Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

I have a habit of ironically referring to Microsoft's various self-induced whoopsies as examples of the company's "legendary approach to quality control." While the robustness of Windows NT in decades past might qualify as "legendary", anybody who has had to use the company's wares in recent years might quibble with the word " …

[Paul Herber]

Well, it compiles!

Well, it compiles!

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Well, it compiles!

Mostly.

(Scripts and config files don't even need to compile.)

[Always Right Mostly]

Re: Well, it compiles!

On Error Resume Next really speeds projects to completion.

[vogon00]

Re: Well, it compiles!

That's almost as useful as backing up to NUL.

_{(That's /dev/null for those of you fortunate enough to be ignorant of MS's device names).}

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well, it compiles!

We're coding like we've never coded before!

[Paul Herber]

Re: Well, it compiles!

We're coding along on the crest of a wave ...

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Well, it compiles!

Hey Crapilot, make changes until it compiles then I stop call you crapilot.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Well, it compiles!

"Code? Where we're going, we don't need code."

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Re: Well, it compiles!

The new method would be as follows :

- ask AI for code

- compile code, find syntax errors

- tell AI about syntax errors

- AI wrings hands, says it's sorry, gives other code

- compile code, find syntax errors

- tell AI about syntax errors

- AI wrings hands, says it's sorry, gives other code

- compiles code, code compiles without errors

- test code, it works

- release into production

- windows bluescreen/corrupts data/bitlocks your drive/insert your favourite

- informs AI of issues

- AI releases new code

lather, rinse, repeat ad infinitum

[[e-mail]]

Last years I call it "Not interested what you need, pay for the subscription and shut up" strategy. When it comes to company use, the Premium support for 50 thousand USD to start talkng to anyone able to help you in trouble - that's not affordable for smaller companies. For my family as a supporter I recommended ChromeOS (or Apple).

[Anonymous Coward]

Backend: a Linux box

Desktop/laptop: MacOS and LibreOffice (before that LibreOffice, and before that StarOffice and yes, I bought that)

ISP and webhosting: FreeBSD based

Some cloudy services: Linux based

Design software: Affinity (now Canva - I have mixed feelings about that but we'll see)

I've been using this privately now for a good 10 years. And no, I don't use social media, yet I'm still fun at parties :).

[Ian Johnston]

Backend: a Linux box

My desktop computer runs Linux Mint. I recently upgraded it to the latest release, at which point my nice Brother DS620 scanner stopped working After some digging I gather that this is because its drivers depend on libsane and libsane has been renamed to libsane1, breaking everything which needed it. All I have to do, it seems, is examine the .deb for the drivers, change all reference to libsane into references to libsane1, repackage and reinstall.

What business is ever sensibly going to trust a system which creates these hoops to jump through? OK, Linux is not as bad as Windows, but it's still shit.

[Bill 21]

All you actually have to do, is wait cos it will get fixed soonish, on account of people will have noticed.

[Snake]

"Wait cos it will get fixed soonish, on account of people will have noticed."

I think you forgot this icon here:

[hedgie]

Also a reason to test any updates before bringing them live. Something like that could certainly happen with Windows or Mac, and without the work-around. There are plenty of reasons that Linux may not be the best option, or even a viable one for a particular person or institution, but updating systems and something breaking can happen regardless of platform.

[SuperGeek]

You can't blame Linux for that. Try getting an Intel I219-V Ethernet controller to work under Server 2025. Yep, you have to edit the driver! Even Intel's own Server 2025 driver doesn't work as the V series isn't listed in the INF!

And the I219-V is a server controller :(

[hoola]

Just for reality that is a card launched in 2015.....

It appears to have been targeted at mobile and desktop OSs so is possibly not in Microsoft's scope for testing and validation of the drivers.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/82186/intel-ethernet-connection-i219v/specifications.html

[Anonymous Coward]

Program / Programme

On the UK version of Windows 11 at work; if you open an application from the 'open with' menu item, you eventually get a file browser object where the file type filter is set to 'programmes'. For those outside the UK, we use 'program' in relationship to computing terms and 'programme' for everything else. It looks like Microsoft just ran the localisation through a UK English spell checker and stuck all of the 'translations' straight in without checking (AI involvement?). I don't know if they have fixed this in other versions of Windows 11 as I don't use Windows outside work, but I think this is a good example of Microsoft's quality control.

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Re: Program / Programme

Oh my lucky child of the Anglophone ...

micros~1 applies machibe translation to everything, in all the languages. And machine translators don't do context.

In the German help, I saw mention of wiping a device in terms of cleaning a surface, and not in terms of remotely deleting data.

So for non-english speakers it's the following workflow: translate in your head to english and try to make sense of it

[David M]

Re: Program / Programme

In an old version of MS Word (set to UK English), the grammar checker explained why it was changing 'tires' to 'tyres' as follows:

"tyres" means "rubber wheel coverings", "tires" means "exhausts".

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Program / Programme

Which I suppose is right as far as it goes (assuming a verb in the 'tires' form) but why didn't it just say 'normal English spelling'?

Still, I shouldn't complain; my most frequent online identity is taken from an MS speck-cheller alternative in pre-windows days which couldn't believe my name.

[Manolo]

Re: Program / Programme

In Dutch I used the word catheter, in a medical context. Word insisted I meant catheder (lectern).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Program / Programme

That's just US sensitivity - you're dealing with a country where you can comfortably show a bloody murder on live TV, but God help you if a woman has a bra malfunction. Medical terms will be banned by the current administration anyway because they do not want to spend money of keeping the population healthy. Just see what happened to vaccination programmes.

But I digress - now you know why I call it autoincorrect. I think it's slowly morphing into Clippy which also merely pretended to be useful.

[Old Used Programmer]

Re: Program / Programme

Another version is to call it "autocorrupt."

[Sherrie Ludwig]

Re: Program / Programme

"Autocorrupt" is genius. May I offer you a beverage?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Program / Programme

"tires" means "exhausts"

So your car has twin tires sticking out of the back.

[VBF]

Re: Program / Programme

And in a vehicular context, "exhausts" are where the hot air is emitted

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Program / Programme

No, you replace "de-de" with "en-us" on the URL. Which is, luckily, still shown and not "protected from view to lessen the burden of users".

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Re: Program / Programme

correction - it is micros~1.sht

[spacecadet66]

Re: Program / Programme

Although to be fair, you should also occasionally clean the surfaces of your devices, a dry microfiber cloth is good for this.

[CorwinX]

Re: Program / Programme

Yeah. They can't even get localisation right for American/UK English.

I shudder to think what they're mangling in other languages.

It'd be great if someone managed to sneak Kurwa (pronouned KU-v-ra) into a Polish localisation.

Idiot yanks wouldn't have a clue.

Hint - while it's used by Eastern Europeans exactly the same way as we use FCUK, it doesn't translate directly to that word.

[vogon00]

Re: Program / Programme

"Yeah. They can't even get localisation right for American/UK English."

It's not just them. US words are frequently being used instead of the 'proper' en-GB word:-) I was reading a BBC news article the other day and was surprised to find them talking of 'flashlights' rather than torches. Yes, it was a local uk-related article. ITV do it as well, plus some other really annoying stuff (Typos in article body, errors in page/tab titles etc. etc., very occasional bias).

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Program / Programme

Sigh... time was when the BBC was the country's repository for standardised 'Queen's English'. As a young broadcast engineer in the seventies, I recall news presenters - Peter Wood, Kenneth Kendall, and Richard Baker - returning scripts with grammatical or usage errors to the newsroom for rewrites. Of course, grammar was considered more prescriptive than descriptive then, but even now it hurts when I see typos, missing words, and Americanisms on UK news sources.

