12 ms·

The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

150 points by shubhamjain 9y ago

zwerdlds 9y ago
This sounds like the combinatoric explosion of point 1 in the Mythical Man Month. It's the one thing I try to make sure all the PMs I work with understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_mythical_man-month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_myt...
jesseryoung 9y ago
Anybody who currently works on the Windows team know if things are still like this? I know I've read about improvements to the version control system for Windows teams and some other blogs about improvements in management practices but I'm wondering if even after 11 years if this has been fixed.
- ryanburk 9y ago
  they have definitely changed the source control infrastructure and are now on git. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...
- whowouldathunk 9y ago
  I work on the Windows team. Things are very different now. Source control especially: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large... It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. And I think that's a good thing.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. Hasn't prevented the travesty that the win10 UI is, though.
    - rhencke 9y ago
      Travesty is a bit hyperbolic, no? The Win10 UI works. It's stable. It's reasonably efficient at getting things done. It's reasonably compatible with people's expectations of how Windows works. (no Win8-style revamp of Start, etc.) There's parts of it I dislike greatly, personally. (Cortana, the Settings/Control Panel split.) It's annoying and unpolished on parts like that, but I can't say it's a _travesty_.
      - titanix2 9y ago
        It's ugly (especially the dialog boxes) and obviously targeted at tablets. As the Surface don't perform well, I hope one day Microsoft will come back to its root and release an edition of Windows tailored for the PC.
        dingo_bat 9y ago
        That's exactly right. It is so ugly! And in the recent builds I've been seeing blurred fonts everywhere. I do like that they are moving fast and most changes are good. For example the pseudo transparency effects alleviate some of the ugliness concerns.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      I like the Windows 10 UI. It's a lot better than 8 and 8.1. I like it better than 7 too for the most part.
the-dude 9y ago
I have always thought about the shutdown crapfest as not being able to shutdown for like ... 25 reasons? I believe there is a KB entry somewhere listing a bunch of them. Almost impossible to troubleshoot ( network connections! )
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  I once had a Windows 7 machine refuse to shut down because it was "Playing Logoff Sound"!
  - moogly 9y ago
    Haha, I wouldn't even be mad. That's adorable.
  - neilalexander 9y ago
    Windows 2000 wouldn't even start the logoff or shutdown process until the logoff sound had completed playing. ;-)
    - damnfine 9y ago
      Oh god, I remember setting a whole sone as my logoff somewhere in the win9x days, and it totally would. I had to hear the whole damn song just to reboot, by which time I had forgotten to change it. Annoyed my family for weeks.
- olyjohn 9y ago
  Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows can't shut down half the time. It doesn't actually seem to be able to kill and shutdown it's own processes. So when shutdown time comes, one little app hang and you'll just sit there forever.
theoutlander 9y ago
I can relate to this. It was a common theme across Microsoft. In one instance, the team I was part of was responsible for the initial integration of Bing and Facebook. We had about 24 dedicated people on the team (a few partner/principal group managers too!). Our team was considered agile because we released most features every 4 months (this was around 2009 I think)!!! Anyway, we had a hackathon at Facebook with Zuckerberg and the FB team. There were all these big (redundant) talks by every manager up that chain about how this is the most important integration, etc. Guess what came out 4 months later??? A like button on the Bing home page! The kicker was that the code for the widget was picked from the facebook developers portal.
- ajross 9y ago
  This isn't purely a software engineering mess though. The PC architecture for "off" is a mess at the hardware level too. I mean, long ago you just had a physical switch on the power supply. But then filesystem authors invented buffering and that wasn't safe anymore. So now there were two ways to shut the machine off: the "safe" way and the old way (where the "old" way was still available via e.g. holding the power button down for 4 seconds). Then, we wanted to start using laptops and carrying them around. But booting the whole computer again and again every time you changed your seat became a chore, so software people invented this cool new trick where you could dump memory to disk and restore it later, so "hibernation" was born and we now had three ways to shut down. Then the hardware people jumped in and pointed out that really the problem here is just the CPU. DRAM refresh is cheap, so there's really no need to dump the RAM at all. Let's just shut the CPU off and come up with a hardware/firmware/OS/driver hack (yeah, it touches basically