So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.
Oh boy, in 2015 Windows 10 was released, and it was extremely broken, including endless reboot loops, vanishing start menu and icons, system freezes, app crashes, file explorer crashes, broken hardware encryption and many broken drivers – so really it was about the same as now. Embracing LLMs and vibe-coding all around made this even worse of course
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.
> 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?
I think you're underestimating the QA burden for large parts of the company. When I worked in payments at MS, the ratio of QA to dev after the cuts was probably on the order of dozens to one, if not a hundred or more once you threw in Xbox/Windows/etc accessibility QA from across the organization and all the other people like lawyers involved in handling over a hundred jurisdictions. I was little more than a frontend line cook and even I had three QA people reporting directly to me; two of them helping write tests so they ostensibly should have been automating themselves out of a job.
There is a lot of manual testing when you have a complex system like that where not everything can be properly stubbed out, emulated, or replaced with a test API key. They also have to be kept around to help with painful bursty periods (for us it was supporting PSD2, SCA, or 3DS2, forgot which). Payments is obviously an outlier because there is a lot of legal compliance, but the people I knew in Cloud/Windows also had lots of QA per dev.
I wouldn't be surprised if the degradation in feature parity of newer Windows software was a result of this loss of QA. Without the QA, the developers have to be less ambitious in what they implement in order to meet release schedules, and since they don't have experienced QA they can't modify the older codebases at all to extend them.
In writing life critical systems like the Space Shuttle's operating system, effectively 99.9% of all work is QA.
MS had the dominant operating system in the world, and keeping its userbase and its ~monopoly dividend would have been more profitable as a business than doing... everything it's done in the past twenty years. Selling software that all the people use all the time just has a lot less opportunity for growth than making new software, according to Investor Brain.
The Windows ecosystem is insanely complex. And they supported it, because of the focus on QA and testing the company adopted 20 years ago after the Blaster worm.
I have a few pretty awesome teams stuck managing windows. They find bugs all of the time. The process of fixing them now practically requires a detachment of druids and Stonehenge to track where in the windows/lunar/solar cycles we are and how to deal with the bullshit & roadblocks the support and product teams throw up. If you fall for their tricks, you’ll miss the feature window… no fix for 18 months.
It used to be much easier as a customer in ye olden times, and I never felt that the counterparty at Microsoft was miserable or getting punished for doing their jobs. We feel that now as customers. You didn’t establish relationships with engineers like with other vendors, but there was a different vibe.
The focus of the company moved in to Azure, service ops, etc.
I worked in the windows org around that time and the Dev/QA ratio there was closer to 1:1. QA did both manual testing and much of the automation, quality gates, and did regression testing against older versions of windows. Given the complexity of the product is is fairly easy for an inexpensive change to require an expensive test effort.
And honestly, that person deserves the same pay grade as a "normal" engineer. But sadly, most QA staff are underpaid and somewhat even an inferior class.
Instead, if the QA role was the dominant and better paid title, you'd immediately see an improvement in that partnership. I don't think that you need subordinate staff in the QA role at all.
And for what its worth, I'm that guy. I am a strong technical software developer, but I would much rather test and poke at code bases, finding problems, working with a "lead" developer, and showing them all their quality mistakes. If I could have that role at my pay grade, I'd be there.
In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.
Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.
When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
> QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all.
The classical joke is: (this variant from Brenan Keller[0])
A QA engineer walks into a bar.
- Orders a beer.
- Orders 0 beers.
- Orders 99999999999 beers.
- Orders a lizard.
- Orders -1 beers.
- Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.
I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
1. SDETs (software design engineer in test) - same pay scale and hiring requirements as SDEs, they did mostly automated testing and wrote automated test harnesses.
2. STEs (software test engineer) - lower pay scale, manual testing, often vendors. MS used to have lots of STE ftes but they fired most of them in the early 2000s (before I joined in 2007).
An ideal ratio of SDETs to SDEs was 1 to 1, but then SDET teams would have STE vendors doing grunt work.
Having STEs as full time employees benefited MS greatly. They knew products from the end user and UI/UX perspective inside and out in ways even the SDETs didn't.
UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.
2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing.
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.
Some useful tech has come out of the development of VS Code that every other editor has been able to benefit from but I don’t rate it much as an editor any more.
It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.
Other than what they're doing to the whole Open Source ecosystem by buying github, stealing all the code for their AI regardless of license, renaming multiple adjacent things to "Github *".
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
> It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
This is a feeling commonly shared here.
I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years.
Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting).
Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it.
Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.
On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code?
Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.
Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
Yes, it is both. If something is forced top down as a productivity spike then it probably isn't one! I remember back in the days when I had to fight management for using Python for something! It gave us a productivity boost to write our tooling in Python. If LLMs were that great since the start, we would have to fight for them.
More competitionis better. If you take the market share and revenue off the table and spread that around in a competitive market you'd be in a much more interesting spot with respect to technology advancements. Instead we continue to stagnate with bullshit like Windows 10 --> Windows 11. Windows 11 was never supposed to exist, but $$$$$. There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. But Microsoft knows it can milk businesses and schools out of ridiculous profits for, essentially, the same garbage and also collude with hardware manufacturers to sell more PCs.
> There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade.
Well there is the violations of Fitts law with the movement of the start button to the centre of the bar?
But it does make it look slightly more Mac! They should make sure the next upgrade moves the corner to grab away from the actual corner, and that the cursor change for grabbing it doesn't always trigger if they want to really rip it off.
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.
That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one
Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.
If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).
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.
Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
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.
On a whim I gave my 14 year old an old System76 laptop with ElementaryOS on it then sent her back to her Mom's house on the other end of the world. Then she switched schools and ended up requiring a laptop instead of an iPad to do her work. I about crapped my pants but she's been using that laptop almost problem-free for two months now (two glitches with Firefox that she got around). She even figured out how to install Sober so she can play Roblox. While that probably says as much about my parenting as Linux's progress I have to say, I'm pretty impressed.
They still need to land on consumer PC shops for regular users to take notice, until the trend of online only, and zero OEM support, rather reverse engineering even when there are systems out there like Dell XPS, Windows and macOS will keep being what most regular users buy.
Either that or a mix of tablets with detachable keyboards or Chromebooks, none of them GNU/Linux powered.
Have you tried Windows 11? The WSL2 integration works really well. And the work that is being done in regards to safe vms so games can move away from kernel anticheat is also exciting.
As someone that was really into WinRT, pity that the whole UWP stack went bust, it was so mismanaged that outside Windows team themselves no one else cares any longer.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
Growth at any cost. Once growth is unable to increase the wealth of the shareholders the money has to be diverted from elsewhere, via cuts. Money gotta keep flowing upwards.
But the second was always the case, windows and everything else is getting shittier so fast it would require a prompt explanation if we didn't have one.
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
The distance between the promise and the reality really is huge. On some level I wished they'd just promise less, because it's not like LLMs compleatly useless. I don't find much use in them, but some clearly do. They do them. But since the entire economy has apparently bet the farm on AI, underpromising isn't really an option, while underdelivering is a problem for future Microslop and co.
Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"
> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
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.
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.
OneDrive slows my directory navigation to a pace reminiscent of mid-90s computing.
Double-click folder name, wait 5 seconds, douhle click next folder name, wait another 5 seconds. As such, I've moved my working directories out of the bubble in which OneDrive is (corporately) configured to operate.
This is 2026. All this processing power, storage and memory capacity and speed, network bandwidth, and we're regressing thirty years of performance gains. Bang up job Microsoft. I'm glad I managed to personally extricate myself from that particular squirrel grip a while back.
They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.
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.
I think system programmers are supposed to come under a more strict standard, simply because they are system programmers. There are programmers, and there are system programmers.
I'm not saying that people should be sacked for just one mistake, unless it is a pretty large one (criminal e.g.). But I'd say system programmers should be allowed to make the same mistake three times maximum. I think that's pretty generous. If the culture does not allow enough time for reflection and education, then that's a different story.
The other programmers do not need to hold the same standards simply because their code (presumably) impact less.
