" thing whose name I forget) was made and supported by Microsoft. What could go wrong?
Reader, it was like pulling teeth. It was as brittle as hell. The little "gateway" had no documentation to speak with and was obviously some stopgap tool some poor Microsoft bod had cooked up under duress. Thanks to the political siloing within Microsoft, its failure to work was of course Someone Else's Problem™ whoever you happened to be speaking to at the time. It was hinted the problem might go away if you just moved your Exchange servers along with the rest of your IT infrastructure into Azure, Access or American Express that'll do nicely sir or ma'am hem hem. At one point, it all started to work and then the IT guys in the company pushed a Group Policy update that made it sulk for two days until it sprang into life again. Don't ask me what they did, maybe they sacrificed a goat or something.
This is Microsoft in microcosm. They often get stick for building monolithic products (look how long it took, for example, for the "WinMin" initiative to deliver a Windows kernel that could boot without the GUI) in their desire to suck you into having to cross-licence their stuff but under the surface it's a mess of sullen little fiefdoms who barely talk to one another because That Lot Over There took all the nice sodas out of our team fridge ten years ago (people who've worked in Microsoft know this isn't a joke) and We're Never Speaking To Them Again. Even the FOSS people when they aren't examining each others' backsides for who has the most truly open orifice co-operate more. People who want to change things for the better get bogged down in the politics and the organisational morass, like this rant that went viral a few years ago about the organisational inertia that paralysed what should have been a relatively trivial element in the Windows UI.
And put into words many of us feel windows is currently a shit show
On the QC thing.
I work in aerospace manufacturing........ how many of you would be happy to fly on a plane where the only people to have done any QC work would be the plane spotters brigade?
No takers..... why does something critical as a desktop OS have no real QC ?
"No takers..... why does something critical as a desktop OS have no real QC ?"
Simple. Different definitions of "critical". In your world, "critical" equates to "some little thing goes wrong, planes fall, people die, governments forced to get involved, people risk getting thrown in prison". In Microsoft's world, "critical" means "no alternatives available--or there'd already be a mass exodus--and they probably have enough resources to lawyer their way out of trouble. After all, it's not like people die because of a bug in their system."
For Microsoft's definition to change, some catastrophe (either people die or a major business goes bust) must be directly attributed to them. It's only crisis that motivates the people with the power.
OK I'll admit perhaps I didnt define critical system too well
But given m$'s attempts to muscle in on the robot market (something that fills me with fear)
Quote: "After all, it's not like people die because of a bug in their system."
PCs ARE used in critical systems ... MRI scanners, Radiotherapy machines, industrial robots to name a few.
A bug in win 10 introduced by automatic updates CAN kill in those circumstances... its not like "Oh I've lost the power point document I've been working on for 2 days" , its more like "Opps I've just given that cancer patient 10 times the gamma ray dose I should have"
Which is why those sort of machines have "For gawd's sake dont let windows update run" signs on them.
Or in the sector I deal with "Welcome to Linux, booting machine application, have a nice day"
"A bug in win 10 introduced by automatic updates CAN kill in those circumstances... its not like "Oh I've lost the power point document I've been working on for 2 days" , its more like "Opps I've just given that cancer patient 10 times the gamma ray dose I should have""
Unless and until this actually happens AND can directly be attributed to Windows or a Windows-based Microsoft action, there will still be no impetus for action. Anything less, and Microsoft will probably lawyer its way out of it.
I work in aerospace manufacturing........ how many of you would be happy to fly on a plane where the only people to have done any QC work would be the plane spotters brigade?
The problem, generically, with software is that people want something that is as complex as a 787 but for £4.50.
I worked on a shrink-wrapped thing back in the days when we had to get CDs printed and shipped. No issuing hotfixes over the internets. The (annoying but efficient) QA guy eventually had all his regression tests run against a coverage analysis tool until he was satisfied that every line was hit. Of course, with networks and race conditions, that doesn't mean that the tests are 100%, but even this effort was far more than you see on typical corporate software. Since the system made a lot of money, we had the leeway to spend the time on this.
"The problem, generically, with software is that people want something that is as complex as a 787 but for £4.50."
That may be the problem generically, but it isn't the problem in this case. Windows costs an order of magnitude more than this. At the bottom end of the market (cheap laptops) it is an appreciable fraction of the cost of the system.
