> On one hand, I've been one of Microsoft's biggest fans. Microsoft helped lift me my family out of poverty. I grew up in Seattle, in the shadow of Microsoft a

> On one hand, I've been one of Microsoft's biggest fans. Microsoft helped lift me my family out of poverty. I grew up in Seattle, in the shadow of Microsoft and their Redmond campus. My father was a laborer who helped built Bill Gate's mansion, and who helped built parts of their Redmond campus. He was incredibly, incredibly, proud, that I drove to work everyday down the streets he had helped plant trees on. He told almost everyone he met that his son worked at Microsoft. Microsoft did a lot of good in the 90s and early 2000s[0], they created a standard platform which the world built upon. They created a stable foundation for thousands upon thousands of developers to build their livelihood. They paid for generations of children to learn programming in free or next to free programs across the country (and across the world). Since their missteps and the rise of mobile, the industry hasn't had a stable development platform to build upon, and we've collectively wasted untold billions of dollars in productivity on crappy cross platform solutions. When I was at Microsoft, the customer was king. I put a stop to plenty of bad behavior by saying "is this what is right for the customer?" and if the answer was no, code didn't ship. But Microsoft is a fear driven company, they were afraid of the rise of the tablet so they made Windows 8, and then they became afraid of Google so they constantly attempt to go for ads. (First they went for search, but then eventually realized Google isn't a search company...) Heck the original reason Explorer was supposed to get tabs was so ads could be shown in new explorer tabs[1]. The other problem is, Microsoft got rid of Software Development Engineers in Test, and they replaced them with devs doing test. But at Microsoft, SDETs served as the last line of defense for the users, as an SDET it was made clear to me from day 1 of my employment that I had the power to stop shipment of software if I felt the code wasn't up to snuff. As a junior SDET I only ever used that power once, I was damn well scared, and when I spoke up and said we had open bugs that I personally considered ship blockers, the lead dev said no problem, the release would be delayed until his team fixed the bugs. No one has that role anymore. Before I left MS around 2016 or so, I saw a fellow developer instructed by the design team to make a UI component behave as if it followed the MacOS design guidelines. The (junior) dev didn't realize that was what he had been told to do, and it obviously took a long time for him to beat the Windows UI controls into shape until they worked like the MacOS UI controls, and when I asked him why he was doing this, he said he was too scared to push back. That is what SDETs were for. To hold the bloody line. Facebook's "move fast an break things" motto gave the industry an excuse to gut dedicated test teams, and now all software everywhere sucks, but no one under 30 realizes anything is wrong because from their perspective things have always been shitty and broken. [0] Yes yes and Linux bad lawsuits etc etc, separate discussion. [1] The ads were to be for Microsoft Store apps IIRC.