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.
People assumed they could "modernize" software engineering, but, at the end of the day, it's still mostly engineering and very slightly about software. People optimized for the wrong thing.
Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
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.
They literally tried that strategy with Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago where they didn't really update it for years, only doing the bare minimum. The result was a downward spiral in market share that they were unable to stop once they started trying again, ultimately resulting in IE effectively becoming obsolete.
Because browsers are one of the very few components that actually need to catch up to the rest of the world, but they've already outsourced most of that work to Chromium.
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
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.
Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.
The competition is more fierce than it has been since before Windows 95 started the complete domination of the desktop market.
Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.
You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.
You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.
I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.
I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
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.
Windows server compared to any linux server os is extraordinarily inferior in every regard except for the AD Domain services interface, which is a leftover from probably Windows NT that they haven't screwed with in the interim so it still functions.
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?
I’m mostly not running Windows, but I dislike web apps, so GSuite is out. I could use Numbers, but I need cloud file storage that works on Android, and Office 365 vs Google One are roughly the same price for the storage I need, so I don’t see any particular reason to put the effort in to migrate from Excel/OneDrive to Numbers/Google Drive.
Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?
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.
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.
Updated Windows 11 on Parallels: Has been stable since 2021.
Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.
All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".
Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.
Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.
I seriously wonder if everyone in the Windows development team(s) are just vibe-coding everything now. I feel like all of these are rookie mistakes from the POV of working on an operating system. This is also the consequence of eliminating all QA and testing and forcing your users to do that for you. Admittedly there are some things that are hard to test (or impossible to) in an automated way, but that's what the old Windows hardware lab test machines were for.
That's terrifying, as I currently have no boot stick. Does someone know a reliable free system backup tool for windows, in simplicity comparable to Timeshift on Linux Mint, which I can start from an USB Medium to restore a broken system? (I need to able to exclude some folders, like Steam games)
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
Heaven forbid any company ever come to the conclusion that shoving updates down your users' throats against their will might not be the best idea humans ever came up with.
I'm still on Windows 10, and the only issue I have is the huge nag-screen promoting Windows 11 that appears sometimes when I boot up.
No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.
I managed to turn it off. But forgot the details. Maybe it was the “RUXIM” binary? I think I unchecked the executable flag for that .exe, or I removed it from the task scheduler.
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.
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).
Standby is broken since the push from S3 to s2idle, this was a wintel move. On windows my laptop would die after a day until I finally forced standard S3 behaviour. After the switch back to S3 it lasts a week again and the resume time difference is negligible.
My Lenovo dock ethernet has gone from not working on Linux and being fine on windows to the other way around.
I do not share your enthusiasm. And since dumped windows entirely after the latest update. Last time I installed windows it took me longer to disable all adds and spyware than to actually install it, another reason for switching.
The Start menu now allows me to do what I have been doing since, like, XP, using shellinks and folders in the taskbar: Sort the Program icons in categories (like "Coding", "Sys", "Tweak", "Web"), to find them easier. This is not totally buggy any more (On Windows 10 the start menu became unusable at some point).
In the taskbar I only have the most used icons. And the opened program instances are separated from the icons. That was doable on Win 10 and I think Win 7 too, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, which is now dysfunct. But the same author has created Windhawk, which does the same plus some other cool things.
The Explorer is useless as ever. I am still using Total Commander with its filter-as-you-type, rename tool and button bars.
What I still miss is a tool like Timeshift on Linux Mint.
It seems like partially moving an app from one monitor to another is improved. Previously, this operation was quite laggy as Win10 must have been doing some involved calculations balancing the DPI between different resolutions.
I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey...
So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
Yes you've nailed it exactly. It sucks the least out of all options. It blunders the least. With Linux I would run into issues more frequently with things that worked "out of the box" (like display drivers) so I just switched back
Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.
If it were the best, I'd be able to drag a file onto a taskbar icon to do something with it, like I could with every other version of Windows ever (and Mac, and Linux).
But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.
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.