MS are not alone in their approach to testing. I know a very able, talented and hard-working tester in a major banking operation, where one would think that thorough testing would be paramount. Not so, on a Friday he has been approached by development on the line of... this release is due to commit Monday can you come in over the weekend. Having spent a long career in IT I find this approach by a bank frightening. Too often senior IT management have never written a line of code and approach it as...how hard can it be.
I can see how Microsoft is losing it madly with the new functionality - they probably farm it out to the cheapest programmers they can nearly get away with. And now there's no discernible QA any more, the results aren't too surprising.
But Microsoft keeps breaking core and fundamental parts of Windows too - the parts that pretty much used to work. What on earth are they doing fiddling with this stuff? I can almost imaging a wide-reaching programme of internal sabotage going on.
They're probably trying to break WINE to ensure there's no viable migration path. That's one reason ReactOS is stuck where it is; Windows is a moving target, and simply by keeping things changing, they make the act of keeping up and staying relevant too difficult.
They're probably trying to break WINE to ensure there's no viable migration path. That's one reason ReactOS is stuck where it is; Windows is a moving target, and simply by keeping things changing, they make the act of keeping up and staying relevant too difficult.
Not that I might not buy that reasoning.
Part of the traction of Windows is all the older software that people need to run, and need it to run.
And thus why it still keeps the older bits up to a point (WIn16 support was dropped with Win64, for example). But that's old stuff, not to mention custom stuff that probably can't be virtualized (like the lathe controlled by the custom card on an ISA bus--support for ISA was dropped with Vista), so that's kind-of "off the back end" territory. But all those custom-built software jobs are still workable, and there's still its stranglehold on the PC games market (in spite of the potential pull power of things like professional gaming leagues).
"Once upon a time, maybe. Today WINE's just going to be another victim of general breakage."
Still, the ongoing news of DXVK development, the inclusion of Proton in the Steam Play system and the addition of vkd3d to WINE is giving me pause. One of the biggest obstacles to Windows emigration even now seems to be actively engaged. It'll be interesting to see something mainstream switch to using stuff like this, though I suspect the lawyers will interfere with this, but I can seriously start to hope again. If things improve by 2020 (when Win7 support drops), there may just be another ship on which to jump finally.
The cynic in me suspects that this is done on purpose. So that when the Anti-Trust people come a-knocking on their door they could honestly say "Ooo, no, we can't remove Internet Explorer, everything else depends on it". (IIRC, an example of what I often used to illustrate systemic flaws in MS' design philosophy).
MS need to dogfood their own product. They should be rolling out the updates across their entire infrastructure before letting them loose on the wider world. Imagine the s**t storm if Nadella walked into the dev team's building and said: "The latest update just deleted all my data"
I heard a story about an email server product (now sadly passed away). The users kept on complaining that when they did certain maintenance tasks, the mailstore would get corrupted. In the end the product manager made the maintenance tasks run on the devs mailboxes every few days. The reliability went through the roof.
Microsoft has now responded to the criticism. The have just announced the Security Update Validation Program. Unfortunately it will not be an in-house QA group that will be testing the software. It will be a corporate insiders program made up of volunteers approved by Microsoft representatives.
Microsoft is assuming that there is going to be a surge of volunteers (unpaid talent) from the IT community. The enterprise has a Jan 14, 2020 deadline looming so resources are tied up doing the migration from W7 to W10, adjusting to cloud services and managing financial processing. They also have to maintain their in house applications.
Microsoft likes to have its cake and eat it too, so they have taken a poor decision and turned it into an opportunity. Shift the responsibility to those who benefit the most from a stable environment. It is also apparent that they are counting on not being held accountable if the corporate insiders do not report all their findings. If there are borks in the future, it's your fault.
Seems highly exaggerated to me.
The data loss was for a very very small amount of people with a highly peculiar situation.
Hp's problem is probably HP's fault.
Yes, Microsoft, like probably everybody else, should increase the quality of the release. No, it's not the end of the world.
Yes, you can't rely solely on insiders to do the testing. No, insiders 'usefulness is not limited to fandom. MS gets plenty of telemetry data, bug reports and feedbacks.
We have many desks with the latest version since its availability, from Dell to Surface to custom-made machines, and zero problem.
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