Microsoft's Problem Isn’t How Often It Updates Windows, It's How It Develops It

[DPI]

This is what Microsoft's stock price has done since Nadella took over:

View attachment 113921

No one is going to fire a CEO with this kind of stock performance unless there's some deep corruption or something else afoot.

Upward trending is what most tech stocks have in today's overvalued market - Nadella or no Nadella. Correlation is not causation.

MSFT's current value feels very hollow, because the increasingly singular "Azure, Azure, Azure" focus of Nadella's will eventually run out of road when other companies with more vertical integration between their cloud offerings and other platforms (mobile, IoT) start really leveraging and flexing. Nadella writing off mobile will be his downfall when his tenure is considered in retrospect.

All that aside, trying to excuse Microsoft's fundamentally flawed Windows development and update process with "yeah but the stock price" is a little silly.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

It ultimately comes down to terrible leadership since Gates left. The programmers didn't wake up one morning and decide to outsource themselves to India or turn Windows into some kind of mobile product.

Oh come on, stop that $@*(@$.

The programmers from India are still following Americans' orders.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

This is what Microsoft's stock price has done since Nadella took over:


View attachment 113921

No one is going to fire a CEO with this kind of stock performance unless there's some deep corruption or something else afoot.

Nah, they want him fired because his name sound odd.

Windows is a $*@()42 show lately, sure, that started before, and the guy in charge was American. Stop that racist garbage FFS.

 

[naib]

This is what Microsoft's stock price has done since Nadella took over:


View attachment 113921

No one is going to fire a CEO with this kind of stock performance unless there's some deep corruption or something else afoot.

If microsoft's only revenue and perceived growth been in Windows then I would agree. However... a lot of it is in their Azures platform and equally if I recall what Nadella stated was that MS would defocus OS development for the cloud.
Shareholder rarely care what a company is doing besides making profit.

So an increase in share price and the continued fall in Windows quality are not mutually inclusive

 

[DeathFromBelow]

Windows is a $*@()42 show lately, sure, that started before, and the guy in charge was American. Stop that racist garbage FFS.

The guy in charge is Indian now and the Windows situation is even worse...

Like I said, the problems started when Gates left. Pointing out that Microsoft cut staff and exploited cheap foreign labor to save a buck isn't racism.

 

[heatlesssun]

All that aside, trying to excuse Microsoft's fundamentally flawed Windows development and update process with "yeah but the stock price" is a little silly.

What? AII I was saying is that no CEO is going to get fired with that kind of stock performance during their tenure. It's just dammed common sense.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

The guy in charge is Indian now and the Windows situation is even worse...

So when it was the blue-eyed guy wrecking it, it was his own doing, but now it's a whole ethnic group bringing the company down. I see.

Like I said, the problems started when Gates left. Pointing out that Microsoft cut staff and exploited cheap foreign labor to save a buck isn't racism.

Cheaper foreign labor to save a buck - Indians are a really smart bunch by the way - is awesome in corporateland. However, that won't help when the pretty boys are calling the shots and making terrible decisions.

 

[BloodyIron]

At what point are you willing to accept MS doesn't care about lean? When it's been thirty years since their last "lean" Windows version? Move on man.

Win2k which happens to be my favorite MS OS of all time.

 

[BloodyIron]

As I said "95% of the majority of what Windows users care about, is equivalently available on alternative options" I'm talking about functional needs, not being tied to a specific piece of software. There is other software that serves the functional needs of 95% of the population, and you're missing that point. Free your mind, look elsewhere, stop fixating on specific titles, and think about what functionally you actually care about, not whether it says "MS Office" anywhere on it.

What other OS runs Office 2013+ & 365 exactly like Windows, so that I can support people who use those packages?

 

[cdr_74_premium]

As I said "95% of the majority of what Windows users care about, is equivalently available on alternative options" I'm talking about functional needs, not being tied to a specific piece of software. There is other software that serves the functional needs of 95% of the population, and you're missing that point. Free your mind, look elsewhere, stop fixating on specific titles, and think about what functionally you actually care about, not whether it says "MS Office" anywhere on it.

If they try, they may be surprised, then they'll have to cope with being WRONG. Oh, the horror!

 

[Shotglass01]

You can save a lot of money in the short term by cutting less profitable operations and RnD, but what happens when the profitable widget or service you focus the company on is suddenly no longer as profitable a few years down the line? Microsoft is so badly mismanaged that they dropped billions on mobile for literally no return, and now the monopoly desktop OS product that was once the core of their business is now at risk. Are web services like Azure really a sure bet? Growth for Azure/AWS/etc already seems to be slowing and Microsoft isn't in a dominant position.

+1 Our company went with AWS because Azure was, I quote, "painful" from our implementation team. They lost a metric ton of money because we went AWS. And we spend a lot. A whole lot.

 

[heatlesssun]

If they try, they may be surprised, then they'll have to cope with being WRONG. Oh, the horror!