everything) for powering on into a known DRAM configuration. Much faster! And now we had a fourth way to shut down. (OK, this is a little spun. In fact suspend to disk and suspend to RAM landed nearly simultaneously in the PC world, with different manufacturers picking different horses. Then of course ACPI came in and standardized both, forever locking us into not one but two kinds of suspend.) Then of course, we had a paradigm shift where "mobile" OSes revisted this whole scheme and threw it out the window. The hardware people making mobile chips designed the clock and power gating logic such that the "suspend to RAM" happens essentially every time the CPU reaches an idle state, and never has to be "entered" explicitly the way ACPI S3 is. And now PCs are shipping with this scheme too even on systems where ACPI still works in a traditional way. So, yeah. FIVE. I mean, Microsoft surely made a UI mess out of this. But it's not like they were handed a simple problem to begin with.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bradford 9y ago
I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opinion was the primary tool used in decision making. In addition to poor decisions, this had two very negative outcomes: 1) reputation was fiercely fought for. Individuals feared that if they were ever incorrect, the damage to their reputation would limit their ability to impact future decisions and eventually lead to career death. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant; the fear itself caused overt caution and consensus seeking. 2) In the absence of data, an eloquent negotiator is often able to obtain their desired outcome, no matter how sub-optimal that outcome might be. Nowadays, I see data used a lot more, hence the telemetry. A while ago, in response to criticism of Windows telemetry habits, I wrote: "Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do. Microsoft didn't start this paradigm, but I think they had to incorporate it in order to stay competitive." I understand that telemetry is still a delicate issue, but the expertise based decision making of yester-year truly sucked for many, and I don't see a viable alternative.
- KiwiCoder 9y ago
  Doesn't the focus on data simply shift the problems you describe to telemetry decisions?
  - bradford 9y ago
    Yes, and, I might be misunderstanding your question, but I view that as a good thing. I don't ever want to spend my time in a meeting witnessing people bicker over where to position a dialog button, when you could just run an A/B test and let data guide the decision process.
    - andrewfong 9y ago
      Yes, but now you get to bicker about how to structure the A/B test and whether the results are statistically significant.
Theodores 9y ago
I have decided to stick with writing code rather than progress my career. Consequently I am that minority in the team delivering features that customers use. I take personal pride in that and keep quiet about it. Those reports, those plans, the documentation, the mock ups, the meetings and the emails are not in the final product, all that work counted for next to nothing. Ultimately it was mostly two of us working away and refining the specs by collaboration with stakeholders on an informal basis. Because we understand the problem space we are able to ask the important questions and I think stakeholders prefer working directly with programmers rather than have messages related via management channels with costs plucked out of the air and relayed back. With stakeholders I find I am talking their language and a lot of ground gets covered in a working meeting, where some fixes are done during that meeting with anything requiring more time speced out. With management intermediaries they think everyone thinks like how they think so they can't imagine that it would be safe to have the programmer talk in a mix of trade jargon with a client. Usually this is part of the gig, many people make a cushty living coasting between meetings. What do we do so as to get on with the job but not enable this coasting that goes on with freeloading management types?
- 0xbear 9y ago
  You'll be out of a job by your mid-40's. I suggest you reconsider your decision to not "progress your career".
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Thankfully the rest of the world is not like SV.
    - 0xbear 9y ago
      I'm not in SV. Just a general observation. Younger people know _how_ to do things, but they don't know _what_ to, and even more importantly what not to do. As you age, you will discover that junior devs are much faster at accomplishing well defined tasks, but, as a rule, utterly helpless with anything open ended/complicated/requiring foresight and experience. Your value will be in helping them navigate things they can't navigate themselves.
kuharich 9y ago
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706976 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706976
feelin_googley 9y ago
