Comment by SirFatty 16 hours ago
"Microsoft shipped a broken “Update and shut down” toggle with Windows 10, and it never acknowledged it until now."
I guess they know what's best for the user base, and this was obviously deemed not important. But boy did they get Copilot integrated in everything post haste.
Typical Microsoft hubris.
I used to always think like that and try to come up with these excuses.
Until I read the story about how Steve Jobs was mad about the fact that Mac was slow to start and asked teams to fix it. Surprise, they fixed it.
And it's not like nobody could say anything at Microsoft. Someone on HN posted this email (originally from a different website):
https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...
However, my guess is that this email got nowhere, because the experience of using Windows isn't so different decades later.
What this means is that 1) Microsoft is first and foremost a business oriented company, and what matters to them most is feature set, compatibility, support etc. As long as things mostly work, it's fine. Usability is at the bottom of the list. 2) Windows is just not important to Microsoft any more.
I bet that Satya Nadella has grumbles about bugs and ads in Windows 11, and likely has run into this specific bug first hand. But when he decides that "ads revenue trumps everything" and "these are just small bugs that don't really matter", he immediately forgets about it all.
> Until I read the story about how Steve Jobs was mad about the fact that Mac was slow to start and asked teams to fix it. Surprise, they fixed it.
What was different then was that Steve Jobs actually loved computers and used them. That is not the case for our modern computing behemoths (Microsoft or Apple).
Dogfooding is a thing, and having a person in power who can say "no" is important.
I just assume the entire Windows team uses OSX on their own time but have some kind of neural defect that prevents them from taking any lessons from it.
New macbooks with a notch hide icons underneath of the notch and those icons are completely inaccessible without installing 3rd party software to manage your status bar, or turning off a bunch of other software with visible icons on your bar.
IMO that's a far worse UX than update and shutdown turning the computer back on at the end.
Sounds like a hard life. So much time spent on buggy, unintuitive, jumbled, and half-assed OS, then the only time they get away from it, they have to use Windows.
> I bet that Satya Nadella has grumbles about bugs and ads in Windows 11
Why should he? If he is really running Windows instead of macOS, what stops him from installing Windows Enterprise or IoT?
> Microsoft is first and foremost a business oriented company, and what matters to them most is feature set, compatibility, support etc. As long as things mostly work, it's fine. Usability is at the bottom of the list.
Blame their customers. Those people accepted random reboots for decades.
I think he's talking about that story about the MacBook Air Presentation to Steve Jobs where he threw the prototype on the floor when he saw how slow it booted so they decided to switch to SSD only storage to mitigate this.
It's however difficult to verify these stories.
I hadn't heard that one, and I can't find anything online. Considering that the base model MacBook Air had spinning rust for the first two and a half years, I'm skeptical.
The "Saving Lives" story I'm referring to is unverified but it does at least come from directly someone who was there.
It’s frankly wild how many weird problems and UX pitfalls I experienced with my first PC in roughly 2005 are STILL issues.
The fuck is Microsoft having all these engineers work all day on?
New priorities get funding and promotions, so everyone abandons unglamorous but critical work.
It is easy to have such hubris, when the competition at the shopping mall where most folks buy hardware is either crimpled Chromebooks and Android tablets, or overpriced Apple laptops, at least in what concerns most tier 2 and 3 countries.
It would be nice to have somethig like Asus or Dell XPS, with Ubuntu LTS fully working laptop hardware at Dixons, FNAC, Publico, Worten, Cool Blue, Saturn, Media Markt,..... but it ain't happening.
However after the netbook phase, that is yet to happen again.
No, the truth of the matter is they needed Copilot in there to analyse and identify the bug for them. And then write the code to fix it...
These kinds of comments make me question how many folk here are actually in tech or if my experience has been uncharacteristically grim.
Does your company not have hundreds to thousands of backlogged tickets and bugs? Are there not different teams for different parts of the system? No triage policy for prioritizing work?
Well, as it happened, when I was part of a company that released software, we prioritized high-visibility bugs that users complained about often.
This is a high-visibility bug that users complain about often.
> Typical Microsoft hubris.
That hubris combined with a whole bunch of decisions I resent/actively dislike and the hassle to opt out of things I never asked for is why for the first time since the late 80's I don't have any Microsoft OS's on any of my PC's.
I only used windows 11 for gaming and I don't really do that much anymore - I may have a look at steam/proton but not really in any hurry either.
90-95% of my computing life was spent inside Linux anyway.
Different teams, perhaps. No idea. A monster org like this must be massively disconnected internally, specially for non-critical bugs and such.