5 ms·

I am quite surprised that this "glitch" ever happened. I am usually no friend of conspiracy theories, but I find the following coincidence a bit tasty: * Micro

by Argorak 14y ago

I am quite surprised that this "glitch" ever happened. I am usually no friend of conspiracy theories, but I find the following coincidence a bit tasty: * Microsoft is known for its obsession with rigorous testing. * They had to pay around a billion for anticompetitive behaviour _and_ implement the "browser ballot". Failure to comply would cost them up to 10% of the annual turnover. * There was a "glitch" that deactivated the ballot for 15 (!) months for a full service pack.

Rastafarian 14y ago
I'm observing quite a few serious regressions in another Microsoft product - Visual Studio 2012, so IMHO this is not completely unlikely to be an accident. On the other side - Steve Ballmer ...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- teh_klev 14y ago
  Would you care to elaborate on the "serious regressions" you perceive to have happened?
  - powertower 14y ago
    Chances are he is referring to the VS.NET 2012 uppercase menu letters. That specific "regression" is a greatly debated topic here, with emotions running hot. 100+ comment threads were started over that one.
    - Rastafarian 14y ago
      The menu letters case is just a registry setting. There are many shortcuts not working properly, e.g. http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/767442/vs11-control-alt-l-shortcut-does-not-scroll-solution-explorer-to-the-selected-document http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/7... , windows with strange state management, the new temp document not working properly.
powertower 14y ago
Do you really think that Microsoft would... 1) Pretend that no one would notice. 2) Do a risk to reward analysis, where they would gladly pay out 7 billion dollars if caught (over a few million extra IE installs). 3) Implement a fix within one day after notice, and offer to extend this ballot on their brand new OS for another 15 months. The simpler explanation is that due to the nature of the ballot, their test Suite did not include the browser ballot in it, and was delegated to someone in the legal department that filed if away and forgot about it. This ONLY affected 28 million PCs. That's a very small fraction of the user-base. And considering IE's market share, this bug would have only caused less than 1/2 of that number of non-installs of other-browsers... As afterwards, anyone could have just downloaded what they were looking for anyways. Also note that for 15 months NO ONE (well, just a few people apparently) contacted MS or the EU Commission about not seeing the browser ballot. I guess the browser ballot is as important as you might think it is to the people of EU.
- Argorak 14y ago
  I didn't say that they did it on purpose. My point is that this is incredibly stupid, especially for an organisation of that size and the projected fine. Yes, we usually don't test for edge cases, but the 7 billion edge-case? So how was this allowed happen? Also, I don't think that this was not reported for 15 months. The problem only became widely known after the EU actually decided for a formal investigation. I found no coverage about when the problem was reported. The 28 million-number is rather irrelevant, as the news coverage states that all of windows 7 SP 1 was affected, so they failed at a major release level. It wasn't 2% of the release or something. This could even have been cought by manual testing. I don't care how important the ballot is in the real world (for the record: I hate the ruling). But this is one of the biggest companies in the world failing to comply with a pretty clear rule that came out of the most expensive ruling ever dropped on them.
  - powertower 14y ago
    My fault. I completely misread your comment.

by Argorak 14y ago

Rastafarian 14y ago

I'm observing quite a few serious regressions in another Microsoft product - Visual Studio 2012, so IMHO this is not completely unlikely to be an accident. On the other side - Steve Ballmer ...

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
teh_klev 14y ago
Would you care to elaborate on the "serious regressions" you perceive to have happened?
- powertower 14y ago
  Chances are he is referring to the VS.NET 2012 uppercase menu letters. That specific "regression" is a greatly debated topic here, with emotions running hot. 100+ comment threads were started over that one.
  - Rastafarian 14y ago
    The menu letters case is just a registry setting. There are many shortcuts not working properly, e.g. http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/767442/vs11-control-alt-l-shortcut-does-not-scroll-solution-explorer-to-the-selected-document http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/7... , windows with strange state management, the new temp document not working properly.

powertower 14y ago

Do you really think that Microsoft would... 1) Pretend that no one would notice. 2) Do a risk to reward analysis, where they would gladly pay out 7 billion dollars if caught (over a few million extra IE installs). 3) Implement a fix within one day after notice, and offer to extend this ballot on their brand new OS for another 15 months. The simpler explanation is that due to the nature of the ballot, their test Suite did not include the browser ballot in it, and was delegated to someone in the legal department that filed if away and forgot about it. This ONLY affected 28 million PCs. That's a very small fraction of the user-base. And considering IE's market share, this bug would have only caused less than 1/2 of that number of non-installs of other-browsers... As afterwards, anyone could have just downloaded what they were looking for anyways. Also note that for 15 months NO ONE (well, just a few people apparently) contacted MS or the EU Commission about not seeing the browser ballot. I guess the browser ballot is as important as you might think it is to the people of EU.

Argorak 14y ago
I didn't say that they did it on purpose. My point is that this is incredibly stupid, especially for an organisation of that size and the projected fine. Yes, we usually don't test for edge cases, but the 7 billion edge-case? So how was this allowed happen? Also, I don't think that this was not reported for 15 months. The problem only became widely known after the EU actually decided for a formal investigation. I found no coverage about when the problem was reported. The 28 million-number is rather irrelevant, as the news coverage states that all of windows 7 SP 1 was affected, so they failed at a major release level. It wasn't 2% of the release or something. This could even have been cought by manual testing. I don't care how important the ballot is in the real world (for the record: I hate the ruling). But this is one of the biggest companies in the world failing to comply with a pretty clear rule that came out of the most expensive ruling ever dropped on them.
- powertower 14y ago
  My fault. I completely misread your comment.