6 ms·

The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

95 points by luu 5y ago

blibble 5y ago
to be honest I wish it was still like this no doubt it's now Agile(TM), which would explain the massive drop in quality
- mnd999 5y ago
  You wish it took a year to code up a menu and the result of that years effort is a menu that nobody likes? I don’t think that’s a good outcome for anybody. Also, Vista is not regarded as a high point for quality, I think it’s pretty clear that modern Windows is an improvement in terms of quality, even if some of the choices they have made are questionable.
  - blibble 5y ago
    > Also, Vista is not regarded as a high point for quality I dunno it didn't have ads everywhere, mandatory telemetry, enforced Microsoft accounts or enforced automatic updates
    - mnd999 5y ago
      Sure, that’s what I was alluding to with questionable choices.
    - TedShiller 5y ago
      Why use windoze at all?
      - blibble 5y ago
        way ahead of you buddy
    - andix 5y ago
      Vista couldn’t even properly copy files, but no advertisements, yay!
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        If I really had to pick between ads or reliable file copy, I'm not sure which one I would pick.
      - worewood 5y ago
        Can you elaborate? I've never had any specific issue with copying files on Vista...
        tyingq 5y ago
        A pretty comprehensive overview: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/inside-vista-sp1-file-copy-improvements/ba-p/723622 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/...
        andix 5y ago
        There was an issue in the first versions of Vista with the file copy especially inside explorer. It was fixed after a while, but this ridiculous error existed for quite a while. After a year or two Vista became quite okay. But the initial release was just a huge pile of bugs, held together with a lot of duct tape.
    - mort96 5y ago
      The ads and forced Microsoft accounts and forced upgrades have nothing to do with development methodology. All of those features can be implemented either with a meeting-hell broken-waterfall model or with an Agile® model. The problem is that the higher ups at Microsoft want those misfeatures. If you restricted yourself to only the telemetry thing you'd have a point, since some models are reliant on spying on users to figure out what works and what doesn't, while other models are reliant on good UX thinking hard about the space and doing user testing. Even there thought, I bet the main problem is that user testing is more expensive than spying on users. A proper critique of the development model would look at the huge and increasing number of broken, half-broken or idiosyncratic features. Pointing to well-implemented but user-hostile features is a broader critique of the direction of the company.
    - _Algernon_ 5y ago
      >it didn't have ads everywhere, mandatory telemetry, enforced Microsoft accounts or enforced automatic updates I don't like that that's apparently becoming the new threshold of quality
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vinyl7 5y ago
    Games that take 6+ years of development are more often higher quality than the ones that take 2-3 years to develop. So yes, I'd be willing to wait half a year or year for updates that are not garbage.
dugmartin 5y ago
I was involved as a remote contractor on Longhorn (Vista) working the accessibility team on Narrator (the screen reader) and the Magnifier. I experienced all of this with the addition of a couple of layers of management at the contracting company I was working for at the time. It was a bit insane. Our code also depended (very tightly) on the new Shell team code but we were a ways away in the branch hierarchy from them and every week it seemed some change was reverse integrated down the tree to us that broke something in our code. I'm not sure why the accessibility team wasn't part of the shell team. Most of the cool code that we implemented was dumped on the floor. We had an experimental feature that would play a varying tone (frequency and amplitude) as you moved the mouse around and got close or over certain controls. The idea was to give a way for non-sited folks to explore a GUI. It worked so much better than the final thing that was shipped which just read all the controls in x/y order in the currently focused window. I eventually got off that contract and I was amazed that Vista was eventually released.
- zerr 5y ago
  How does one get such remote contract gigs at BigCo's? Can you mention the agency?
  - dugmartin 5y ago
    It was kind of a one off. One of Microsoft’s first 100% remote employees was getting bored working alone on the east coast so he got permission to hire a small consulting shop near him to work with him. I was part of that shop after a failed startup (they were also a startup accelerator that I was part of earlier). I don’t think they exist anymore - the partnership had a falling out around the same time as the dot com bust.
- flatiron 5y ago
  I was a contractor at apple and had to do some stuff to authkit. It was a friggin nightmare. Running daily builds of macOS is a nightmare and the amount of secrecy and “you only get to know what you need to know” is super painful. I disliked that part a lot. Apple employees also look down on the “sad grey” badge employees. Was really great getting emails every week for beer and bbq events with the disclaimer I wasn’t invited.
dmitriid 5y ago
A good illustration of The One Unbreakable Law https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY (Conway's Law, but do watch the talk for more context)