(And of course Firefox/Mint/Cinnamon still insists on using American spelling for its corrections, in spite of me telling it not to. I think it has a sense of humour...)

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Program / Programme

"the other day and was surprised to find them talking of 'flashlights' rather than torches"

Maybe it's a regional thing or even a class thing but we used to call them "flashlights", not "torches". (Damn spill chucker wants to hyphenate it!)

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Program / Programme

But as another from the same general area as Dr Syntax... to me it was always a torch, not a flashlight. Though we did differentiate between a torch and a bicycle lamp...

That said, as a child in Yorkshire, dialect was local enough that one could easily identify the area of a city where someone else grew up.

[jake]

Re: Program / Programme

Got me Os and As in Yorkshire. Heard flashlight about as often as torch. To this Yank, it always seemed to me that there was definitely a class difference the two. The taxi driver who worked on his own car would ask me to hold his torch as he fiddled around under the bonnet, while his neighbor the banker would occasionally come out with his flashlight if he noticed the torch's bulb getting dim.

And yes, both the torch fans and the flashlight preferrers both used bicycle lamp for that particular tool.

One thing we could all agree on ... Pints all 'round.

[Snake]

Re: flashlight vs torch

"Though we did differentiate between a torch and a bicycle lamp..."

But what about a tiki torch? Or the Olympic torch? Or a gas torch?

UK'ers criticize U.S. grammar [often] but flashlight is specific to one type of device: a battery-operated incandescent (now, LED) hand-held light. No confusion nor additional adjectives necessary.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: flashlight vs torch

"UK'ers criticize U.S. grammar [often] but flashlight is specific to one type of device: a battery-operated incandescent (now, LED) hand-held light. No confusion nor additional adjectives necessary."

Can we all agree on the "pitchfork", no matter which torches we carry?

[jake]

Re: flashlight vs torch

Depends on what you mean by a "pitchfork".

Would that be a broadfork, a border fork, a compost fork, a digging fork, a hand fork, a manure fork or a spading fork?

_{Perhaps you actually mean a pitchfork ...}

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: flashlight vs torch

"Would that be a broadfork, a border fork, a compost fork, a digging fork, a hand fork, a manure fork or a spading fork?"

You git! :-D

[dmesg]

Re: flashlight vs torch

Tuning fork?

[jake]

Re: flashlight vs torch

That's pronounced "tacky torch", because invariably they are. Very tacky.

HTH

[jake]

Re: flashlight vs torch

Just to add to the conversation, if you go back in history a little[0] way, you'll find the Brits calling it an "electric torch".

_{cf. You'll find mentions in early Biggles books ... the ones you can't get anymore because they are politically incorrect by today's standards.}

_{[0] I remember some of my friends using the term in Yorkshire in the 60s/70s.}

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: flashlight vs torch

"early Biggles books ... the ones you can't get anymore"

Try The Faded Page. There is a fair collection of W E Johns' work including Biggles.

The texts in the site are the transcribed intact from original texts but might contain a warning that certain attitudes, prejudices and beliefs expressed in the text that are unacceptable today were common and acceptable at the time of writing.

[DrewPH]

Re: Program / Programme

Brit here, I've always called them flashlights to avoid confusing them with something dipped in pitch that's held aloft at a viking funeral.

[Dr Paul Taylor]

curva

This word, with the obvious innocent meaning in western Europe, is my answer to those who claim that certain words are intrinsically offensive, for example as racial slurs.

I was once on a train (in England) surrounded by a bunch of (white) guys chatting loudly in some language that I couldn't identify, fuelled by plenty of beer. This word was used rather frequently and I was about to ask what it meant, when I realised that it was probably an expletive.

When I got home I looked it up in Wiktionary to try to find out what language it was. (With various spellings) it is not only in every Slavic language but also in Greek, Hungarian and Lithuanian.

After Douglas Adams, all I can say is Belgium!

[grizzo]

Re: curva

Also in Romanian. I was driving there once with some local passengers in the car and at some point my Waze set in Italian said "Attenzione! Curve pericolose" (Attention! Dangerous bends ahead) before a section full of hairpins.

My passengers started chuckling since to them it sounded like that we were about to approach some dangerous ladies standing on the side of the road :)

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: curva

There was (much missed) a billboard near a set of bad curves in Interstate 95, as you entered Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The billboard advertised a "gentlemen's club" and featured family friendly pictures of some well proportioned young women (I hesitate to call them ladies, though they may have been models). Anyway, they were not the best part of this billboard -- that was the text: "Dangerous Curves Ahead", followed by the name and address of the establishment.

At some point, either the establishment, the billboard company or the city made the billboard disappear. I miss it...it combined two important things: attractive women and a public service announcement, and did it well.

[jake]

Re: curva

There used to be (still is? I don't know ... it was half a century ago, or thereabouts) a gambling & drinking establishment in Auburn, California. I can't remember their name, but I do remember their bumpersticker:

<bar logo & name> "Liquor in the front, poker in the rear"

The logo was a silhouette of a prospector panning in a creek.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: curva

"some dangerous ladies"

Don't ever make the assumption that they are not dangerous.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Program / Programme

Visual Basic for Applications, circa '97

True and False are localized (e.g.: Vrai / Faux), making code incompatible between localized versions of MS Office...

[Joe W]

Re: Program / Programme

Still the case in Excel....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Program / Programme

I thought they had finally tokenised that idiocy? I mean, it's only been like, what, two decades or so?

[Not Yb]

Re: Program / Programme

Just remember, in Germany, it's not "MicroSoft Fenstern", and despite translate.google.com,"Windows" does translate to "Fenstern" unless you're talking about the MS product.

There are many words that, to machine translation, translate to the same word in another language (like "Windows" in English to "Windows" in German) despite any desire that you might have to learn what that other word actually means when it isn't a brand name.

Then there's Bing Translate on Kindle, which has been nearly useless every time I tried it. Translating the foreign word into the exact same spelling in English when I didn't know what the foreign word meant to begin with isn't useful, and yet MS Bong does it all the time.

[Chris Warrick]

Re: Program / Programme

For some time, the British version of Windows 11 translated "Compress to ZIP file" as "Compress to postcode file".

Meanwhile, the Polish version of Windows 11 changed the long-standing translation of "View", and now it is effectively the "Show" menu (or more precisely, "Display" as a verb), which does not make sense at all.

[SVD_NL]

Re: Program / Programme

If you want to download the office suite through the MS365 portal now, the button says "installeer kantoor" (install office).

Seems reasonable right? Well, the product name is still "Microsoft Office" in Dutch, and the button will seemingly conjure up a physical office space...

The weird part is that this button used to be correctly localised, and that part of the portal hasn't really been changed as far as i can tell.

Another fun one is the "update information" button on the My Account page (referring to updating your security info, e.g. backup phone numbers and MFA methods). We need to direct users to click the "Informatie over de update" (Information about the update) link. This has been an issue for ages though.

[Cloudseer]

Re: Program / Programme

I remember installing an English version of office on a Dutch windows 98 and getting mixed language dialog boxes across the operating system with the buttons in one language and the dialog text in another.

[jake]

Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

... starting with the run-up to the official release of Win2003Server.

Win2K was the last semi-decently vetted MS operating system; it's all been downhill from there.

[Roland6]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

We forget that MS took a kicking to get them to take quality sufficiently seriously to do the work necessary to turn the pile of garbage that was launched as XP into XP-SP2/SP3 which everyone remembers and raves about.

