Microsoft vows to destroy Office, er, offices: Campus to be demolished and rebuilt Microsoft has announced that it is time to simply tear stuff down and rebuild anew. Sadly, this is not in reference to Windows, which still labours under code built up over decades of twiddling, but is instead related to the modernisation of its campus. That said, we quite fancy the idea of being issued one of those natty …
Wow, there are a lot of people reading this who don't know squat about software development based on the votes.
When you throw away old cold, you throw away years and years of bug-fixes. If you genuinely start from scratch you have to find and fix all these things again.
Lots and lots of companies have made this mistake, and many of those never recovered... they lost years working on it only to have something that was not as good as the previous iteration despite looking shiny.
"you throw away old cold, you throw away years and years of bug-fixes"
From my experiences (20 years commercial development), you're more likely to be throwing away years and years of horrible spaghetti code, full of patches, hacks and work-arounds that the business required in order to hit a deadline and that "we'll fix in the future" - but never did because of the next deadline and subsequent wave of patches, work-arounds etc...
A couple of roles back, the senior architects managed to convince the leadership team to do a from-scratch rebuild of one of the more major web-apps we offered (it's predecessor having 10+ year old code in it). Yes, there were weeks of analysis prior to anything happening, and it took over a year to bring it up to production-ready, but thanks to automated regression, when we went live with that rebuilt version, the only bugs we saw were real edge-cases.
No doubt MS will introduce a new "Fluent Design" for the new buildings that they'll abandon once half of them are finished.
And there'll be CCTV and microphones everywhere so MS can "collect data" on the usage of the buildings.
And then the builders will show up every 6 months at the most inopportune moments to "install the latest features" to the office space...
We'd have the same problems of a company that doesn't listen to customers, it would be filled with unasked-for and unwanted capabilities dreamed up by US software marketeers. And it would without doubt be designed and coded on the cheap, using that proven "innovation" of offshoring.
The outcome would certainly be bloated code, an unfamiliar and counter intuitive interface, all of it cleaner or better than the cruft-addled rubbish they're peddling now. And being Microsoft, you just know that a few short button presses in the right places would turn up truly ancient code or legacy interfaces that they copied across, because they couldn't be arsed to really redo from scratch, hoping that nobody would notice.
Android may in a sense be better than Win3.11, but for file browser, copy & paste, using SD card storage, printing and visual GUI style (too flat & monochrome) etc it makes Win 3.1 look very good and functional. A lottery if an app can print, use SD card data, connect to a share, if a phone has a functional file manager included and if the app isn't wasting valuable screen space on adverts. Or if you can ever find the file it saved to copy to PC, or if you can ever figure where to put a file from PC so app can "import" it. Why do apps want to copy files from SD card to scarce internal Flash. Win 10 seems determined to copy all the most annoying bits of Android, Chrome OS and Apple OS X in that order.
Expect worst win 10 updates till the new facilities bedded in. Meanwhile I have two identical Win10 tablets with heavy keyboard docks. One accepts Win10 updates and the other silently fails with no error messages.
Google, Amazon, Facebook & MS etc *ARE* listening to you. But not about bugs. It's more personal than that.
I'm holding at Android 5.0.1, but I'm running rooted (which certainly impacts this).
All data that apps save get saved on my SD card, aside from some apps that don't play well with SD -- in those cases, their config files and such typically have to remain on the internal store.
By "all data" I mean just that. Photos I take, anything I download, music, video, etc. I also store files directly to it through mounting on my desktop machine, through using SCP, and using an Android file manager.
I don't tend to install apps on the SD card because I swap SD cards too often for that to be convenient.
I was on the first floor, it was a nice building (2/1092). Close to Cafe 4, I spent many a summer day hanging out at Lake Bill watching to Koi eating my lunch. Ah, those were the days. I was on the BPOS testing team, managing all the Unix and Linux systems that had come over form acquisitions and no one could quite build a replacement. Nothing like being a perma-temp assigned to keep a pile of SunFires up and running and in the exact same config (We had piles and piles of spares, since a lot of the already-replaced code ran on them too, so when code got replaced, I scooped up the old stuff and crammed it into my storage closet). It was such a fun gig, but eventually I had to move on.
....but I have no problems with Windows 10 on my main daily driver laptop. Mainly used for all the usual apps, development with Visual Studio/Code, running SQL Server and Exchange and playing World of Tanks :)
It's starts quick, either cold or from sleep and performance is fine. It never fails me. I've never been borked by an update. I've had 2 blue screens since I moved to it about 2.5 years ago - which is fewer than my Mac Mini and a Linux family box. I find is easy to use and now that I'm used to it, could not envisage going back to 7. There are of course some annoyances for me but, significantly fewer than with the iShiny OS. I rarely use the Linux box and then only for email, surfing and so on so can't comment on those annoyances.
Now I get that not everyone gets the same mileage, the comments above show that, but how come my experience is so different?
but how come my experience is so different?
Same reason that some people win the lottery - pure, dumb luck..[1]
(It's a variant on the '10 million monkey Shakespeare' trope.. sooner or later, 10 million Windows 10 machines will eventually produce one that actually works..)
[1] Or you have a machine with no exotic hardware and don't use it to do anything that causes a crash..
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