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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
by 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.
- nxc18 9y agoMicrosoft fired a huge number of their SDETs (and they no longer actively recruit them). Since then, I've seen a huge decline in quality among office and windows. Devs will tell you they're just as good as testing as the testers, but I don't buy it. Also, if you're a dev, do you really like testing enough to give it just as much attention as you do feature implementation? Again, I don't buy it.
- Clubber 9y agoYes, I'm a dev and I know I don't have the patience for testing. Devs tend to only test happy path, or just off of it. I didn't realize how unexpected software can be used until I attended one of our company's user groups.
- codedokode 9y ago> in the age of i5's and i7's on every desktop with 8+gb of ram Is that really so? Large corporations probably don't want to overspend money for excess hardware power. Intel Celeron or Atom + 1-2Gb of RAM should be enough for office work.
- bulatb 9y agoOnce you add the standard set of IT shitware, Serious Enterprise Endpoint Security, legacy line-of-business apps, and poorly written drivers for the cheap components in those systems, 8GB/i5 is closer to a reasonable minimum for usability. And if it comes with spinning drives, just have it shipped directly to the landfill.