[Greybearded old scrote]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

For very small values of "everyone."

[VicMortimer]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Lots of us rant and rave about how awful eXtra Pitiful was.

I don't know why the article pretends MicroSloth ever had any quality to control in the first place. They've always been terrible.

[cyberdemon]

2000 was the last "Good" version of Windows IMO

I made the switch to Linux shortly after that and never looked back

[CorwinX]

Re: 2000 was the last "Good" version of Windows IMO

I'd go with Server 2003 plus Service Packs.

For quite a while I ran it in "Desktop Mode" - all that entailed was disabling some features/services and enabling others.

It was fundamentally the same code under the hood.

I liked the ability to re-enable specific Server features if temporarily needed to resolve something.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: 2000 was the last "Good" version of Windows IMO

Nononono... Für XP and 2003 the code base was split. Source: Mister RSX-11m / VMS / Mister Windows NT Dave Cutler himself. Without him the OS below the UI would be a lot worse, a lot more inconsistent, and if you thing you've seen many BSODs.... Never experienced XP SP0? He is the too a reason why AMD64 got so successful and 64 bit Windows along with it (yeah, MS is not always WIntel)... We need him to prevent Longhorn 2.0. AGAIN.

[Roland6]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

It’s there in the first sentence:

“ ironically referring to .. the company's "legendary approach to quality control." “ ie. It had no quality control.

[Kurgan]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Maybe you don't remember windows 3.1 and windows 95, and ME and Vista.

Ms has been able to provide solid software with MS-DOS. When Windows 3 and 95 came, it was normal to have something crash at least twice a day. And it was so "normal" that at that time the quality of hardware also got down the drain, because no one expected a windows PC to work properly for more than 2 hours straight, so if RAM was faulty and sometimes crashed, no one was surprised. And actually no one even thought about the possibility that hardware was faulty, because software was much more defective, and it was normal. It was "the way computers work". I was in my twenties at that time, and I worked as a sysadmin (as I do now) and I remember very well all of this. The downfall of software quality (and I mean software from MS, because Novell Netware worked fine) and then of hardware quality too (in the PC market, not the much more expensive server hardware)

Then, when finally MS merged the NT kernel into the desktop OS, things started getting better. And then when they recovered from the bad name, and actually made an OS that mostly worked (win2000, XP, and even 7, even if 7 was a memory hungry monster), things started getting VERY bad again (Win 8 anyone?)... and here we are, in a totally different world, made of cloud services and desktop spyware (win11 is not an os, it's a desktop spyware), but with the quality standards of windows ME.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

No, I beg to differ in one specific point: Windows 8 and 8.1 were VERY stable, the first to survive an nvidia driver crash, and quite faster that Win7 too if you had 4+ GB RAM, especially networking. It even needed less disk space on the long run, partly due to running cleanmgr automatically to remove old update backups which filled up Windows 7 120 GB System SSDs very fast. Don't mention the UI though. Improved up to Server 2019 / Win10 1809, and then leveled out and went south starting with the pandemic (which is no excuse for bad quality), and to hell somewhere 'round 2021.

[Kurgan]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

I actually don't know. I loathed so much of the win8 ludicrous need for a huge amount of RAM and its disgusting UI that, as most business users did, I told my customers to avoid it entirely and keep using 7 till the end, so my experience with win8 was limited to "wtf is this UIi? wtf is this memory requirement? AVOID AT ALL COSTS".

[bombastic bob]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

to add to your mention, Micros~1's QA layoffs [and general bad attitude about what CUSTOMERS actually WANTED] coincided with the release of W10.

I participated in the W10 insider program with the hopes of getting Micros~1 to change their Sinofsky-inpired ways. They FAILED.

As for terms describing their QA and customer service performance, I propose "Under-whelming Quality Concern, delivered 'as-is'."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

If I recall correctly, the terrible quality of Windows Server facilities like file sharing and printing was what actually gave Linux its entry into the corporate world.

If you had file and print services that just stayed up and working day after day it was a very safe bet that the local IT engaged in some skunkworks and brought a Linux SAMBA server into play instead of the utter unstable and buggy disaster that Microsoft made of it.

How on Earth did we end up using services that even a used car salesman would hesitate to advise as suitable?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

"Ms has been able to provide solid software with MS-DOS."

And that was originally bought in.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Ironically, we had a couple of Vista laptops. These were quite stable as well... but I prefer Win7 above everything else.

It'll run just fine with 2Gb RAM, unlike Win10/Win11 which requires a minimum of 8Gb RAM just to operate properly without serious lagging and swapping....

[bombastic bob]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

a lot of the bloat on startup is Windows Defender and various .Net things that for some reason MUST EAT RESOURCES for the first 10 minutes or so...

[algol60forever]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Does anybody remember having to access the motherboard of an Apple III (we developed in UCSD Pascal, and yes, if it compiled, it ran) and push almost every chip in? Regular job.

[upsidedowncreature]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

I remember running what were then considered large spreadsheets in Visicalc on an Apple ][ - I had to remove the top cover to avoid the machine overheating.

[chivo243]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

That's when we could smell the rot. I gleaned that from an article I read at them time! MS is now so large that the decisions made are impossible to execute at that scale. No Vision! They need a megalomaniac like Jobs to get the job done!

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Should Elon take over?

(although he may start by suing to get listed as a founder)

[bombastic bob]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

A joking rumor says Elon's starting up a company called MegaHard to rewrite all of windows using AI.

I think that'd be a GREAT idea for Wine, actually... make it 100% compatible with Windows 11 applications by re-writing the entire Wine system [for XOrg, naturally, NOT Wayland] so we can FINALLY ditch Micros~1 COMPLETELY

[picturethis]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

At home,

When MS announced that Windows 10 would have forced, non-preventable upgrades, that's when I started the home migration - Now running either Linux (AMD64) and/or Raspbian (ARM) on all machines. Will be switching to Trixie for the Pi HW that can handle it. I keep one MS Win 10 machine (don't use it currently). Win 11 (or any MS software) will never run on hardware located in my house.

At work,

That's a different story, company runs on MS (and by definition, now Win 11 on the desktop). However, I have switched over to running Win 11 in a virtual machine now (Ubuntu Host). So far so good. At least for now, this should contain Recall and CoPilot to that VM and not the host. I have to say, it's so nice being able to leave my machine running overnight and not having it automatically rebooted due to "updates" when I come in the next morning. I now actually am in control of my (well, the company's) hardware - what a concept.

Microsoft is the quintessential evil corporation, it's not really their fault, they're just greedy, at all costs. Privacy, Quality is not in their vocabulary. And they are not the only corporation to worry about. Beware AI, reject if at all possible. It's going to end very, very badly.

[isdnip]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

Windows 10 updates are preventable -- in the Pro version, not Home. I don't run updates until I'm damned well ready to, and it's always a) well after the crowds have found the major failures (which get reported on El Reg), and b) a reboot won't be too inconvenient, given that I keep many processes running at once.

But their quality has remained poor, getting worse. Especially Office, which is the standard for revisable document sharing and collaboration. (So please don't tell me to use Libre.) A couple of months ago, I was editing something in Word and it disappeared. Not just the Word window, but Office itself. It suddenly and completely de-installed itself. This is on a subscription version of 365, paid up. I had to reinstall and fix a bunch of settings again. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was editing a big document in Word and it crashed. And in doing so deleted the file I had been working on. No backup or anything; it just killed the entire file. So a couple of days' work lost. And whose idea was it to take away the vertical scroll bar three seconds after you stop moving it? Excel lately is no prize either. Enshittification rules.