"I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stupid shit" wasn't a result of any one programmer making a dumb decision; most of it was a result of an architecture and a mindset which tried to prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot by gratuitously abstracting away "dangerous" things like memory management. Again: needless abstraction will bite you in the ass if you're not careful. My lead and I spent months going through the Outlook code exorcising "stupid shit" -- removing code which hid what it was actually doing, getting the code cleaner and closer to the machine, making everything more explicit, tighter, and less generic." The above is excerpted from a later blog post by the same author.
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  On the flip side, removing safety from MS Office devs has led to a pretty significant quality and security decline. Pretty much every Office version we upgrade to is tested to hell and back and we usually delay adoption for three years. By then its barely functional after three years of service packs and hotfixes. We just migrated 100 people to 2013 and are still finding issues. Worse, this mentality spread to updates, which we have to delay by 2 weeks or more due to breaking things, ironically usually Outlook. Would I trade a slower start time and less perky performance for security and stability? Absolutely. Maybe those old timers knew what they were doing. Maybe the care vs quick equation makes more sense to lean on care than quick for many types of software, especially in our connected world. Maybe the trade-off didn't make too much sense during the age of Pentium II, but in the age of i5's and i7's on every desktop with 8+gb of ram? I doubt it would be as noticeable. I think we're dangerously experimenting with a "do it quick, ship, and maybe fix it later" mentality that might make sense with startups hurting for dollars and a MVP, but for dinosaurs like Microsoft, its a liability. I wonder how many "previous employees didnt know what they were doing so we fixed everything" anecdotes end up with unhappy customers in the end? Perhaps most.
saagarjha 9y ago
Aside: is this website messing up the scroll for anyone else?
- codedokode 9y ago
  Blogspot's UI is awful. They probably tried to follow trends and make an app out of website. While loading the page it first shows you the preloader with gears, then loads the top post and only later loads the post you were going to read. It probably gives good score in automated load speed test but in fact you can start reading the text much later than if it were plain HTML page. And when I clicked the search box, the post I was reading has scrolled itself away (no kidding!). I tried to remove focus from the search box but the post didn't come back. And that is Google's product. It might have some advanced code inside but the UI is awful.
  - eadmund 9y ago
    I think it's pretty terrible that Blogspot requires JavaScript in order to display text. There's already a really great way to display text on the web: HTML. It just makes no sense to me to change that. It's much like how the original wiki is so badly broken now.
kabdib 9y ago
And they still managed to fuck it up in the latest version of Windows Server; logging out of the GUI is perilously similar to shutting down the system. Oh, you get some more warnings, but I can easily see muscle memory doing the wrong thing.
dredmorbius 9y ago
I'd like to read this, but Blogspot is absolutely the most reading-hostile service of which I'm aware. Its "dynamic" formats most especially. Not only do these defy all readability within a browser, they break fallbacks: console clients (w3m, elinks, etc.), or readability alternatives (Pocket, Instapaper, Outline.com). Please just don't use Blogspot. And don't use the dynamic styles if you must.
- codedokode 9y ago
  I agree, it is an example showing why you should not try to convert every website into a SPA. A in SPA means "application", not a "website".
SimonPStevens 9y ago
> "Those new hybrid hard drives can make this super fast." - Vista RTM'd - 8th November 2006 - Date on that blog post - 21st November 2006 ... and the wikipedia page he links from the blog post about hybrid drives says "In 2007, Seagate and Samsung introduced the first hybrid drives". I don't think making UI decisions based on hardware unreleased at the time is really the right way to do it. (The same wikipedia page also lists those early hybrid drives as "featuring 128 MB or 256 MB NAND flash memory options" and given that Vista required 512mb and recommended 1gb, I don't even think that they would have helped that much as most of the ram would still need to be written to the spinner platter part of the disk anyway)
kelvin0 9y ago
TL;DR: Bike shedding + Poor communication ==> LONG HORN.
mvindahl 9y ago
Entertaining blogpost. And reading the 2006 comment thread below is also pretty entertaining. All of the comments seem to be about ten years old. Most of them tend to agree that Microsoft seriously botched this feature. But there is also a very vocal minority who argue that Joel is a moron who should shut up and the thing that makes Windows so great is its flexibility, and all those 15 menu options make sense, and people should just shut up about their Macs and deal with the fact that Mac has just a teeny weeny market share. Well, fast forward to 2017. MacBooks are all over the place. And when trying to shut down Windows 10, I'm faced with just three options: Sleep, Shut down, and Restart. Vista really was the nadir of Microsoft in terms of UX, no matter how furiously some people contested this back in the day. And Joel was spot on.

