4 ms·

I don't have the reference for it here, but in the first year Windows Vista was out >50% of crashes were due to buggy nVidia drivers. Microsoft assumed (incorre

I don't have the reference for it here, but in the first year Windows Vista was out >50% of crashes were due to buggy nVidia drivers. Microsoft assumed (incorrectly) that their ecosystem would get their shit together automatically. That nVidia would make solid drivers for the new Windows WDDM driver model. The year before Windows 7 came out I was working at a company (DivX ;-) making Windows software. We were getting contacted by different testing groups at Microsoft constantly. Some weeks three different people might contact me. Somehow they found my phone number? It didn't seem very efficient, but it was clear that they were allocating huge resources to this. They found unbelievably nuanced bugs (their QA was better than ours...). They wanted to know when we were going to have a fix by. They wanted to make sure they didn't have a Vista repeat. Vista SP1 was actually quite stable, but it was too late for the Vista brand already. With Windows 7 it seemed clear that the thing they cared about was: the software their users actually use still works after the update. Right or wrong, it was very user centric, because what user likes for their software to break? Nobody cares why.

lamontcg 3y ago
Microsoft got to burn those kinds of resources on the compatibility problem due to having had a near-monopoly on the desktop back in those days. That isn't going to be repeatable for pretty much any other software company other than a FAANG, and certainly not of open source projects, not even Linux. People don't pay enough to open source for that kind of support.
- gbin 3y ago
  It is true for the kernel though. Linus has a strict non regression (of the user code) rule. If some user code starts to break because of a kernel change, the kernel team takes the blame no question asked.
edg5000 3y ago
Amazing story, thanks for sharing. It explains some of the sustained success of Windows perhaps.
- mcny 3y ago
  Speaking of windows Vista, a tale of two friends kts call them ben and randy. Ben has a Compaq laptop that is Vista capable. It takes upwards of three minutes, I kid you not, of blank screen to get a UAC prompt for elevated access request. And those were very common with Vista. Randy has a nice (and expensive) desktop and thinks windows Vista is just fine and all computers should upgrade to it (college computers still has Windows XP and there was no plan to upgrade existing computers to visits that I knew of). They both have wildly different opinions of Windows Vista. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-debacle-intel-pushes-microsoft-bends/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

lamontcg 3y ago

Microsoft got to burn those kinds of resources on the compatibility problem due to having had a near-monopoly on the desktop back in those days. That isn't going to be repeatable for pretty much any other software company other than a FAANG, and certainly not of open source projects, not even Linux. People don't pay enough to open source for that kind of support.

gbin 3y ago
It is true for the kernel though. Linus has a strict non regression (of the user code) rule. If some user code starts to break because of a kernel change, the kernel team takes the blame no question asked.

edg5000 3y ago

Amazing story, thanks for sharing. It explains some of the sustained success of Windows perhaps.

mcny 3y ago
Speaking of windows Vista, a tale of two friends kts call them ben and randy. Ben has a Compaq laptop that is Vista capable. It takes upwards of three minutes, I kid you not, of blank screen to get a UAC prompt for elevated access request. And those were very common with Vista. Randy has a nice (and expensive) desktop and thinks windows Vista is just fine and all computers should upgrade to it (college computers still has Windows XP and there was no plan to upgrade existing computers to visits that I knew of). They both have wildly different opinions of Windows Vista. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-debacle-intel-pushes-microsoft-bends/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...