[Not Yb]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

"Don't tell me to use Libre" you say, then follow it with some of the reasons why you really should be using Libre locally, even though it isn't the 'standard' for revisable document sharing and collaboration software. Something being standard doesn't make it automatically the best choice, even if everyone in your company is somehow forced to use it.

The idea that a document is something that 2 or more people need to be able to edit in real time is something Microsoft enables, but in my experience, really not a good way to wind up with a useful, concise, and meaningful document by the end of the process.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

We're a Microslop shop.

Honestly, it is getting so ridiculous and tiresome I've been considering replacing all of Win11 with Linux running a virtualized instance of WinNT4SP6 and our software - no more worries about windowsupdates borking something...

Unfortunately serial and USB passthrough will be problematic and iffy, and will be introducing more points of failure.

So we can just as well go straightout for Linux and stop supporting Microslop alltogether.

[Oh Matron!]

Yet another Windows vs macos comparison....

Sorry, apologies, but why such a frequent cadence?

macOS has a much more sedate release program, where both enterprise and public testing is encouraged. macOS isn't without it's faults, but, my God, from an Enterprise IT perspective, it's much more manageable (and better quality)

[Dan 55]

Re: Yet another Windows vs macos comparison....

MacOS and Windows are both on yearly major releases and both have public testing. The quality of MacOS is also leaving something to be desired lately too. Perhaps you just can't cram new features and respond adequately to a flood of bug reports often written by people who have no real expertise in writing them and release on a marketing-driven yearly schedule.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yet another Windows vs macos comparison....

TBH, Tahoe is about the first OS where its first release did have fairly serious issues (both graphics and audio). The recent update 26.1 fixed a lot of it, but it proved the dictum that you shall never use a new major OS release for production until the first patch has come out.

That said, if I add OPEX to the costs of Apple gear it quickly emerges as the cheaper option, that's why MS has been working so hard on customer lock in such as its Azure cloud and things like Dynamics (which is about as dynamic as my 89 year old granddad, btw) because from a desktop/laptop perspective it's evident it's moving towards the wrong side of the cost/benefit equation at quite a clip. If I then add the ability to just sent staff abroad to any Apple shop for repairs of even replacement instead of having to run a spares and repair division and the sheer raw power versus long battery life it becomes very hard to continue defending a Microsoft based desktop, also because Microsoft (who clearly realised this a while back) are now evolving towards the strategy of the Netscape they destroyed: the browser is the interface.

Hence also the lack of attention to the desktop. As far as I can tell, they damn well know it's a lost cause, they're just leading the sheep along until enough of them realise this for that revenue to drop below cost.

Given the intelligence of the average decision making sheep, give it another decade or so..

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Yet another Windows vs macos comparison....

Because every update resets the data inhalation settings to "Yes please." It's hard to hoover when the plug is pulled. They do this because they know that eventually people will fet tired of having to go back every other day to turn those setting back off and will stop doing it. When that happens, the data harvest is no longer called on account of rain.

[mw_foot]

Break all the things

Server 2025 has so many issues. Yet MS keep piling on the features whilst breaking things. More generally.

In August the CU for Win11 24H2 wouldn’t deploy via WSUS and last month local host broke.

The focus should be on stability and speed. I put linux mint in an old laptop and it’s much faster than Win11.

You could almost argue a split of organisational vs home versions of Windows is needed. You don’t need Candy Crush/Xbox on Education/Enterprise versions.

[Roland6]

Re: Break all the things

> You could almost argue a split of organisational vs home versions of Windows is needed.

MS already use “Home”, “Professional”, And “Enterprise” for this. However, what is clear MS think playing games and watching adverts is what counts as work these days.

It seems now, to avoid the junk you need the “Server” edition.

However, given the vast majority of servers in the world run Linux/Unix (including those underpinning Azure) and MS’s desire to replace all its on-prem products like Exchange with cloud, it can’t be long before MS sunsets Windows Server.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Break all the things

They even try to push XBox stuff on server versions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our BOFHs haven't got a clue

They've set a group policy enable "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" which has no effect on security updates but opts the PC into preview updates which have even worse QA (if any at all).

Still, if they want to opt in to increasing their chances of having to sort out a boot-looping fleet of PCs then that's their problem.

[Paul Johnston]

Re: Our BOFHs haven't got a clue

Curious if that is what they want to do or have been instructed to do by on high?

[Rosie Davies]

Redmond Reliable

I've been using the above for years to describe things that will break as soon as you look at them. And if you stop looking at them. And just for giggles because, why not?

Rosie

[ITMA]

Microsoft's QC

To mangle a quote from the film "The Legend of Hell House" where Florence Tanner is supposed to be possessed by a haunting spirit.

"Who the hell do you think you (Microsoft QC) are, you bastard? You might have been hot stuff when you were fifteen, but now you're shit!

[blu3b3rry]

QC? Where?

Can't speak so much for Windows 11 (only ever had it on one computer until its warranty ran out, and hated it), but W10 had its fair share of stupid little foibles that should have been caught in QC testing had any been done. Some of these have existed for at least four years.

Trying to pin anything to the start menu as a tile, then arrange it to suit is often a work of patience and at least one reboot. Adding a tile then dragging it into position can often cause it to jump on top of some others and glitch the whole UI out. If that doesn't happen, it often pings off down into an out of sight wilderness you can only reach by scrolling for 30 seconds to find a tile frozen in place. Fixing the frozen menu normally requires a reboot to nudge everything into working again. Not hardware specific either as noticed on both my 2014 desktop tower and a 2022 Dell laptop, both rather powerful and fast Core i7 machines.

Obviously with the cessation of W10 updates its never getting fixed, but it's been an issue since at least 21H2 when the intensely irritating and buggy "news and interests" pop-up widget got slapped on everyone's taskbars without asking (often as not trying to remove the widget would cause it to freeze in place until you logged out/in and forced a reload of the taskbar).

I've used Ubuntu 22 GNOME for bits and bobs at work and Linux Mint Cinnamon at home. Neither are perfect but I've yet to find anything as flaky or crap on them as those issues above.

....okay, I'll breathe. It's way too early for a beer so I guess I'll settle for a coffee refill.

[Pascal Monett]

"It's difficult to pinpoint precisely"

Not really.

It is precisely when The Powers That Be at Redmond decided that they were more intelligent than quality control.

Borkzilla has the money. It should rehire every quality control specialist on the planet and get them hammering the fuckups that this ever-growing pile of festering shit is ceaselessly creating.

The shareholders ? Who cares apart from them.

[LessWileyCoyote]

Re: "It's difficult to pinpoint precisely"

One could argue that because the US legal system places duty to shareholders before everything, with dire penalties for failing, that the shareholders are actually The Powers That Be, and also sole controllers of the money. Hence the current situation - everywhere, not just at MS.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: "It's difficult to pinpoint precisely"

And that is ironic, for the companies who ignore the shareholders and take proper care of their customers make money every quarter like clockwork. Those who don't have bursty profits then start spiraling down.

M$ is hitting the top of the spiral now. I've used M$ since 3.1 days, and while I occasionally grumbled I stayed. Why? Because it worked and I'm inherently lazy. I'm no programmer techie, just a user. Win10 was a tipping point though - the never ending updates, the constant need to put setting back like I had them, constantly having to find where those setting are hiding now, M$ finally made their OS suck enough that I put in the work necessary to move to Mint. If a lazy old man like myself is willing to leave, they're not long for this world.

[Like a badger]

Re: "It's difficult to pinpoint precisely"

If a lazy old man like myself is willing to leave, they're not long for this world.

If only.