150 points by shubhamjain 9y ago

This sounds like the combinatoric explosion of point 1 in the Mythical Man Month. It's the one thing I try to make sure all the PMs I work with understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_mythical_man-month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_myt...

jesseryoung 9y ago

Anybody who currently works on the Windows team know if things are still like this? I know I've read about improvements to the version control system for Windows teams and some other blogs about improvements in management practices but I'm wondering if even after 11 years if this has been fixed.

ryanburk 9y ago
they have definitely changed the source control infrastructure and are now on git. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...
whowouldathunk 9y ago
I work on the Windows team. Things are very different now. Source control especially: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large... It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. And I think that's a good thing.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. Hasn't prevented the travesty that the win10 UI is, though.
  - rhencke 9y ago
    Travesty is a bit hyperbolic, no? The Win10 UI works. It's stable. It's reasonably efficient at getting things done. It's reasonably compatible with people's expectations of how Windows works. (no Win8-style revamp of Start, etc.) There's parts of it I dislike greatly, personally. (Cortana, the Settings/Control Panel split.) It's annoying and unpolished on parts like that, but I can't say it's a _travesty_.
    - titanix2 9y ago
      It's ugly (especially the dialog boxes) and obviously targeted at tablets. As the Surface don't perform well, I hope one day Microsoft will come back to its root and release an edition of Windows tailored for the PC.
      - dingo_bat 9y ago
        That's exactly right. It is so ugly! And in the recent builds I've been seeing blurred fonts everywhere. I do like that they are moving fast and most changes are good. For example the pseudo transparency effects alleviate some of the ugliness concerns.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    I like the Windows 10 UI. It's a lot better than 8 and 8.1. I like it better than 7 too for the most part.

the-dude 9y ago

I have always thought about the shutdown crapfest as not being able to shutdown for like ... 25 reasons? I believe there is a KB entry somewhere listing a bunch of them. Almost impossible to troubleshoot ( network connections! )

wolfgang42 9y ago
I once had a Windows 7 machine refuse to shut down because it was "Playing Logoff Sound"!
- moogly 9y ago
  Haha, I wouldn't even be mad. That's adorable.
- neilalexander 9y ago
  Windows 2000 wouldn't even start the logoff or shutdown process until the logoff sound had completed playing. ;-)
  - damnfine 9y ago
    Oh god, I remember setting a whole sone as my logoff somewhere in the win9x days, and it totally would. I had to hear the whole damn song just to reboot, by which time I had forgotten to change it. Annoyed my family for weeks.
olyjohn 9y ago
Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows can't shut down half the time. It doesn't actually seem to be able to kill and shutdown it's own processes. So when shutdown time comes, one little app hang and you'll just sit there forever.

theoutlander 9y ago

I can relate to this. It was a common theme across Microsoft. In one instance, the team I was part of was responsible for the initial integration of Bing and Facebook. We had about 24 dedicated people on the team (a few partner/principal group managers too!). Our team was considered agile because we released most features every 4 months (this was around 2009 I think)!!! Anyway, we had a hackathon at Facebook with Zuckerberg and the FB team. There were all these big (redundant) talks by every manager up that chain about how this is the most important integration, etc. Guess what came out 4 months later??? A like button on the Bing home page! The kicker was that the code for the widget was picked from the facebook developers portal.

