7 ms·

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. At least

• Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
  It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.
  • dartharva 2mo ago
    All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.
    • bitmasher9 2mo ago
      The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.
      • 0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago
        There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.
      • epistasis 2mo ago
        If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer. Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.
        • bitmasher9 2mo ago
          Is it 2019 again?
          • epistasis 2mo ago
            Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.
            • tavavex 2mo ago
              I don't think they're talking about the debate itself, but maybe about the software job market of the 2010s. Back then, software engineers were more scarce and valuable than today, hypothetically giving them much more leverage to say 'no' to bad orders. Nowadays, many people are just trying to stay under the radar and remain employed.
    • somenameforme 2mo ago
      WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it. I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
      • robotnikman 2mo ago
        There's a reason why people either stick to Win32 or go with something like Electron when it comes to making Windows apps.
• mawadev 2mo ago
  You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
  • tavavex 2mo ago
    I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base. All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
    • mawadev 2mo ago
      I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and then rezips itself.
      • themanualstates 2mo ago
        Oh my. E.g. OpenWrt's massive toolchain at least compiles down to tiny binaries to make up for itself.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Why don't you literally just pirate it. You already own it, so it's not even immoral.
    • seki285 2mo ago
      Can't play multiplayer with friends... I think but I'm not sure. It seems to rely on Steam or Microsoft services for regular and modded play.
• reaperducer 2mo ago
  This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage. And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
  • bitmasher9 2mo ago
    When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.
    • pferde 2mo ago
      Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers. I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
      • bitmasher9 2mo ago
        I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”
        • pferde 2mo ago
          You're right, of course. The point I was trying to make (badly) is that people have hatred for Microsoft for a lot more than just BSODs of decades ago. There has been bad engineering upon bad engineering for many decades, manifesting in all kinds of ways. And that's what this subthread was discussing, Microsoft being bad.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.
• keiferski 2mo ago
  It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
  • ecshafer 2mo ago
    This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
    • 12_throw_away 2mo ago
      A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything. (Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
  • wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
    I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
    • fireflash38 2mo ago
      XP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.
      • buran77 2mo ago
        Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
• r_lee 2mo ago
  Azure is also such a mess. 10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year) I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
  • taosx 2mo ago
    No owners, no responsability, no incentive to fix it. Ticket grabbers and checklist markers.
  • eterm 2mo ago
    And the official auth URLs are always such random crap that I'm surprised people don't get phished left right and centre.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 This is why. TLDR: complete incompetence at all levels
  • robotnikman 2mo ago
    Compared to the old Win32 apps and settings menus of Windows Server, the Azure web interface is a disaster.
  • Rury 2mo ago
    I once saw someone say something like this: "Working in a monopoly mega corp is like working for a 20 person company, connected to 20 other 20 person companies, connected to 20 similar entities containing similar 20 companies, with each group of 20 persons in each competing with each other for investment/budgeting." Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world. Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess. Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.
• 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
  The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
  • tempfile 2mo ago
    This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
    • 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
      So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank. But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
  • vezycash 2mo ago
    >The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
    • 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
      Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014. QA doesn't get enough love :(
  • throwaway85825 2mo ago
    QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.
    • 0x3444ac53 2mo ago
• everdrive 2mo ago
  >With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
• inigyou 2mo ago
  Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.
• bilekas 2mo ago
  I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.
  • ColdStream 2mo ago
    There are stories of MS bringing in high school students to code core features on Windows 95/98 as a part of their summer intern programming. And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up. They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.
• AlexandrB 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.
• still_grokking 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. > There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years. It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
• wartywhoa23 2mo ago
  I pretty much doubt it's incompetence. It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.
• ponector 2mo ago
  >> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
• hnlmorg 2mo ago
  It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft. It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are. Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
  • eleveriven 2mo ago
    The most damning part is that signing in isn't some obscure edge case. It's the front door to one of the biggest games ever made
• ColdStream 2mo ago
  To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see. It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that. But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical. an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down. Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
• robotnikman 2mo ago
  I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.
• jedmeyers 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. Their PM motto is "quality is a feature", and obviously not everybody needs all the features.
• movedx 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. Whoa! Now hang on a minute. That's not fair. They've only been developing software for 51 years! It takes time to get good at these things, you know?
• binkHN 2mo ago
  Yep. I think Microsoft is planning to make all their money from AI; because all their other stuff is becoming wildly enshitified and I take every opportunity that I can to look for a replacement.
• tombert 2mo ago
  I feel like what Microsoft is best at is making something and convincing everyone to use it before anyone has been able to thoroughly check how terrible it is, and by the time people have pointed it out, it’s too late and people act like it’s impossible to change. Windows 11 has been a shitshow, but Windows has basically been a shitshow since at least Vista, and maybe XP. People defend XP, but let’s not forget that Windows Update was still broken shitware on XP. The “system repair tools” have never worked for anyone ever in history. System Restore barely-if-ever worked. Office is a shitshow. Teams is a shitshow. Their entire web presence is a shitshow. Everything that MS does is a shitshow. And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit.
  • 71bw 2mo ago
    >And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit. There is no such operating system.
    • tombert 2mo ago
      macOS isn't perfect but it is decidedly less shitty than Windows. Linux has its issues but it's still less terrible than Windows.
• bmitc 2mo ago
  > This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. That's not all true. .NET/C#/F# are all technical marvels.
• eleveriven 2mo ago
  The difference is that Linux usually fails loudly and gives you something to investigate. Microsoft software often fails behind five layers of UI etc.
• duxup 2mo ago
  My phrase is that Microsoft's software feels like it is POINTED AT ME to make me do / jump through whatever hoops they want first. Me getting things done is an afterthought. It's not just Microsoft of course, it's a lot of places (streaming platforms only seem to want me to watch very specific movies), but it's very noticeable with Microsoft. Microsoft used to be imperfect, but it was utilitarian and I felt like I could get on with my task fairly fast and someone somewhere working there thought about how they might facilitate me doing those tasks. Now they think of other things.
• Danox 2mo ago
  Over the years when Microsoft has to compete on a level playing field they are hopeless, they only know one way playing from a monopoly and when they don’t have it well they suck. Copilot will be the end of Nadella.