Most of MS profit is from enterprise licences, and most of those businesses are entirely happy paying the Microsoft tax, gabbling over Teams, with 90% of users using Excel as the universal solution, and the remaining 10% see pivot tables within Excel as the universal solution, producing mountains of Powerpoint crap, and rejoicing that multiple users can concurrently access a file through Sharepoint. And a lot of them are enthusiastically embracing Copilot.

There's a tiny proportion of business leaders (in the West, certainly) who even understand the FOSS concept, and a tinier subset still who are willing to even consider dumping Microsoft. The QA problems rarely trouble senior leaders - it's handled by IT, and its ITs fault if things don't work. It is ITs problem to work out if the latest MS "update" is safe to roll out to the business. Licence fees are simply a cost, that's handled by procurement. Finance will moan about the cost, but then scream blue murder if somebody says "Hey, Finance guys, we're moving you to Open Office".

Globally, market share reports suggest Google have a greater share than MS for office productivity software. That maybe true, although not what I see in the UK, and even then are Google either more competent or more trustworthy than Google?

[VicMortimer]

Re: "It's difficult to pinpoint precisely"

It's super easy to pinpoint.

August 1981. That's when the abomination they called PC-DOS was released and began to contaminate computers.

It's only been downhill since for them, and for those of us unfortunate enough to occasionally have to touch the steaming pile that is a MicroSloth operating system.

[Dippywood]

MS seem to have a habit of putting their foot in it - the leg-end that is their quality control.

[cd]

The word you're looking for is...

Nepo.

The poster children, Ivy League uni's, include Penn, whore Wharton MBA factory has rrbounded karmically(did I sorll that correctly?)....

"The FAQ site linked in the email confirmed that systems accessed by the hackers include Penn’s Customer Relationship Management system in Salesforce, file repositories in SharePoint and Box, a reporting application titled Qlikview, and Marketing Cloud.

The page specified that Penn’s “development and alumni activities” were accessed with the stolen credentials, but the University has “no indication” that Penn Medicine electronic medical records were affected"

https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/11/penn-cyber-attack-email-update-faq

[TempusFugit]

Microsoft quality has always been questionable since Win95

In my opinion Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP3 (maybe Win7 too) were the best quality professional and consumer OSes.

There was a time when I was doing field support during Win95/98 through to XP. Viruses were a major problem for all my clients for YEARS, typically the only solution was to backup what could be backed-up, wipe the disk, and reinstall Windows (which had the added benefit of flushing any vendor crapware). There was a (Reg?) story or rumour that Steve Balmer was asked by a close friend if Balmer could to fix his laptop. Balmer found it so infected with assorted viruses that he ordered Microsoft to finally pursue quality and push to improve stability and security, which resulted in monthly updates we have now.

However, quality has backslid a lot, in favour of Microsoft continued insistence to force feed unnecessary and questionable features into the OS. And remember that they typically maintain six (!) versions (maybe fewer now) of the same OS (Home, Pro, Enterprise, Server). MacOS maintains just one version. (I've intentionally skip open source OSes.) As a programmer, you want to maintain the fewest versions possible, because it multiplies the workload and more issues have a chance to slip testing.

Unix has a philosophy "do one thing well" - Microsoft would benefit to adopt such a philosophy. (Ignore AI, its a disaster in wait.)

[mark l 2]

Re: Microsoft quality has always been questionable since Win95

Other than a few features present or missing there is no underlying difference between home, pro and enterprise. After all they are all installed off the one ISO just depending on what product key you put in is the version you get.

Im not sure if it will still work as it was a while ago i tried it but there was a program you could download which would 'convert' an home install into a professional by changing the relevant registry entries and system files, then allowing you to add it to a domain. Ofc this wasn't something the Windows activation servers would like so you would then need a pro product key for it to activate..

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Microsoft quality has always been questionable since Win95

On NT4, there was a registry entry to move from Workstation to Server edition.

And if you edited it, you got a popup stating you were naughty...

[Nematode]

Re: Microsoft quality has always been questionable since Win95

I don't recall 3.1 being any good, either. And as for MS-DOS as opposed to the Dos's they gobbled up to take them off the market.... Even CP/M was better!

[Anonymous Coward]

"legendary approach to quality control"

How about "ongoing commitment to entropic decay" ? ( or, to showing entropy at work )

[Bebu sa Ware]

"calls into question the company's competence."

I think it is fair to say that question has been definitively answered.

[Anonymous Coward]

Leg end

Microsoft's legegendary approach to quality control. [now includes..]*

*This update to the statement has been rolled back to undo a breaking change.

[gnwiii]

Enshittification

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It — By Cory Doctorow

[Dwarf]

Reliance

How did we get to a point where lots of people think its OK to just build and ship, without all the intermediate testing steps.

Then, when not one, not two, but many updates have been bad, showing this was an awful idea, the practice still remains.

The problem seems to be that there is no financial consequence to Microsoft (and other vendors doing the same) for poor software updates that adversely affect many businesses.

Have we really learned nothing in the last couple of decades.

[Like a badger]

Re: Reliance

The problem seems to be that there is no financial consequence to Microsoft (and other vendors doing the same) for poor software updates that adversely affect many businesses....Have we really learned nothing in the last couple of decades.

I think that first sentence answers the second, don't you? Vendors have learned that QA is a cost to them, and if they do away with it then the cost goes away, but they take in as much money as before.

[Dwarf]

Re: Reliance

Well, it made sense in my head when I wrote it, but following your feedback, I agree, so have an upvote.

The big question is how to make it hurt the suppliers bottom line, so that they change their approach.

[nijam]

> It's difficult to pinpoint precisely where it went wrong for Microsoft when it comes to quality.

As someone who was working with other classes of computer when MS-DOS "came out", my experience since suggests the answer is "Whan Microsoft were founded."

[steelpillow]

The Legendary Legend

The NT Legend was never more than propaganda puff - BSOD FFS! Better than WFW or Win95, but that was about it. Amigas, Ataris, Apples, even my Acorn RISC PC, were more stable. But if you wanted rock-solid servers, you went UNIX. End of. Yes, rigorous regression testing got impossible, but the shift from waterfall to agile just opened the door to move-fast-and-enshittify-things, and regressions are nowadays resolved by pushing out the next level of gobshite, preferably forcing your lusers to upgrade their hardware at the same time. NT outlasted Win2000 only because the enshittification was already setting in. Meanwhile, a handful of Unices - notably Solaris for a while, followed by Linux and the odd BSD, went on from strength to strength (though not always commercially).

Legendary quality control, my arse!

[ChoHag]

Re: The Legendary Legend

It's not just legendary, it's mythical!

[Nate Amsden]

Re: The Legendary Legend

Lack of stability in NT is what drove me to Linux in 1998. I was using DOS/Win3, then as I was in the pirate scene at the time I used many betas/etc of Win95, and not long after the release of 95 I got sick of it and switched to NT 3.51 Server (friend worked at MS and sent me a real install CD for it). Then NT4 came out and I moved to that(I had pretty good hardware at the time, I recall I was an "official" beta tester for NT4 and they sent me a set of CDs with the betas at one point), memory is hazy how much I liked (or not) NT 3.51, but NT4 wasn't great for long and I was already dual booting Linux and Windows, then decided to just dump windows entirely. Ironically(?) earlier this year I decided to formalize some of my older hardware as retro gaming type things, setting up fresh SSDs on two older laptops with XP/Win7/Win10, and setting my Ryzen system which till then was only used for video encoding, as a dual boot Linux/Win11 box to run games in Win11.

