6 ms·
It's not your imagination – Microsoft's sofware has gone downhill
- allears 5y agoThis headline has nothing to do with the linked article. The article discusses a fix for Win11 on AMD processors. The article does not claim, or even imply, that "MS software has gone downhill." I'm not a Microsoft booster, but it seems that submitter has an axe to grind...
- rstuart4133 5y agoSubmitter here. You're right about the article being unrelated, but that is a mistake on my part. Turns out HN removes ?query and #fragment from the URL. The URL I submitted was: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/amd-and-microsoft-release-fixes-for-ryzen-slowdowns-in-windows-11/?comments=1&post=40343211#comment-40343211 Sorry - I wasn't aware HN did that. I can't see any way to fix it.
- allears 5y agoThat's an interesting anecdote, from a MS developer, which I hadn't seen. And certainly relates to the headline you posted. Too bad HN won't allow the direct link, and apologies for assuming you were trying to misrepresent things.
- jiggawatts 5y agoCustomers like me definitely noticed this happening. We also noticed how documentation completeness and quality took a massive dive. Something like 90-95% of all Microsoft's "docs" these days are auto-generated from the code, and do not have doc-comments to provide English text. So the text, if any, is literally just the identifiers with space characters added between the words. The only doco they have is some blog articles and maybe a few pages of overview docs for their flagship products. That's it. I've seen docs regularly updated for each of the releases such as 2010, 2013, 2016, etc... and then just nothing for the 2019 or 2020 releases. Maybe a page or two, that's it. I recently got an automated email sent to me by GitHub because someone started working on an issue I opened for missing 2019 docs. It's nearly 2022!
- prirai 5y agoYeah, there have been blogs like how to view downloads in Edge and how to add a new user in Windows.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThat's not visible either unless JS is enabled (it's not just your imagination, the Web's quality has gone downhill). If you have issues getting a submission parsed correctly, please email the HN moderator team at hn@ycombinator.com
- rstuart4133 5y agoThanks. I've emailed them.
- ksec 5y agoI actually flagged your post. But now seeing it was the comment that you were trying to bring attention to it makes more sense.
- usr1106 5y agoThat's an insightful post. What a pity it got lost because of HN's URL stripping. So it's not empty words, Microsoft loves Linux. At least they they adopted Linux / open source testing organization. (Some projects are better than others, there is OpenQA, but quite often you get free (as in beer in this case) software and pay with own efforts that has not been systematically tested or documented.) Disclaimer: Developer, have used only Linux for 13 years. Would never take a job again that requires me to touch Windows.
- prirai 5y agoI only want Microsoft to get DirectX implementation in the kernel and then Windows can be gone for good. Perhaps, the steps are in this way.
- dang 5y agoI've restored the URL. Sorry about that. But I don't understand how you arrived at the title - that language does not appear anywhere on the page as far as I can tell. In that case it would be better to use representative language from the OP itself. ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." is in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- jdsully 5y agoThings were a bit more organized in other orgs. The windows org actively fought Satia so eventually he just forced the issue with a mass layoff.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoReading around the web, there are also a lot of complaints how buggy Mac OS is nowadays. Kinda obnoxious how the 2 companies are worth billions (or trillions?) but can't deliver polished software.
- jleyank 5y agoI assume people want features and eye candy over stability or performance? Or the companies think they do. But apple’s snow leopard was a tune up that was well received and effective. Maybe nobody likes doing hard work for boring stuff? Damn code isn’t anywhere near as fast as it should be, either given the hardware advances (Wirth’s law).
- theonemind 5y agoThat sounds to me like the sort of things users will say they want. But when they imagine an OS, they just sort of take stability for granted. Like, if I say, 'picture your favorite food, now what can you to do make it better?' you didn't start by picturing it burnt. You pictured it the way you liked it. They're saying "what do you want out of an OS?" then putting that crap on a burnt OS. People assumed the OS wasn't burnt. I think there's profit in delivering what people actually want, regardless of what they say they want.
- hulitu 5y agoWin 10 is nor stable nor performant. It does not crashes but is full of errors.
- rurban 5y agoMacOS peaked at High Sierra, went downhill afterwards. Also it's HW. Windows peaked at WinXP sp3.
- neximo64 5y agoWindows 11 feels like a web app. Terrible
- atatatat 5y agoWebapps don't have to be terrible. Don't let the rushed, incomplete web apps of yesterday scare you away from PWAs!
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago>Webapps don't have to be terrible. Yet they mostly are.
- crubier 5y agoWait until you see native apps made by people with the same skills as those who make “shitty web apps”. At that point the word “terrible” does not even apply anymore.
- watermelon0 5y agoEh, most PWAs are still slow and have non-intuitive UI.