Open gpedit.msc, configure policies to disable automatic updates. At this point Windows is a virus that is useful for only playing computer games and should be avoided for any other purpose.
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
The only system where I had this happen was a Google Pixel 6a, where a system update irrecoverably corrupted all (encrypted) data which made it not boot on top.
It's particularly great Monday morning on your phone if you require 2FA to sign in to work.
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
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...
It isn't and I am apparently suffering from some very early onset dementia, so thanks for correcting me.
I, for some inexplicable reason, totally forgot that the whole Crowdstrike debacle was so bad because they could directly distribute faulty code to running systems, bypassing MSFT, staggered roll outs, etc.
I, again total mistake on my part, somehow had the mistaken memory that the changes were distributed via Windows Update, when the opposite being the case was what made that so bad.
Basically, mea culpa, honestly simple error and thanks for calling it out.
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
Fair point, outside my rose coloured memories of Windows 2000, it was likely never a beacon of stability. This is all purely subjective, but in my, frankly not always very reliable memory, I still have the distinct feeling that what has changed is the "in version progression" for lack of a better term.
A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.
8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.
Interesting. I bought a brand new Windows Arm machine the other day that was DOA: It booted with the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME message. I brought it back to Microcenter and exchanged it and the replacement works fine. I wonder if that machine was just updated at the factory before it shipped...
I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.
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.
I think you're underestimating the QA burden for large parts of the company. When I worked in payments at MS, the ratio of QA to dev after the cuts was probably on the order of dozens to one, if not a hundred or more once you threw in Xbox/Windows/etc accessibility QA from across the organization and all the other people like lawyers involved in handling over a hundred jurisdictions. I was little more than a frontend line cook and even I had three QA people reporting directly to me; two of them helping write tests so they ostensibly should have been automating themselves out of a job.
There is a lot of manual testing when you have a complex system like that where not everything can be properly stubbed out, emulated, or replaced with a test API key. They also have to be kept around to help with painful bursty periods (for us it was supporting PSD2, SCA, or 3DS2, forgot which). Payments is obviously an outlier because there is a lot of legal compliance, but the people I knew in Cloud/Windows also had lots of QA per dev.
I wouldn't be surprised if the degradation in feature parity of newer Windows software was a result of this loss of QA. Without the QA, the developers have to be less ambitious in what they implement in order to meet release schedules, and since they don't have experienced QA they can't modify the older codebases at all to extend them.
MS had the dominant operating system in the world, and keeping its userbase and its ~monopoly dividend would have been more profitable as a business than doing... everything it's done in the past twenty years. Selling software that all the people use all the time just has a lot less opportunity for growth than making new software, according to Investor Brain.
I have a few pretty awesome teams stuck managing windows. They find bugs all of the time. The process of fixing them now practically requires a detachment of druids and Stonehenge to track where in the windows/lunar/solar cycles we are and how to deal with the bullshit & roadblocks the support and product teams throw up. If you fall for their tricks, you’ll miss the feature window… no fix for 18 months.
It used to be much easier as a customer in ye olden times, and I never felt that the counterparty at Microsoft was miserable or getting punished for doing their jobs. We feel that now as customers. You didn’t establish relationships with engineers like with other vendors, but there was a different vibe.
The focus of the company moved in to Azure, service ops, etc.
It was a partnership. I miss it.
Instead, if the QA role was the dominant and better paid title, you'd immediately see an improvement in that partnership. I don't think that you need subordinate staff in the QA role at all.
And for what its worth, I'm that guy. I am a strong technical software developer, but I would much rather test and poke at code bases, finding problems, working with a "lead" developer, and showing them all their quality mistakes. If I could have that role at my pay grade, I'd be there.
Quality testers are so extremely valuable.
Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.
When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy.
* Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
The classical joke is: (this variant from Brenan Keller[0])
A QA engineer walks into a bar.
- Orders a beer.
- Orders 0 beers.
- Orders 99999999999 beers.
- Orders a lizard.
- Orders -1 beers.
- Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.
[0] https://xcancel.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232?...
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
I don't have time to deal with phone issues-it should just work so I can get on with my day.