In an era where games on Linux is maturing quite well, I took the opposite approach. I was playing Unreal Tournament and other Loki games 25 years ago on Linux(and other games with Cedega years later), but now I don't bother with games on Linux computers. Main reason I don't want to risk stability on my main system which goes months between reboots. Second is I have the other hardware already so I can just set it up the way I want(and finally a decent desk setup with lots of monitors with switches for HDMI and audio). There isn't really any personal data on any of them so MS can spy all they want for systems they support still I don't care. I even bought fresh copies of Win10 Pro one laptop, and Win11 pro for my Ryzen direct from MS, the first MS operating systems I have paid money for(as stand alone products) since Win95(obviously got copies of other MS OSs through computer purchases etc).

[ovation1357]

Re: The Legendary Legend

Exactly!

I was going to comment on the author's use of "robustness" when referring to NT.

I think that statement needs qualifying with the word "relative" because it was more robust when compared to previous versions of windows, but compared to most about anything else it was still an unstable crock of excrement.

A good friend of mine was working for an insurance company around the time of NT and the execs wanted to migrate the whole business from a mainframe to a cluster of NT servers. Needless to say it never happened - partly due to complex migration issues from a bespoke solution to an off-the-shelf product but NT's uptime was nothing short of pathetic when compared to the mainframe, which was also a significant factor.

[herman]

Abort, Retry or Fail

Life is too short to waste on Windows maintenance.

[Homo.Sapien.Floridanus]

John: … and I saw the angel blow its trumpet, signifying the end of life quality on Earth.

Apostle: Will that be the ‘second coming’?

John: No, it will be second Tuesday.

[SnailFerrous]

With apologies to Nike

Just Ship It.

[Like a badger]

Re: With apologies to Nike

How about "Just excrete it" ?

Although isn't that the Agile motto?

[Sam Adams the Dog]

It's still legendary.

It's just that the legend has changed. It used to be "Microsoft can do no wrong." Now it's "Microsoft can do no right." Neither was completely true in its day.

[xyz123]

From an internal microsoft (quite high up) employee.

He told me MS has been 'playing the long game' with Windows 11 where they try to look completely incompentent so when they inevitably get sued because they''re using Recall to blackmail some president or politician, they can say it was their own mistakes and stupidity not a malicious attempt to literally subvert democracy in the US.

I'm serious about this. It's the same trick Bush Jr pulled and people went "oh he's a buffoon...it must have been his advisors that were the real evil ones behind the scenes" and Bush got away with an absolute crapton of direct orders to commit crimes against humanity (extra judicial mass executions etc)

[Nate Amsden]

As it's been shown/exploited countless times over the past couple of decades, it's easier to ask for forgiveness then ask for permission.

[Doctor Syntax]

It's easier to not ask forgiveness because it's already too late. and hence irrelevant

[steelpillow]

"Sell the solution to today's problem, but be sure to build in tomorrow's problem" has been their mantra at least since the days of Ballmer.

Looking forward to the day when the problem is, "How do we do it without Microsoft product?" For Schleswig-Holstein, that day has already arrived.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

*LOLOLOLOL* Microsoft "quality control" has been a joke in the industry since day one! Their first C compiler for the Amiga didn't even handle pointers properly! THAT kind of nonsense has always been their "reputation."

[bobd64]

“legendary approach to quality control”

With the quality control for which Microsoft is well known...

[Anonymous Coward]

Very difficult to clone Windows

"I doubt they will be able to clone Windows. It is very difficult to do technically, we have made it a moving target and we have some visual copyright and patent protection." link

[DJV]

"it calls into question the company's competence"

I think you'll find that they've managed to expunge every drip of competence* that they ever possessed.

* Which was decidedly minuscule in the first place.

[claude j greengrass]

...and how many decades did it take you to realizes this?

[Boris the Cockroach]

You want

to sum up m$ and their windows OS.

Boot up this win10 PC, get a full screen ad for win 11, click on "no I dont f'ing want it", get another full screen dialog "Are you sure?" "Yes I f'ing am" button and the PC instantly blue screens.

Followed by the reboot

And the self same ad asking me if I want win11........

And its because m$ is effectively a monopoly*, theres no incentive for quality control, theres no incentive for listening to the users, theres no incentive for ease of use, or security or anything else, because us victims cannot make the change to get away for windows. so m$ introduce stuff like one drive, recall, online accounts etc etc etc to tie users even more tightly to m$ and then m$ will use "You must subscribe to get your data" just after you've uploaded 200gigs of irreplacable photos/movies to their 'cloud' (after they configure one drive to delete all local content...) because all they want is to get our money and as much of it as they can possibly extract.

Its rather sad really , imagine 2 other operating system creators along with m$ ,each with 33% of market... and m$ runs the sort of crap listed above.... there'd be 2 OS creators with 50% of the market each and m$ would be bust.

*yeah I know theres linux..... in fact my on-line shopping/e.mail/anything secure PC runs linux mint

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: You want

"because us victims cannot make the change to get away for windows"

Mostly you could. But because Microsoft are skilled at frog-boiling you won't.

How bad are you going to let it get?

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Core stuff falling apart.

Since Server 2022 I can still reliably reproduce a deduplication-hyper-v-volume bug in Server 2025 too. Now, that my main machine switched to Server 2025, I can reliably reproduce this on real hardware too, without nested-V. Whatever the component is, which could be the MS-AHCI driver, some new ntfs race condition or whatever, unfixed since I reported. They even added "nested V not supported" only 'cause of me - and now i reproduce it without nested. Thank you whoever inside MS killed any action on that bug with a classical stop argument. Nest will be "SATA and NVME not supported", "on top to storage space stripeset not supported" - but they can't kick all variants, since quite an amount of clusters and server do run it reliably, though on a cluster shared volume (according to information, I never dared to activate it there, especially with that bug).

Server 2019 does NOT have that dedup bug, so it is indeed new.

PosershellPowershell ISE: Get-Chilitem -Literalpath "\\?\C:\" is broken since Server 2022/Win11 21h2. Works in a real (PS 5.1) shell. Makes development work for admins more difficult, since we are VERY often not allowed to install other stuff on servers.

Another bug, broken shadowcopy access using explorer or other tools, in Windows 11 22h2 and 23h2 needed over two years to fix. And only due to an "by accident seen" from an MS contact who made it a bug report and pushed.

Dave says "the core is still great", but that is, IMHO falling apart too.

[Blackjack]

[How would you describe the quality of Microsoft's wares these days, and the amount of testing that has been done before the company's latest emission?]

infamous /ĭn′fə-məs/

adjective

*Having an exceedingly bad reputation; notorious.

"an infamous outlaw."

*Causing or deserving severe public condemnation; heinous.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

PS: Let alone the MS AI-translated articles

Ever since MS started AI-translating support articles the translations got worse. Record holder:

Translating a registry key, which is clearly marked as "this is a registry key and not normal text":

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

->

HKEY_LOKALE_MASCHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fenster\Aktuelle Version

Similar crap on powershell or certutil commands etc. They fix it when you use the feedback, takes a few weeks and a few times of back and forth. There was a relative short time when the translations were OK, but somewhere 2017 it started to degrade again, so i always "en-us" the URLs of articles, don't even try to read the German "translation".

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: PS: Let alone the MS AI-translated articles

Or syntax colors not working any more in Teams for powershell code, since it is now detected and tagged as "power"

[STOP_FORTH]

Easy to pinpoint

They should never have killed off Bob, Rover and Clippy.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Mcrosoft: where Agile is Agilest

Break things so fast and so often that you can't move fast enough to catch with the issues.