throwaway984393 5y ago
> So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks. The Open Source development model addresses this. By removing meetings and forcing all work to be done "in the open", it is impossible not to know what is going on, because you can always just go look at what's going on. Subscribe to the mailing list and you will always know what is going on. Or don't and read the mailing list archives. Look at the patches, read the documentation, understand the context from discussions. There is no waiting for a team meeting, there is no arbitrary line of organizational hierarchy in your way. Just make a patch and send it in. There are of course still delays and discussions and disagreements and whatnot; that's the nature of collaboration with multiple humans with agency and ownership. But you never need 24 people to design a menu, because you just start designing it, and people can discuss the work asynchronously on the mailing list. There is no ceremony. All organization is ad-hoc, dynamic, decentralized, and just-in-time. By the time a large "corporate" team has finished building one feature, the open source developers have already released and tested three alpha versions. I think every product owner should read The Cathedral And The Bazaar and put the bazaar method into practice (or at least try it!).
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  You cannot reasonably expect people to check into a plethora of information streams, digest it, and be able to come to a meaningful consensus of action. The meetings, the management, the prioritization, they all act as information filters of a sort. Otherwise, you experience death by information overload. The most "open" of open source and remote companies still have meetings, product roadmaps, and prioritization. Resources and time are finite.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    How does Linux do it? Does anyone know of any documentation for the process they follow?
    - striking 5y ago
      Linux doesn't solve nearly the same set of problems that Windows does. One is a kernel. The other is an operating system. Typically this is just semantics, but it's meaningful here because you still need all of the other components (GNOME and X and PulseAudio and SystemD and so on, as concrete motivating examples) to make up the whole OS. And unsurprisingly, you end up losing out on features that would require vertical integration. Accessibility on Linux is more or less a non-starter, the design of every application and toolkit is blindingly variable, nothing about the system can be depended on (even the standard C library!) unless your app has been intentionally built and tested with that particular version of that grab bag of components. Windows is one thing. People know what they're getting when they use it. I don't like it much, but it certainly achieves the goal it set out to accomplish. I certainly don't lie awake in bed wondering why everyone uses it over my favorite grab bag of widgets that more or less looks like an OS.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
tldr code jockeys learn why Systems Engineering is a valid discipline.
HollywoodZero 5y ago
I'm not a developer, but a PM. I wonder if in the age of GitHub, if this node to root process still exists the same fragmented state. Any devs with insight? Doesn't, the modern git approach make it MUCH easier for developers to get more immediate changes to the codebase?
- nhoughto 5y ago
  I mean a monorepo is basically the modern answer to this, use technology to the solve the coordination problem, its just a different (better) answer. At Windows scale (like Google and FB etc) it would require effort but is do-able, and has been done elsewhere. A multi tiered tree of repositories sounds very complex though, and would require its own effort, amazing it worked at all.
kaetemi 5y ago
Ah, yes. Program blocks with a dialog to ask if you want to save. Windows puts a giant fullscreen message saying a program is blocking shutdown. And the only way to click the dialog is to abort shutdown altogether. And then when you click don't save, the program doesn't close anymore because the system isn't shutting down anymore. Great UX...
MBCook 5y ago
For those who didn’t click through the right chain of links, here’s the original article this one was respond to. I do wonder what they were trying to do that didn’t happen though. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ The thing that stood out to me is this is from 2006. Joel‘s suggestion of the “b’bye button“ is effectively what we got on the iPhone and later the iPad (minus user switching). The user no longer has to care about all those different states. They can either go away for a little while, or go away for a long while and have the hardware turn off.
gandalfian 5y ago
To stop windows click Start.
tantalor 5y ago
This is like nothing but red flags. Why would anyone accept this? I would be screaming from the rooftops.
mc4ndr3 5y ago
None of our problems are technical. They are the direct consequence of the political state of affairs. A few ideas for more productive organizational structure: * Temporarily merge the two teams, so the members share the exact same leadership chain. * Define clearer contracts between parties for what needs to get done, in what order of priority. Find the volunteers who can help ensure fewer important task dependencies aren't skipped. * Narrow the participant pool. No situation will make everyone happy, but some organizational rigor would allow for higher productivity.