ajross 9y ago
This isn't purely a software engineering mess though. The PC architecture for "off" is a mess at the hardware level too. I mean, long ago you just had a physical switch on the power supply. But then filesystem authors invented buffering and that wasn't safe anymore. So now there were two ways to shut the machine off: the "safe" way and the old way (where the "old" way was still available via e.g. holding the power button down for 4 seconds). Then, we wanted to start using laptops and carrying them around. But booting the whole computer again and again every time you changed your seat became a chore, so software people invented this cool new trick where you could dump memory to disk and restore it later, so "hibernation" was born and we now had three ways to shut down. Then the hardware people jumped in and pointed out that really the problem here is just the CPU. DRAM refresh is cheap, so there's really no need to dump the RAM at all. Let's just shut the CPU off and come up with a hardware/firmware/OS/driver hack (yeah, it touches basically everything) for powering on into a known DRAM configuration. Much faster! And now we had a fourth way to shut down. (OK, this is a little spun. In fact suspend to disk and suspend to RAM landed nearly simultaneously in the PC world, with different manufacturers picking different horses. Then of course ACPI came in and standardized both, forever locking us into not one but two kinds of suspend.) Then of course, we had a paradigm shift where "mobile" OSes revisted this whole scheme and threw it out the window. The hardware people making mobile chips designed the clock and power gating logic such that the "suspend to RAM" happens essentially every time the CPU reaches an idle state, and never has to be "entered" explicitly the way ACPI S3 is. And now PCs are shipping with this scheme too even on systems where ACPI still works in a traditional way. So, yeah. FIVE. I mean, Microsoft surely made a UI mess out of this. But it's not like they were handed a simple problem to begin with.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bradford 9y ago

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opinion was the primary tool used in decision making. In addition to poor decisions, this had two very negative outcomes: 1) reputation was fiercely fought for. Individuals feared that if they were ever incorrect, the damage to their reputation would limit their ability to impact future decisions and eventually lead to career death. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant; the fear itself caused overt caution and consensus seeking. 2) In the absence of data, an eloquent negotiator is often able to obtain their desired outcome, no matter how sub-optimal that outcome might be. Nowadays, I see data used a lot more, hence the telemetry. A while ago, in response to criticism of Windows telemetry habits, I wrote: "Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do. Microsoft didn't start this paradigm, but I think they had to incorporate it in order to stay competitive." I understand that telemetry is still a delicate issue, but the expertise based decision making of yester-year truly sucked for many, and I don't see a viable alternative.

KiwiCoder 9y ago
Doesn't the focus on data simply shift the problems you describe to telemetry decisions?
- bradford 9y ago
  Yes, and, I might be misunderstanding your question, but I view that as a good thing. I don't ever want to spend my time in a meeting witnessing people bicker over where to position a dialog button, when you could just run an A/B test and let data guide the decision process.
  - andrewfong 9y ago
    Yes, but now you get to bicker about how to structure the A/B test and whether the results are statistically significant.

Theodores 9y ago

I have decided to stick with writing code rather than progress my career. Consequently I am that minority in the team delivering features that customers use. I take personal pride in that and keep quiet about it. Those reports, those plans, the documentation, the mock ups, the meetings and the emails are not in the final product, all that work counted for next to nothing. Ultimately it was mostly two of us working away and refining the specs by collaboration with stakeholders on an informal basis. Because we understand the problem space we are able to ask the important questions and I think stakeholders prefer working directly with programmers rather than have messages related via management channels with costs plucked out of the air and relayed back. With stakeholders I find I am talking their language and a lot of ground gets covered in a working meeting, where some fixes are done during that meeting with anything requiring more time speced out. With management intermediaries they think everyone thinks like how they think so they can't imagine that it would be safe to have the programmer talk in a mix of trade jargon with a client. Usually this is part of the gig, many people make a cushty living coasting between meetings. What do we do so as to get on with the job but not enable this coasting that goes on with freeloading management types?

0xbear 9y ago
You'll be out of a job by your mid-40's. I suggest you reconsider your decision to not "progress your career".
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Thankfully the rest of the world is not like SV.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    I'm not in SV. Just a general observation. Younger people know _how_ to do things, but they don't know _what_ to, and even more importantly what not to do. As you age, you will discover that junior devs are much faster at accomplishing well defined tasks, but, as a rule, utterly helpless with anything open ended/complicated/requiring foresight and experience. Your value will be in helping them navigate things they can't navigate themselves.