[Will Godfrey]

Microsoft's Legendary Recursion

It just keeps going round and round - they forgot to put in a terminating condition.

[jcday]

I would describe.

Microsoft's quality control as legendary. I mean, it fits all the criteria - it doesn't actually exist, it's set in the ancient past, there are only stories about it, and the stories exaggerate whatever good points there were.

In short, it's pretty much on-par with dragons, King Arthur, Atlantis, and the labyrinth of the minotaur.

Let's be fair, guys - that's about as legendary as you can get.

Ohhhh, you mean as in "good"! NT might have held that claim for a while, but DOS was terrible (and several versions were pulled for copyright violations), and regular user Windows has never actually been that good or that stable. It dominates only because it violated antitrust laws (a verdict reached in the courts on multiple occasions).

Windows has never achieved success, beyond NT, by actually working well.

That is all anyone has to know.

[DrewPH]

Re: I would describe.

NT was never good. It was just marginally less terrible than other Microsoft things and is now regarded with rose-tinted memories for some reason. Some variation of Stockholm Syndrome perhaps?

[steelpillow]

Re: I would describe.

BSOD Blindness Syndrome?

[DS999]

Windows 11 was bound to suck

Because it was the "every other" release. i.e. it goes back further but in the past 20 years Windows Vista sucked, then Windows 7 was OK. Windows 8 sucked, Windows 10 was OK. So Windows 11 had to suck, and Windows 12 should be OK.

[sansva]

Migrate Windows to Linux

Windows should migrate to Linux. Make the Windows Desktop Environment an option but not necessary so users can choose their own desktop environment. Adapt cmdlets and functions to work with Linux, but focus on Systemd and Bash.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Migrate Windows to Linux

microsoft isn't going to break semi-compatibility with old windows software by replacing the NT kernel with Linux - as the result would be an OS that has worse software comparability than WINE on LiGNUx.

systemd and Bash are GNU, not Linux and microsoft already offered access to Bash with GNU/kWindows ("WSL1") and systemd and bash on GNU/Linux VMs ("WSL2").

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: Migrate Windows to Linux

It'd be easier than you think. There is no such thing as a "native" Windows app, ever since the first release of NT you have been on top of one subsystem or another, historically DOS, OS/2, and Win16, now mainly Win32 and Win64.

The kernel system call layer has never been publicly documented, only the subsystem APIs, but it is believed to be more in keeping with the Unix model of a few hundred syscalls as opposed to the tens of thousands of Windows API calls.

It wouldn't be impossible to code a translation layer between those system call schemes (a la lxrun for non-Linux Unices) or indeed recode those subsystems to use native Linux calls.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Migrate Windows to Linux

Windows keeps a lot of cruft and bugs around, even from DOS, as if any of those cruft or bugs are cleaned up, windows software stops working.

Things like scrollbars are implemented in kernel and if any change is made to how scrollbars are implemented, scrollbars are going to stop working in some programs.

>translation layer between those system call schemes

microsoft has already implemented a translation layer between Linux SYSCALLs and windows API calls ("WSL1") and going the other way around would only take a bunch of work.

But if that is done, software that depends on bugs and race conditions in the NT kernel will stop working.

>a few hundred syscalls as opposed to the tens of thousands of Windows API calls.

There are at least 1000 library calls available between glibc and the rest of the libraries that work with GNU - although there is only 336 Linux SYSCALLs at the moment.

>non-Linux Unices

The kernel, Linux uses no Unix code and is not Unix certified and GNU's Not Unix.

[Apprentice Human]

Micro$loth bad in 1990 worse in 2025

Quality control? The myth from Redmond.

When I came across unix in '89 I realized how bad M$ was.

I keep up that unholy OS it as my wife likes her games.

1. M$ is the cutting edge of OSs of the 1960's.

2. Unix/linux is the cutting of OSs of the 1970's.

3. Err, can we do better?

[Eric 9001]

What robustness of Windows NT?

After experiencing windows 95 and earlier, I guess "no longer crashing every day" would seem to be very robust, but windows has never been the slightest bit robust or reliable.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: What robustness of Windows NT?

That depend(ed) on the version and how you use it. I saw enough Windows servers with uptimes > 800 or > 1200 days, they just worked, noone noticed. They were all Server 2008 and 2012 (R2) since "Session isolation" and a few other memory tampering protection things came with that version. Since "Monthy patchday" was taken more serious I never saw such uptimes with 2016 to 2022 - well, occasionally I do during my audit of customers, but that is a different story. NT 4.0 and Server 2003 boxes with over a year were seen more often too, as long as there is no IIS or other known "quality" service running. I know others, though not personally seen, who had the other NT Server variants I skipped up for even longer, and some rare cases even Win9x boxes doing a "normally server" Job running for years.

It is a fickle combination though, there is a reason why I exclude workstation windows. Not because of the version, but because of the applications running there, quite often lower driver quality, some games insisting on bad written copy protection or anti-cheat crap. Often updates less well tested by MS that on Server (Oh wait, it WAS that way, now no difference). And win9x had no memory protection at all.

[retiredFool]

Lead a charmed life I guess

Never really used windows. Mainframes, then sun's(unix), then x86(Linux) in early noughts. None of these crashed often, up times were always in months/years. As I write this on my laptop, a relatively young 86 day uptime. Don't even remember why I power cycled it. I recall if my sun box did crash or later Linux I'd just sort of be taken aback. Normally the only reboots were if I wanted it to, or if the power failed. And I recall many a place & route after 2-3 days of running when a thunderstorm would knock out the power and I'd be irritated about the lost work. So the only times I can relate are when friends ask for help. I always let them know I am not a windows guy so may be useless.

Which brings us to a couple days ago. A neighbor who is just completely computer illiterate wanted to send some photos taken on her phone to ebay via their chat as the object was crushed in the flimsy box it was sent in. I figured how hard can this be. So after showing her how to plug the USB-C cable into the computer, we began. Her desktop did not have a C port, so we used a laptop she had. After plugging in the Iphone asked for auth which she granted. Then we spent about 10 minutes trying with really no success to move the files to the machine. So then we resorted to the easiest method I know, we emailed them to her via her phone, and then saved them to a file, and then uploaded them. Even here, it seemed things just were not obvious. I had to click each one individually. I tried what I thought was a reasonable way to select multiple's but nothing worked. Which is weird, as we had no problems figuring out how to select multiple photos on the phone and send them in a single email. Since there were only 6 photos to extract/upload, one at a time on the computer was faster for me. Every time I help someone use windows for anything I just think thank god I don't use this myself.

[mevets]

"At one point,..."

What, exactly, is meant by one point? I can only imagine the traditional maths definition of infinitely small; as opposed to some belief in a historical period ( Make MS Great Again ?) where this was true.

I am not sure who, but certainly someone great, first defined nostalgia as a longing for a past that never occurred.

[IanRS]

A step up

Microsoft's quality control is no longer merely legendary, it's mythical!

[[e-mail]]

The Windows Business Model is Obsolete

The Windows business model was based on the assumption that:

1) People would buy a "lifetime ownership"

2) The lifetime of the ownership was usually limited as a practical matter by the fact that people wanted to upgrade their hardware over couple of years

People, especially business users, are finding that the value of the hardware upgrade is limited these day. The old hardware works just as well as the new hardware. A significant percentage of business software is web based anyway. Most users can get along just find with something as simple as a Chromebook This has led to people using Windows 10 for a decade and expecting support for that entire time. Microsoft clearly didn't think of that. These days, there best product is the Azure cloud where it is easy to run a Linux workload.