Hearing that Apple were dedicating time to stop features and go after stability is exactly what I want to hear.
1. SDETs (software design engineer in test) - same pay scale and hiring requirements as SDEs, they did mostly automated testing and wrote automated test harnesses.
2. STEs (software test engineer) - lower pay scale, manual testing, often vendors. MS used to have lots of STE ftes but they fired most of them in the early 2000s (before I joined in 2007).
An ideal ratio of SDETs to SDEs was 1 to 1, but then SDET teams would have STE vendors doing grunt work.
UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.
Going backwards in stability is out of character.
The only person I heard was writing perfect code was Donald Knuth. And even he had bugs in its code.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?
It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.
I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm.
It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
This is a feeling commonly shared here.
I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years.
Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting).
Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it.
Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.
Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.
Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
I think more competition is better than less
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...
Well there is the violations of Fitts law with the movement of the start button to the centre of the bar?
But it does make it look slightly more Mac! They should make sure the next upgrade moves the corner to grab away from the actual corner, and that the cursor change for grabbing it doesn't always trigger if they want to really rip it off.
Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.
That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.
If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise:
https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl...
On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.
Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
Also: do you have a reference for “a couple years ago Microsoft [made] LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production”?
I know they started investing, mentioning future benefits, but don’t remember them saying their Windows development team (heavily) relying on it.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
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.
Either that or a mix of tablets with detachable keyboards or Chromebooks, none of them GNU/Linux powered.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?
some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.
Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]
[0]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/msft/employees/
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
Reality has a way of showing itself eventually.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
Double-click folder name, wait 5 seconds, douhle click next folder name, wait another 5 seconds. As such, I've moved my working directories out of the bubble in which OneDrive is (corporately) configured to operate.
This is 2026. All this processing power, storage and memory capacity and speed, network bandwidth, and we're regressing thirty years of performance gains. Bang up job Microsoft. I'm glad I managed to personally extricate myself from that particular squirrel grip a while back.
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.
I'm not saying that people should be sacked for just one mistake, unless it is a pretty large one (criminal e.g.). But I'd say system programmers should be allowed to make the same mistake three times maximum. I think that's pretty generous. If the culture does not allow enough time for reflection and education, then that's a different story.
The other programmers do not need to hold the same standards simply because their code (presumably) impact less.
https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10730
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761870
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.
https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...
Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.
You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.
You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.
I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.
I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
OEM laptops with Linux distributions pre-installed are only available on online shops known to HN/Reddit demographics.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
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.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
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.
Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.
All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".
Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.
Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.
Anyways, it is possible!
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).
My Lenovo dock ethernet has gone from not working on Linux and being fine on windows to the other way around.
I do not share your enthusiasm. And since dumped windows entirely after the latest update. Last time I installed windows it took me longer to disable all adds and spyware than to actually install it, another reason for switching.
In the taskbar I only have the most used icons. And the opened program instances are separated from the icons. That was doable on Win 10 and I think Win 7 too, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, which is now dysfunct. But the same author has created Windhawk, which does the same plus some other cool things.
The Explorer is useless as ever. I am still using Total Commander with its filter-as-you-type, rename tool and button bars.
What I still miss is a tool like Timeshift on Linux Mint.
Otherwise off the top of my head I don’t find Win11 much better or worse than Win10.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
Except maybe when I was trying to use the XMP profile of my memory. It works now, maybe a BIOS update improved that.
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
It's particularly great Monday morning on your phone if you require 2FA to sign in to work.
I think I might know...
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.
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...
(FWIW, Crowdstrike has also crashed Linux systems: https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2024/04/msg00202.html)
I, for some inexplicable reason, totally forgot that the whole Crowdstrike debacle was so bad because they could directly distribute faulty code to running systems, bypassing MSFT, staggered roll outs, etc.
I, again total mistake on my part, somehow had the mistaken memory that the changes were distributed via Windows Update, when the opposite being the case was what made that so bad.
Basically, mea culpa, honestly simple error and thanks for calling it out.
IMO, it's all traceable to their decision to lay off their dedicated QA teams in 2014
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.
8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.
I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.