kuharich 9y ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706976 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706976

feelin_googley 9y ago

"I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stupid shit" wasn't a result of any one programmer making a dumb decision; most of it was a result of an architecture and a mindset which tried to prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot by gratuitously abstracting away "dangerous" things like memory management. Again: needless abstraction will bite you in the ass if you're not careful. My lead and I spent months going through the Outlook code exorcising "stupid shit" -- removing code which hid what it was actually doing, getting the code cleaner and closer to the machine, making everything more explicit, tighter, and less generic." The above is excerpted from a later blog post by the same author.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago
On the flip side, removing safety from MS Office devs has led to a pretty significant quality and security decline. Pretty much every Office version we upgrade to is tested to hell and back and we usually delay adoption for three years. By then its barely functional after three years of service packs and hotfixes. We just migrated 100 people to 2013 and are still finding issues. Worse, this mentality spread to updates, which we have to delay by 2 weeks or more due to breaking things, ironically usually Outlook. Would I trade a slower start time and less perky performance for security and stability? Absolutely. Maybe those old timers knew what they were doing. Maybe the care vs quick equation makes more sense to lean on care than quick for many types of software, especially in our connected world. Maybe the trade-off didn't make too much sense during the age of Pentium II, but in the age of i5's and i7's on every desktop with 8+gb of ram? I doubt it would be as noticeable. I think we're dangerously experimenting with a "do it quick, ship, and maybe fix it later" mentality that might make sense with startups hurting for dollars and a MVP, but for dinosaurs like Microsoft, its a liability. I wonder how many "previous employees didnt know what they were doing so we fixed everything" anecdotes end up with unhappy customers in the end? Perhaps most.

saagarjha 9y ago

Aside: is this website messing up the scroll for anyone else?

codedokode 9y ago
Blogspot's UI is awful. They probably tried to follow trends and make an app out of website. While loading the page it first shows you the preloader with gears, then loads the top post and only later loads the post you were going to read. It probably gives good score in automated load speed test but in fact you can start reading the text much later than if it were plain HTML page. And when I clicked the search box, the post I was reading has scrolled itself away (no kidding!). I tried to remove focus from the search box but the post didn't come back. And that is Google's product. It might have some advanced code inside but the UI is awful.
- eadmund 9y ago
  I think it's pretty terrible that Blogspot requires JavaScript in order to display text. There's already a really great way to display text on the web: HTML. It just makes no sense to me to change that. It's much like how the original wiki is so badly broken now.

kabdib 9y ago

And they still managed to fuck it up in the latest version of Windows Server; logging out of the GUI is perilously similar to shutting down the system. Oh, you get some more warnings, but I can easily see muscle memory doing the wrong thing.

dredmorbius 9y ago

I'd like to read this, but Blogspot is absolutely the most reading-hostile service of which I'm aware. Its "dynamic" formats most especially. Not only do these defy all readability within a browser, they break fallbacks: console clients (w3m, elinks, etc.), or readability alternatives (Pocket, Instapaper, Outline.com). Please just don't use Blogspot. And don't use the dynamic styles if you must.

codedokode 9y ago
I agree, it is an example showing why you should not try to convert every website into a SPA. A in SPA means "application", not a "website".

SimonPStevens 9y ago

> "Those new hybrid hard drives can make this super fast." - Vista RTM'd - 8th November 2006 - Date on that blog post - 21st November 2006 ... and the wikipedia page he links from the blog post about hybrid drives says "In 2007, Seagate and Samsung introduced the first hybrid drives". I don't think making UI decisions based on hardware unreleased at the time is really the right way to do it. (The same wikipedia page also lists those early hybrid drives as "featuring 128 MB or 256 MB NAND flash memory options" and given that Vista required 512mb and recommended 1gb, I don't even think that they would have helped that much as most of the ram would still need to be written to the spinner platter part of the disk anyway)

kelvin0 9y ago

TL;DR: Bike shedding + Poor communication ==> LONG HORN.

mvindahl 9y ago

Entertaining blogpost. And reading the 2006 comment thread below is also pretty entertaining. All of the comments seem to be about ten years old. Most of them tend to agree that Microsoft seriously botched this feature. But there is also a very vocal minority who argue that Joel is a moron who should shut up and the thing that makes Windows so great is its flexibility, and all those 15 menu options make sense, and people should just shut up about their Macs and deal with the fact that Mac has just a teeny weeny market share. Well, fast forward to 2017. MacBooks are all over the place. And when trying to shut down Windows 10, I'm faced with just three options: Sleep, Shut down, and Restart. Vista really was the nadir of Microsoft in terms of UX, no matter how furiously some people contested this back in the day. And Joel was spot on.