Plenty of folks have tried and tried and tried with Linux. If you're running basic stuff it's simple. If you're running stuff like me it's that trying amounts to dozens and hundreds of hours with a lot of stuff that just doesn't work or exist under desktop Linux.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

Plenty of folks have tried and tried and tried with Linux. If you're running basic stuff it's simple. If you're running stuff like me it's that trying amounts to dozens and hundreds of hours with a lot of stuff that just doesn't work or exist under desktop Linux.

Thus, the "may" word.

If it doesn't work for you, so be it. I am all for the best solution for each person's individual needs.

 

[chithanh]

a bad change could easily cost millions of dollars

Heh, the Arstechnica author almost gets it.
When Google messes up their ad server, it costs them millions of dollars.
When Microsoft messes up Windows, it costs their customers millions of dollars.

The amount of pain that users will endure and still stay with Windows is staggering. Microsoft knows this. Until users switch in large numbers to other operating systems in response to such bugs, there is no business case for Microsoft to act.

Plenty of folks have tried and tried and tried with Linux. If you're running basic stuff it's simple. If you're running stuff like me it's that trying amounts to dozens and hundreds of hours with a lot of stuff that just doesn't work or exist under desktop Linux.

Case in point.

This is what Microsoft's stock price has done since Nadella took over:

Even if stock performance were somehow a good indicator of Microsoft products' quality (which it isn't), you cannot view a single company in isolation and draw meaningful conclusions from that. You must at the very least see Microsoft stock performance relative to the rest of the field.

(Source: Yahoo! Finance)

You can see that Microsoft performed same as the market (I used Nasdaq 100 Technology Sector for reference) for most of Nadella's time as CEO, only starting to diverge in early 2018. Coincidentally that was when Linux started to overtake Windows in Azure.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

Microsoft would do a lot of people a favor by creating a "Windows for Workstations" SKU that slowed down the micro-release cadence, rolled back the forced updates and gave businesses the Windows 7 experience they desire.

Yeah, I hate Windows 10's approach to updates. The annoying as hell update orchestrator that you have to castrate manually if you're on home edition... the buggy updates... the rollbacks that don't actually keep your data. The updates are just trash. They're too frequent, they require restarts, and then (the most absolutely RETARDED thing--and I'm not using retarded lightly, I literally feel whoever implemented this is some autistic idiot without a shred of sense) THEY DO THE RESTART THEMSELVES WHENEVER THE HELL THEY FEEL LIKE IT. That last tidbit literally just got me to turn off updates whenever I can.

My current computer has the education edition, since I'm enrolled in OMSCS at Gatech. I made the mistake of turning off windows updates in general for a long time entirely through gpedit. Turns out new Nvidia drivers for my 2080 wouldn't run on the damn older version. And I couldn't update because I hadn't updated in so long. Their update system was literally screwed up. So I did a reinstall of 10 from the recovery menu, telling it to keep my data. Which. It fucking didn't keep, at least not near all of it. Good job, Microshit.

My personal laptop, I basically have to wrangle with Updateorchestrator constantly and rip its nuts off because Home edition doesn't even have gpedit despite not necessarily costing much less. =_=; Otherwise enjoy waking up to browsing sessions being gone, save data lost, and/or your youtube video that helps you stay asleep through noise not playing on your speakers anymore when you get up. Great.

Work laptop, it restarted on me in the middle of coding. Or just restarts if I leave it sleeping. Which means I lose my place in various pieces of code when I come in the next day. I honestly didn't expect the enterprise edition to be retarded too, but apparently it is. Though then again part of that is my company's policies, because I think they use a custom image and distro server. So eh, nothing new. Just IT people being horribly out of touch as usual. Awesome. That type of crap works for some accountant person or manager, but when will they realize us coders can't just have our computers getting restarted willy nilly? I put it into hibernate for a reason. I want to pick up where I left off. In a lot of places. You're literally causing ideas to go down the damn drain every time you restart on me.

At work, many of my passwords are some combination of &@#! and IT. I know they have their reasons but frankly I don't give a crap.

Well </rant>. Builds up for a bit there.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

Well, I'll give it to them that it is a lot easier to download a few update packages that follow for each major update. Considering I'm wiping machines clean a lot more often now, it comes in handy.

Now, when you realize I shouldn't be doing that, well...

 

[DocNo]

They are just repeating this Apple hipster shit.

Huh? Apple releases one major release a year. And lately every other release is primarily focused on optimizations and not new features. Not sure why you are trying to drag Apple into MS's crazy train...

 

[lostin3d]

From the article in relation to q/a, "Cutting back to one release a year, or one release every three years, doesn't do that, and it never did. It's the process itself that needs to change: not the timescale."

I admit I wanted to really argue against his point until I read it all the way through. He really does put some effort into the process flaws and by the end I have to agree. I also agree when he mentions how many look back with rose tinted glasses to WIndows past and I've been one of those. I admit I started complaining during a 3 year cycle going from Vistas>7>8>8.1>10>various build updates. Granted many things under the hood look the same but I do get tired of looking for where some things have moved or at least how the newer menus don't show them. Cortana's really loving how often I have to use it to find those things. I'd prefer if they slowed down just for those reasons alone but overall the process is in shambles. I also remember how XP pre-service pack 3 was a security nightmare. Loved it for functionality but it was a laughing stock otherwise.