So the cost of support for Windows has remained relatively constant but the direct revenue. They could have gone with a straightforward pay for support idea, but "increasing shareholder value" means making stock prices go up. It is hard to convince investors that a support business with worth bidding up a stock price.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our most recent CTO is an admirer of Microsoft (I think he worked there at one point). His latest brilliant innovation: The company had too many staff classified as QA relative to staff classified as developers (according to some metric in his head) so fire a bunch from QA to keep the numbers right. Without doing any serious analysis of what they did or whether they were, in fact, needed in their particular posts. That's real enterprise-level policy right there. Or perhaps Russian roulette. Some days, it can be difficult to tell.

[timrichardson]

I wonder if spinning off windows would help. While it's been downgraded internally in terms of management responsibility, it must be a huge distraction in terms of reputation, risk and quality, and it's not very strategically interesting.

They could let Windows keep the software for Micro computers branding and embrace the ambition of Azure.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Paid troll? "Embrace the ambition" sounds very much like a MS-detached-from-reality-marketing branding, like "embrace the ambition of Longhorn", currently longhorn 2.0 seems to be planned.

On top: MS has "embraced the ambition of Azure" for over a decade now, and see how stable it got... Ambition alone is never enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another Agile victim.

"Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in."

And that, friends, says it all. Micro$oft's not the first company to go all-in on Agile and watch quality fall off a cliff (anyone ever hear of Dell? Same story). The problem is that Agile's great for manufacturing -- which is what it was intended to support -- but terrible for software. You just can't shift to the management-defined-problem-of-the-day and expect to produce quality software (at least, not with any degree of efficiency). But when the C-Suite bought into the consultants' crap about Agile and forced engineers to work in that bizarre manner, the results were predictable.

[Alex 72]

Microsofts:

Impressive appetite for risky updates.

[Sonic The Screwdriver]

Atlantean approach to quality control.

Once it was a proud island in a sea of chaos.

But it's firmly underwater now.

[Joe1962]

Well, there's always the easy antonym of "legendary", as in "infamous approach to quality control".

[dbellamy59]

En$hitification

Not certain about GB, but in North America the wholesale slide of the web including the shredding of Windows 11 is referenced as "enshitification". It's become a popular term in the past year. Note: credit to Ars Technics who reference the term and author (trying to type authour*) where I came across this. Also yes to the wildly out of control translation/spelling issues or just proper use of grammar. Has anyone looked at SCVMM recently? It's hilarious. It reminds one of the old cartoon showing Windows Development productivity vs consumption of Scotch by MS developers.

[Cliff Clavin]

It's a little-known fact

Microsoft is again leading the world, being first to philosophically assure quantum quality with its back-end allusive tautology stochastic Heisenberg integration testing tombola.

[BlueLeaf]

The new name is

"QC Windows" (QC = Quality Challenged)

[Shropshire Lad]

Job Creation Programme

Dunno what everyone's carping about. The unmitigated pile of steaming* guano that comprises the MS portfolio has kept me gainfully employed for nearly thirty years, if only as an unwilling sh1t shoveler.

The horror that is MS came to me full force when I moved from a UNIX/Linux shop to a full on MS enterprise. From one or two out of hours call a month, it went to several every night. I probably suffered PTSD because of it. I still jump out of my skin even now when I hear anything that sounds like the default BlackBerry ring tone.

Anyway, I retire at the end of this year, and then it'll be SEP**.

* it probably doesn't, but for dramatic effect

** somebody else's problem

[DownUndaRob]

Antipodean Beta Testers

Always seems to be Oceania that gets the changes first up, by the time the UK us waking up they are reported.

Australia - MS Beta Testers for the world.

[TonySomerset]

Hated but Inescapable

So much about MS is totally wrong. I do not need a nursemaid. I do not need that phantom hand constasntlyt changing things behind my back or stuff my machine with completely unwanted gizzmoes. But it is very had to turn off MS after decades of building dependent software that I need and want to use daily to survive. Elsewhere it would be ranked as blackmail or extortion, in the IT world as it is just shrugged off as "normal".

.

[Capt.Obvious]

I'm sure it pretty much all started going downhill once they outsourced everything to India. This is what has happened to pretty much every single company who did the same thing.

[James Dore]

How would I describe Microsoft's QA?

"Aggressive incomptence"

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace "Microsoft's Legendary Quality Control" with:

We put it AI and it said it was OK. So what's your problem with that ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It delivers.....

Shareholder Value

Remember that the main function of any MS product is to generate profit. Any use to the customer is second to that.

And ideally the product will be bought by the customer for profit, and then exploit that customer for more profit.

If it breaks, well, who cares? Not MS (or Google or Amazon or any other hyperscaler), you'll be back for another bite of that big shit sandwich come renewal. You've done it for 30yr you're not stopping now.

[David Hicklin]

Agile

> Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.

And that says it all, that even M$ read "Agile" and " great, no more testing needed" and here we are.

Ignoring that each monthly release is a Waterfall event.

[Dronius]

Microslop delivering:

QA : Questionable Assurance

in a QC : Quibble Chocked, environment,

with an Agile devilry shitstem , in order to deliver shatisfaction to their end loosers.

Maximising productivity for stuport contractors while increasing cohesion among employees as they unify around their common level of customer satisfaction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interns

The Windows (Desktop Platforms) Division is currently manned by $6 an hour Indians and interns that don't know what they're doing and holding on for dear life.

But Microsoft is a large conglomerate with wildly different cultures and development strategies. I was, for example, impressed with the source code of Calculator, which had a myriad of unit-tests. This is the way to make quality software IMHO. And it shows. There are few reported incidents with Calculator.

Most people claim that Windows is an unimportant profit center that can be milked to the fullest. I disagree. Microsoft's dominance is ultimately founded on Windows. If Windows falters, Microsoft stumbles and crashes.

If Linux Mint starts taking considerable market share on the desktop we'll see Redmond once again focusing its efforts on Windows, hopefully for the better. There's nothing that motivates more than imminent death.

[anthonyhegedus]

They've heard of it

Microsoft are diverting all of their resources to profit-making. If they have a choice of hiring more QC staff, spending more time on testing etc. or changing the way the start menu works for the 999th time this season, we know which one they're going to go for

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They've heard of it

Features are cheaper than quality and sadly often sell, "never mind the quality feel the width".

El Reg has an unusually large concentration of people who are looking in from the outside scratching their heads at why things are such a mess.

Most people pretty dumb and are on the inside looking out whilst scraching their asses wondering the easiest way to finance the next car/phone/AI TV they don't need and confused as to who is stopping them making a million on Tik Tok (since it can't be their fault).

[N Tropez]

Re: They've heard of it

The problem with American style capitalism is, if you are a public company, you are responsible to your shareholders - who can be very powerful - and therefore, maximising profit. If you are a private company, your prosperity depends on your workforce and your customers. QED.

[I think I think, therefore I think am?]

Fond memories

"I remember Microsoft. Didn't they has an OS long ago?

[PeterM42]

It's difficult to pinpoint precisely where it went wrong for Microsoft when it comes to quality.

It's EASY to pinpoint precisely where it went wrong for Microsoft when it comes to quality. - There! FTFY

Bill Gates stepped down from his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008, leaving his position as chairman in 2014 and resigning from the board entirely in 2020.

[Dante Alighieri]

The Lotus Paradigm, 2025

Windows ain't done 'til Office won't run!

[Fignuts]

A certain meme describes it best

Simply do a google image search for "when your code has over 200 warnings but no errors" (yes, with the quotes) and look for Jeremy Clarkson. That sums Microsoft up about as well as any meme I've seen.