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Aren't that great? Making Windows work across the diversity of hardware it does, in basically every language, is impressive to me. Azure seems to work pretty i

Aren't that great? Making Windows work across the diversity of hardware it does, in basically every language, is impressive to me. Azure seems to work pretty impressively at scale, Xbox is no slouch, and Bing is the only credible alternative to Google. Office is everywhere, Email is done at scale, OneDrive is simple and effective, again at scale. Or we can look at the deep levels of Enterprise integrations (Active Directory, SQL Server, Group Policies et al) Or what about development tools like Visual Studio, languages like C++ or C#, or a bunch of other stuff in that lin I get the "Microsoft is evil" mantra from the Open Source community, and thats certainly well deserved. They're far from perfect, their business practices in the past have been down right bad, but I'm not sure their Engineering is the area I'd fault them for.

rsynnott 3y ago
It _used_ to be appalling (on release, XP was the most security-holey thing you can imagine, and Vista barely worked at all, say), but it does seem to be generally improved these days.
jwestbury 3y ago
Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually understands more than a tiny, tiny fragment of the stack. And the not-my-problem culture from the days of Gates and Ballmer stack-ranking is absolutely still present -- I found what looked like a pretty major security bug (expired user certs being accepted, including those for a service admin account), and was told by multiple long-tenured, senior engineers, that since it wasn't our service misbehaving, I shouldn't worry about it. (I ignored them, dug in more, discovered it was a totally unrelated -- and less scary -- bug, and still found the owning team to let them know.) I've worked at -- including Microsoft -- three major tech companies and a quant hedge fund, and Microsoft's engineering practices -- at least within the Office org, where I worked -- are appalling by almost any measure, in comparison with their competitors. Their success is largely down to three things, IMO: 1. First-/early-mover advantage in many spaces. 2. Excellent business management. 3. Some very, very strong engineers at the principal level and higher.

rsynnott 3y ago

It _used_ to be appalling (on release, XP was the most security-holey thing you can imagine, and Vista barely worked at all, say), but it does seem to be generally improved these days.

jwestbury 3y ago

Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually understands more than a tiny, tiny fragment of the stack. And the not-my-problem culture from the days of Gates and Ballmer stack-ranking is absolutely still present -- I found what looked like a pretty major security bug (expired user certs being accepted, including those for a service admin account), and was told by multiple long-tenured, senior engineers, that since it wasn't our service misbehaving, I shouldn't worry about it. (I ignored them, dug in more, discovered it was a totally unrelated -- and less scary -- bug, and still found the owning team to let them know.) I've worked at -- including Microsoft -- three major tech companies and a quant hedge fund, and Microsoft's engineering practices -- at least within the Office org, where I worked -- are appalling by almost any measure, in comparison with their competitors. Their success is largely down to three things, IMO: 1. First-/early-mover advantage in many spaces. 2. Excellent business management. 3. Some very, very strong engineers at the principal level and higher.