 

[DPI]

I also remember how XP pre-service pack 3 was a security nightmare. Loved it for functionality but it was a laughing stock otherwise.

Not really comparable. The service pack era was, by and large, pretty damn solid and you didn't really have to question them since they were developed and tested properly; I can't recall one I ever got burned by even in orgs with 1000+ nodes. The availability of Windows updates never really induced dread the way they do now - Microsoft wasn't disguising shady trojan shit with vague KB descriptions the way they do now with things like trying to backport telemetry into 7 and 8.1.

Windows 10's awful, untested updates on the other hand are part of an overall pattern and ultimately systemic. It's the worst of both worlds right now: the updates are at their lowest quality ever and then forced down everyones throats more than ever. Do they really wonder why the backlash continues to grow?

 

[nightfly]

I find that last sentence the funniest thing I have read in a long time.. "which includes identifying and patching problems only after release." Microsoft is the father of "Release & Repair" and that started in the late 90's..

Give the devil his due, that was ONE way to find out how their software worked on many thousands of different hardware combinations. Because no one was going to fix what wasn't appearing to be broken.

And it was lean... when?

Windows 3.11. Everything after that was designed to obfuscate. The registry is a nightmare to anyone who wants to know how to adjust their system, and it was intentionally designed to hide operations from the users. Try out some software and then uninstall it? That fact is buried somewhere in the operating system FOREVER, and you're not allowed to know where; what else is being hidden away? We're not allowed to know. All we get told is, 'microsoft knows better than you' so trust them. Bullshit.

Win2k which happens to be my favorite MS OS of all time.

Nah, I liked Dos 5 best. Never required a reinstall...ever. But it was the release of this rock stable OS that fooled a lot of us into thinking that Microsoft had it's act together, knew what they were doing, and this idea fooled us for a very long time.

See, W2K gradually filled itself up with junk just like every other version of windows, just another eventual victim of windows rot; windows says all files are intact and just fine, thank you, but then stuff just doesn't run anymore. Even if you haven't installed anything new. Just one day, you turn on your computer, click on the icon that worked fine yesterday, and it no longer works. And there's no explanation why. You can try registry cleaners, chkdsk, whatever. Nothing turns up out of order. Your computer just doesn't work right anymore, for no particular reason. And there's no way to find out why, because microsoft doesn't want you to know. They want you to buy another new version of thier product, instead. Planned obsolescence of your product will NEVER get you any respect, only hatred. Creating more bells and whistles won't help if the engine won't run.

This problem has existed from win95 all the way to this day, and Microsoft apparently has absolutely no intention of ever fixing it. That is the absolute best example of why Microsoft still sucks.

It's now 23 years later, and they still haven't fixed that problem. How does anyone defend that?

Like I said, the problems started when Gates left.

Gates caused plenty of problems, now we have those and new problems, too. So it just seems worse. Or does everyone forget Windows Me and microsoft Bob? How about Clippy? The XP SCSI bug that was never fixed? Gates legacy is that of predatory marketing and then managing to get the government to look the other way (bribes, I'm sure) as it steamrolled over competitors, in the name of profits first, NOT improving his product.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

Gates caused plenty of problems, now we have those and new problems, too. So it just seems worse. Or does everyone forget Windows Me and microsoft Bob? How about Clippy? The XP SCSI bug that was never fixed? Gates legacy is that of predatory marketing and then managing to get the government to look the other way (bribes, I'm sure) as it steamrolled over competitors, in the name of profits first, NOT improving his product.

Even Clippy hates Windows 10.

Vista had a rocky start with bugs and the online trolling, but it ended up being a really good product. Their success wasn't just from predatory corporate behavior, Linux sucked back in the 2000/XP era and Microsoft consistently added useful new features in each release. I have to give Gates credit for consistently having a superior product.

In the post-Gates era Microsoft has been removing features and breaking things. First they killed little things like Movie Maker and the photo editor from Vista, then they made Media Center payware and ruined the UI in 8, 10 introduced various application-breaking issues with each update, and now they can't seem to stop randomly deleting user data.

 

[zkostik]

Huh? Apple releases one major release a year. And lately every other release is primarily focused on optimizations and not new features. Not sure why you are trying to drag Apple into MS's crazy train...

I'm not dragging them into this crazy train, they pioneered it and MS picked up the trend. You clearly are not working with Apple products to make that kind of statement. Apple used to fix and optimize but lately they add crap user features and break things all the time, you'd know if you with with Apple stuff in a business environment. Apple's major release is in many cases mostly a patch or a service pack at best but with random things changes and usually not working. On a consumer end it isn't very noticeable but on business end it's a complete disaster. MS is doing the same now more or less with Win10 being a service.