So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
> Two QA per dev??
QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy.
* Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
> QA is a lot cheaper than dev.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!
Indeed! I'll wait on the penguin or fruit side with some pop-corn and see where the things are going to.
Seems like the fruit vendor is on the same train as MS if not just a few cars behind yet still arriving at the same destination.
At least we get Visual Studio Code for free
It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.
They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons.
Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
> Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
Oh it did help.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
this reasoning is flawed.
wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?
some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.
Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.
Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.
Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
If they used copilot and it was years ago, I'm actually impressed there are no reports of Windows PC's exploding
> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
> That productivity may not be visible.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
Reality has a way of showing itself eventually.
Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.
Thanks for the heads up, I was not following closely.
It's not LLMs. It's returns-driven-development.
But the second was always the case, windows and everything else is getting shittier so fast it would require a prompt explanation if we didn't have one.
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"
But web people can write css faster so I think it is a net positive?
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.
They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.
If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
I think system programmers are supposed to come under a more strict standard, simply because they are system programmers. There are programmers, and there are system programmers.
I'm not saying that people should be sacked for just one mistake, unless it is a pretty large one (criminal e.g.). But I'd say system programmers should be allowed to make the same mistake three times maximum. I think that's pretty generous. If the culture does not allow enough time for reflection and education, then that's a different story.
The other programmers do not need to hold the same standards simply because their code (presumably) impact less.
There are fewer and fewer 'David Cutler' types and more and more 'Pavan Davuluri' types at Microsoft. Wonder if the blame is really down to AI or indeed a lack of attention to detail from a new kind of workforce.
'David Cutler' types are definitely not popular, in his prime time or in nowadays. My only regret is that I have never worked under such a person.
People assumed they could "modernize" software engineering, but, at the end of the day, it's still mostly engineering and very slightly about software. People optimized for the wrong thing.
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At this point Microsoft needs to go back to service packs and a three year OS version cycle. Rapid development doesn't seem to be working.
How can a company this big fail so hard in what one would consider their main* product still baffles me.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
Because they no longer see windows as anything more than a delivery platform for their subscription services, IMO
You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
"maintain" meaning keeping it somewhat workable or actually improving it?
ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.
They literally tried that strategy with Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago where they didn't really update it for years, only doing the bare minimum. The result was a downward spiral in market share that they were unable to stop once they started trying again, ultimately resulting in IE effectively becoming obsolete.
I believe Microsoft can skate for a long time with just bug fixes and security updates. It makes the drop in Windows' quality all the more baffling.
True but it is still their moat. Without windows they will lose a lot of appeal to their cloud products like Intune, Azure AD, M365 etc
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.
At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.
The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.
Yes it wasn't until recently that I understood why people ran Windows Server as their home operating system.
Because they know everyone who's still using Windows has no choices to switch to. They won't use Linux or Mac.
No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.
Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.
If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.
Those people don't even have Windows–compatible computers. They have phones and tablets.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.
Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
Windows server compared to any linux server os is extraordinarily inferior in every regard except for the AD Domain services interface, which is a leftover from probably Windows NT that they haven't screwed with in the interim so it still functions.
If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
Correct. IT departments want Active Directory.
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
I think Excel is better in Sheets in ways that are important for a lot more users, but it isn’t the same ways for each user.
Also, which I should have said, is for that small group, the missing Sheets features are a show-stopper, not just an annoyance
Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
Ask anyone who was a power user of dBase or Lotus 1-2-3 back in the '80's.
Realistically it's because a good chunk of their work is outsourced abroad who then in turn outsource their thinking to ChatGPT.
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.
I see Microslop's "AI" coding mandate is continuing to go well
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Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Modern Windows... It's like having your own DoS adversary baked into your PC.
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
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Previous discussion:
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
"Uninstall latest lack-of-quality update"
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
I think I might know...
Cutting QA on your core product is a very Boeing choice.
I have never once in my entire life equated quality of software with headcount of QA department, I tell you that.
Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
> I think I might know...
I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
> MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
IMO, it's all traceable to their decision to lay off their dedicated QA teams in 2014
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
There's a reason many call them Microslop.
Not slop but sophistication.
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Only 12 year old boys 25 years ago. Use Linux or MacOS, just move on.
I don't think Microslop was a common term 25 years ago.
Okay, Micro$lop.
>nightmare gets worse
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.
The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.
Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).
If not for being forced off, most people would never have left windows xp… many medical practices and industrial facilities still are in it.
Windows Key + P to change monitor configuration quickly.
I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey...
So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.
That is also a Windows 10 feature
I'm pretty sure that's been a shortcut well before W11, W7 iirc.
Wasn't that introduced in Windows 7?
It certainly exists in my Windows 10.
It just works.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.
If it were the best, I'd be able to drag a file onto a taskbar icon to do something with it, like I could with every other version of Windows ever (and Mac, and Linux).
But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.
Forkbombing into resource exhaustion aside, W11 is the only system that left me unable to as much as log in
What other operating systems have you used?
Dual boot with Fedora on my laptop, and my desktop at home is a Mac mini M4. I really like Fedora, it's my Linux distro of choice, but the experience is not as nice as on W11 in my opinion.
So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
No one is blaming LLMs.
Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
> Two QA per dev??
QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy.
* Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
> QA is a lot cheaper than dev.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!
Indeed! I'll wait on the penguin or fruit side with some pop-corn and see where the things are going to.
Seems like the fruit vendor is on the same train as MS if not just a few cars behind yet still arriving at the same destination.
At least we get Visual Studio Code for free
It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.
They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons.
Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
> Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
Oh it did help.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
this reasoning is flawed.
wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?
some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.
Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]
[0]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/msft/employees/
They weren't great before LLMs either.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.
Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.
Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
If they used copilot and it was years ago, I'm actually impressed there are no reports of Windows PC's exploding
> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
> That productivity may not be visible.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
Reality has a way of showing itself eventually.
Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.
Thanks for the heads up, I was not following closely.
It's not LLMs. It's returns-driven-development.
But the second was always the case, windows and everything else is getting shittier so fast it would require a prompt explanation if we didn't have one.
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"
But web people can write css faster so I think it is a net positive?
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.
They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.
If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
I think system programmers are supposed to come under a more strict standard, simply because they are system programmers. There are programmers, and there are system programmers.
I'm not saying that people should be sacked for just one mistake, unless it is a pretty large one (criminal e.g.). But I'd say system programmers should be allowed to make the same mistake three times maximum. I think that's pretty generous. If the culture does not allow enough time for reflection and education, then that's a different story.
The other programmers do not need to hold the same standards simply because their code (presumably) impact less.
There are fewer and fewer 'David Cutler' types and more and more 'Pavan Davuluri' types at Microsoft. Wonder if the blame is really down to AI or indeed a lack of attention to detail from a new kind of workforce.
'David Cutler' types are definitely not popular, in his prime time or in nowadays. My only regret is that I have never worked under such a person.
People assumed they could "modernize" software engineering, but, at the end of the day, it's still mostly engineering and very slightly about software. People optimized for the wrong thing.
[flagged]
At this point Microsoft needs to go back to service packs and a three year OS version cycle. Rapid development doesn't seem to be working.
How can a company this big fail so hard in what one would consider their main* product still baffles me.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
Because they no longer see windows as anything more than a delivery platform for their subscription services, IMO
You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
"maintain" meaning keeping it somewhat workable or actually improving it?
ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.
They literally tried that strategy with Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago where they didn't really update it for years, only doing the bare minimum. The result was a downward spiral in market share that they were unable to stop once they started trying again, ultimately resulting in IE effectively becoming obsolete.
I believe Microsoft can skate for a long time with just bug fixes and security updates. It makes the drop in Windows' quality all the more baffling.
True but it is still their moat. Without windows they will lose a lot of appeal to their cloud products like Intune, Azure AD, M365 etc
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.
At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.
The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.
Yes it wasn't until recently that I understood why people ran Windows Server as their home operating system.
Because they know everyone who's still using Windows has no choices to switch to. They won't use Linux or Mac.
No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.
Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.
If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.
Those people don't even have Windows–compatible computers. They have phones and tablets.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.
Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
Windows server compared to any linux server os is extraordinarily inferior in every regard except for the AD Domain services interface, which is a leftover from probably Windows NT that they haven't screwed with in the interim so it still functions.
If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
Correct. IT departments want Active Directory.
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
I think Excel is better in Sheets in ways that are important for a lot more users, but it isn’t the same ways for each user.
Also, which I should have said, is for that small group, the missing Sheets features are a show-stopper, not just an annoyance
Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
Ask anyone who was a power user of dBase or Lotus 1-2-3 back in the '80's.
Realistically it's because a good chunk of their work is outsourced abroad who then in turn outsource their thinking to ChatGPT.
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.
I see Microslop's "AI" coding mandate is continuing to go well
Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Modern Windows... It's like having your own DoS adversary baked into your PC.
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
Previous discussion:
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
"Uninstall latest lack-of-quality update"
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
I think I might know...
Cutting QA on your core product is a very Boeing choice.
I have never once in my entire life equated quality of software with headcount of QA department, I tell you that.
Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
> I think I might know...
I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...
> MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
IMO, it's all traceable to their decision to lay off their dedicated QA teams in 2014
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
There's a reason many call them Microslop.
Not slop but sophistication.
[dead]
Only 12 year old boys 25 years ago. Use Linux or MacOS, just move on.
I don't think Microslop was a common term 25 years ago.
Okay, Micro$lop.
>nightmare gets worse
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.
The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.
Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).
If not for being forced off, most people would never have left windows xp… many medical practices and industrial facilities still are in it.
Windows Key + P to change monitor configuration quickly.
I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey... So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.
That is also a Windows 10 feature
I'm pretty sure that's been a shortcut well before W11, W7 iirc.
Wasn't that introduced in Windows 7?
It certainly exists in my Windows 10.
It just works.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.
If it were the best, I'd be able to drag a file onto a taskbar icon to do something with it, like I could with every other version of Windows ever (and Mac, and Linux).
But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.
Forkbombing into resource exhaustion aside, W11 is the only system that left me unable to as much as log in
What other operating systems have you used?
Dual boot with Fedora on my laptop, and my desktop at home is a Mac mini M4. I really like Fedora, it's my Linux distro of choice, but the experience is not as nice as on W11 in my opinion.