95 points by luu 5y ago

blibble 5y ago

to be honest I wish it was still like this no doubt it's now Agile(TM), which would explain the massive drop in quality

mnd999 5y ago
You wish it took a year to code up a menu and the result of that years effort is a menu that nobody likes? I don’t think that’s a good outcome for anybody. Also, Vista is not regarded as a high point for quality, I think it’s pretty clear that modern Windows is an improvement in terms of quality, even if some of the choices they have made are questionable.
- blibble 5y ago
  > Also, Vista is not regarded as a high point for quality I dunno it didn't have ads everywhere, mandatory telemetry, enforced Microsoft accounts or enforced automatic updates
  - mnd999 5y ago
    Sure, that’s what I was alluding to with questionable choices.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    Why use windoze at all?
    - blibble 5y ago
      way ahead of you buddy
  - andix 5y ago
    Vista couldn’t even properly copy files, but no advertisements, yay!
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      If I really had to pick between ads or reliable file copy, I'm not sure which one I would pick.
    - worewood 5y ago
      Can you elaborate? I've never had any specific issue with copying files on Vista...
      - tyingq 5y ago
        A pretty comprehensive overview: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/inside-vista-sp1-file-copy-improvements/ba-p/723622 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/...
      - andix 5y ago
        There was an issue in the first versions of Vista with the file copy especially inside explorer. It was fixed after a while, but this ridiculous error existed for quite a while. After a year or two Vista became quite okay. But the initial release was just a huge pile of bugs, held together with a lot of duct tape.
  - mort96 5y ago
    The ads and forced Microsoft accounts and forced upgrades have nothing to do with development methodology. All of those features can be implemented either with a meeting-hell broken-waterfall model or with an Agile® model. The problem is that the higher ups at Microsoft want those misfeatures. If you restricted yourself to only the telemetry thing you'd have a point, since some models are reliant on spying on users to figure out what works and what doesn't, while other models are reliant on good UX thinking hard about the space and doing user testing. Even there thought, I bet the main problem is that user testing is more expensive than spying on users. A proper critique of the development model would look at the huge and increasing number of broken, half-broken or idiosyncratic features. Pointing to well-implemented but user-hostile features is a broader critique of the direction of the company.
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    >it didn't have ads everywhere, mandatory telemetry, enforced Microsoft accounts or enforced automatic updates I don't like that that's apparently becoming the new threshold of quality
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vinyl7 5y ago
  Games that take 6+ years of development are more often higher quality than the ones that take 2-3 years to develop. So yes, I'd be willing to wait half a year or year for updates that are not garbage.

dugmartin 5y ago

I was involved as a remote contractor on Longhorn (Vista) working the accessibility team on Narrator (the screen reader) and the Magnifier. I experienced all of this with the addition of a couple of layers of management at the contracting company I was working for at the time. It was a bit insane. Our code also depended (very tightly) on the new Shell team code but we were a ways away in the branch hierarchy from them and every week it seemed some change was reverse integrated down the tree to us that broke something in our code. I'm not sure why the accessibility team wasn't part of the shell team. Most of the cool code that we implemented was dumped on the floor. We had an experimental feature that would play a varying tone (frequency and amplitude) as you moved the mouse around and got close or over certain controls. The idea was to give a way for non-sited folks to explore a GUI. It worked so much better than the final thing that was shipped which just read all the controls in x/y order in the currently focused window. I eventually got off that contract and I was amazed that Vista was eventually released.

zerr 5y ago
How does one get such remote contract gigs at BigCo's? Can you mention the agency?
- dugmartin 5y ago
  It was kind of a one off. One of Microsoft’s first 100% remote employees was getting bored working alone on the east coast so he got permission to hire a small consulting shop near him to work with him. I was part of that shop after a failed startup (they were also a startup accelerator that I was part of earlier). I don’t think they exist anymore - the partnership had a falling out around the same time as the dot com bust.
flatiron 5y ago
I was a contractor at apple and had to do some stuff to authkit. It was a friggin nightmare. Running daily builds of macOS is a nightmare and the amount of secrecy and “you only get to know what you need to know” is super painful. I disliked that part a lot. Apple employees also look down on the “sad grey” badge employees. Was really great getting emails every week for beer and bbq events with the disclaimer I wasn’t invited.