- vinay427 5y agoI genuinely don’t understand what people are referring to when they use PWA in this context. Do the latest versions of Google office suite apps qualify? How about Outlook in the browser, or maybe TensorBoard or Slack? I would generally describe all of those listed above as providing a poor experience compared to even a decent native app. Maybe those aren’t what you mean, which is why I’m curious to hear which PWAs aren’t terrible.
- crubier 5y agoYes sure... the old song of « these new web apps like Google Docs are terrible, we should go back to MS office 97 ». Meanwhile, customers clearly and massively choose web apps over more traditional apps. Think of the market share of web/electron apps now: Google docs, Gmail, Slack, Figma and others. I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts. The thing is that for a given budget, the development velocity of web based apps is 10x faster than native apps. I’ll get downvoted for that, but that’s the real reason why the web is winning.
- Khelavaster 5y ago"Microsoft doftware has gone downhill" is not what the article is actually about, nor does it really touch on the topic. The title of this post should probably be changed..
- okareaman 5y ago"AMD and Microsoft release fixes for Ryzen slowdowns in Windows 11"
- gigel82 5y agoI live in PNW and have lots of friends working at Microsoft. Despite the whole "One Microsoft" drumbeat, they're pretty much still the MS of old with little tribal infighting trumping customers' needs. Windows in particular feels like a captain-less ship with no one overseeing the big picture and every little group pushing their own little shitty features to prove their raison d'etre and their budgets and promotions. It's pretty sad really; they used to have a monthly "town hall" where the leadership team was answering real (sometimes tough) questions from employees, but they replaced those with fake / pre-scripted casts with softball "Q&A" meant to introduce a team or a feature instead of answering an employee's concerns; meanwhile, real employee feedback and questions are left to fester in the Yammer echo chamber. Lots of people leaving core products, but hard to say if that's MS-specific or the industry-wide recent trend. I'm told managers recently did a "stay interview" asking ICs really weird questions about why you're staying at MS, why you'd be leaving, etc. so it's likely the attrition problem is pretty bad.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago> ...they're pretty much still the MS of old with little tribal infighting trumping customers' needs Do you mean that have much infighting?
- gota 5y agoMaybe little was meant to be 'petty'
- vinay427 5y agoI happened to read it correctly, but it’s definitely ambiguous. Little can describe the locality of the infighting or the amount of total infighting, where the former was the intended meaning.
- gigel82 5y agoSorry, I meant insignificant / petty; little/small groups fighting each other instead of working together.
- _nickwhite 5y agoWithout Microsoft software, Ransomware would not hardly exist. I think the “downhill” has been a huge cliff for the past few years, but it’s getting worse. Nothing drives Azure business better.
- phendrenad2 5y agoThat's just survivorship bias. Ransomware attacks are very low-tech and mostly rely on social engineering. (Unless you think the average hospital IT department is going to use an open-source patient tracking program and recompile it from source to pull in the latest openssl patches...)
- nineteen999 5y agoI mean I agree with your first two sentences but > recompile it from source to pull in the latest openssl patches... Why would they do this rather than rely on their upstream distributor to push an updated OpenSSL shared lib, and just apt-get/dnf install it? ... things have gone extremely backwards in this misguided modern rush to statically link everything so we can install it into a container.
- phendrenad2 5y agoPeople assume that if you just switch to Linux, you'll get world-class security no matter what you do. But, real-world use diminishes that significantly (non-technical users, IT teams who aren't command-line gurus, vendors who ship outdated patches, budgeting departments that won't approve expenses to move off out discontinued software, etc. Not to mention, Linux as a platform is battle-tested for server purposes only. Local exploits abound. "Just use Linux" is easy to say, but I wonder, would it really improve things?
- short12 5y agoMicrosoft basically peaked twice. Win98 se and xp post sp2
- psd1 5y agoBoth of those were crap. MS peaked around 2010. Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 - these are fantastic OSes, better than any Windows OS before or after on any metric I care about. Exchange 2010 was an excellent product, Active Directory resolved some management niggles, Powershell reached version 3...
- majkinetor 5y ago2010? Nonsense, it was disaster. MS is peaking now, it started around 2017, just after Satya Nadella became CEO.
- 0dayz 5y agoWhenever I see these kind of headlines, I expect some deep analysis of said topic, but it then it disappoints with your average article. With that said I remember Barnacules Nerdgasm talking about this and essentially it came down to MSFT relying too much on tests and not real-life usage[1]. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA
- kaminar 5y agoY'all are so funny. Msft has always made crap software, just good enough that people would deal with it. Marketing and bullying works. Msft put Apple in the grave in the 90s, then Gates saved Apple with a $500m investment, to avoid monopoly charges...think he hasn't profited? Not going anywhere.