dmitriid 5y ago

A good illustration of The One Unbreakable Law https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY (Conway's Law, but do watch the talk for more context)

throwaway984393 5y ago

> So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks. The Open Source development model addresses this. By removing meetings and forcing all work to be done "in the open", it is impossible not to know what is going on, because you can always just go look at what's going on. Subscribe to the mailing list and you will always know what is going on. Or don't and read the mailing list archives. Look at the patches, read the documentation, understand the context from discussions. There is no waiting for a team meeting, there is no arbitrary line of organizational hierarchy in your way. Just make a patch and send it in. There are of course still delays and discussions and disagreements and whatnot; that's the nature of collaboration with multiple humans with agency and ownership. But you never need 24 people to design a menu, because you just start designing it, and people can discuss the work asynchronously on the mailing list. There is no ceremony. All organization is ad-hoc, dynamic, decentralized, and just-in-time. By the time a large "corporate" team has finished building one feature, the open source developers have already released and tested three alpha versions. I think every product owner should read The Cathedral And The Bazaar and put the bazaar method into practice (or at least try it!).

dimitrios1 5y ago
You cannot reasonably expect people to check into a plethora of information streams, digest it, and be able to come to a meaningful consensus of action. The meetings, the management, the prioritization, they all act as information filters of a sort. Otherwise, you experience death by information overload. The most "open" of open source and remote companies still have meetings, product roadmaps, and prioritization. Resources and time are finite.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  How does Linux do it? Does anyone know of any documentation for the process they follow?
  - striking 5y ago
    Linux doesn't solve nearly the same set of problems that Windows does. One is a kernel. The other is an operating system. Typically this is just semantics, but it's meaningful here because you still need all of the other components (GNOME and X and PulseAudio and SystemD and so on, as concrete motivating examples) to make up the whole OS. And unsurprisingly, you end up losing out on features that would require vertical integration. Accessibility on Linux is more or less a non-starter, the design of every application and toolkit is blindingly variable, nothing about the system can be depended on (even the standard C library!) unless your app has been intentionally built and tested with that particular version of that grab bag of components. Windows is one thing. People know what they're getting when they use it. I don't like it much, but it certainly achieves the goal it set out to accomplish. I certainly don't lie awake in bed wondering why everyone uses it over my favorite grab bag of widgets that more or less looks like an OS.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

tldr code jockeys learn why Systems Engineering is a valid discipline.

HollywoodZero 5y ago

I'm not a developer, but a PM. I wonder if in the age of GitHub, if this node to root process still exists the same fragmented state. Any devs with insight? Doesn't, the modern git approach make it MUCH easier for developers to get more immediate changes to the codebase?

nhoughto 5y ago
I mean a monorepo is basically the modern answer to this, use technology to the solve the coordination problem, its just a different (better) answer. At Windows scale (like Google and FB etc) it would require effort but is do-able, and has been done elsewhere. A multi tiered tree of repositories sounds very complex though, and would require its own effort, amazing it worked at all.

kaetemi 5y ago

Ah, yes. Program blocks with a dialog to ask if you want to save. Windows puts a giant fullscreen message saying a program is blocking shutdown. And the only way to click the dialog is to abort shutdown altogether. And then when you click don't save, the program doesn't close anymore because the system isn't shutting down anymore. Great UX...

MBCook 5y ago

For those who didn’t click through the right chain of links, here’s the original article this one was respond to. I do wonder what they were trying to do that didn’t happen though. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ The thing that stood out to me is this is from 2006. Joel‘s suggestion of the “b’bye button“ is effectively what we got on the iPhone and later the iPad (minus user switching). The user no longer has to care about all those different states. They can either go away for a little while, or go away for a long while and have the hardware turn off.

gandalfian 5y ago

To stop windows click Start.

tantalor 5y ago

This is like nothing but red flags. Why would anyone accept this? I would be screaming from the rooftops.

mc4ndr3 5y ago

None of our problems are technical. They are the direct consequence of the political state of affairs. A few ideas for more productive organizational structure: * Temporarily merge the two teams, so the members share the exact same leadership chain. * Define clearer contracts between parties for what needs to get done, in what order of priority. Find the volunteers who can help ensure fewer important task dependencies aren't skipped. * Narrow the participant pool. No situation will make everyone happy, but some organizational rigor would allow for higher productivity.