microsoft BBC article.

[ik9000]

Anyone see this on the BBC re M$oft? Choice quote:

"In 2014, we cancelled our company meeting where our leaders would tell employees what was important, in favour of having a hackathon that lets our employees tell our leaders what's important," recalls Jeff Ramos.

So about the time it all started getting truly awful then.

"We don't want to be the cool company in the tech sector," Mr Nadella has previously said.

"We want to be the company that makes other people cool."

ROFL

How about going back to being reliable, trustworthy and robustly testing everything to make sure it actually works? That would be nice.

[DanceswithUnix]

How about going back to being reliable, trustworthy and robustly testing everything to make sure it actually works? That would be nice.

When the heck did they ever do that?

[ik9000]

When the heck did they ever do that?

I seem to remember the early days of win7 being able to set to auto update "urgent/important only" and it worked just fine. Ditto office updates of that era. IMO everything went to pot from circa 2010/2011 onwards. Win7 and office2010 were the last solid MS products IMO.

[spacein_vader]

I seem to remember the early days of win7 being able to set to auto update "urgent/important only" and it worked just fine. Ditto office updates of that era. IMO everything went to pot from circa 2010/2011 onwards. Win7 and office2010 were the last solid MS products IMO.

I disagree, Visual Studio is very good and Azure is the only credible alternative to AWS for a lot of cloud compute work. Powershell and Windows Subsystem for Linux are also pretty powerful and stable tools.

What I would say is that their consumer software has been... variable in quality.

[Millennium]

I seem to remember the early days of win7 being able to set to auto update "urgent/important only" and it worked just fine. Ditto office updates of that era. IMO everything went to pot from circa 2010/2011 onwards. Win7 and office2010 were the last solid MS products IMO.

errr yes....

[scaryjim]

I seem to remember the early days of win7 being able to set to auto update "urgent/important only" and it worked just fine. ...

Windows 7 was great compared to Vista and XP. But that's a pretty low bar. There were plenty of Windows 7 updates that broke stuff. And letting MS decide what's "urgent and important" isn't really that reliable a method of screening updates. Not to mention that Win 7 was - indeed still is - just as bad as Windows 10 at randomly interrupting you to tell you it's about to restart for an update unless you stop it.

And let's not forget that when MS asked users what they actually wanted, what we ended up with was Office 2007...

[ik9000]

Windows 7 was great compared to Vista and XP. But that's a pretty low bar. There were plenty of Windows 7 updates that broke stuff. And letting MS decide what's "urgent and important" isn't really that reliable a method of screening updates. Not to mention that Win 7 was - indeed still is - just as bad as Windows 10 at randomly interrupting you to tell you it's about to restart for an update unless you stop it.

And let's not forget that when MS asked users what they actually wanted, what we ended up with was Office 2007...

never had issues with win7 forcing me to update, just hit postpone. Unlike win10 where it kicks you out regardless. The days of letting ms decide on updates ended when they started pushing winX notices/adware through the updates channel. Didn't really have too many issues before then. But then I did do annual rebuilds so I guess that probably helped a bit. But for my needs, I found it just fine. Unlike win10 where every forced OS upgrade seems to break yet another thing that was working perfectly fine before. EG my wireless, where for 6 months now 5GHz is crippled, and only 2.4GHz gives proper speed. All since win10 upgraded itself to give me new features I neither requested nor wanted.

[Saracen999]

Windows 7 was great compared to Vista and XP. But that's a pretty low bar. There were plenty of Windows 7 updates that broke stuff. And letting MS decide what's "urgent and important" isn't really that reliable a method of screening updates. Not to mention that Win 7 was - indeed still is - just as bad as Windows 10 at randomly interrupting you to tell you it's about to restart for an update unless you stop it.

.....

Which is why I decjded to take responsibility for doing updates when I wsbred them, abd had/have updates set to manual only.

Then, I can decide when it is convenient, which for instance, is not an hour or two before a submission deadline. So I keep s careful eye on urgents, and securjty issues, wait until major updates have broken other people's systems and been sorted out, and even then, test on a duplicate system for issues before risking a live machine.

Which is why (in part) MS can stick Win10.

[Spud1]

It's interesting to hear different perspectives on this.

From my perspective Microsoft have been going from strength to strength in recent years. Windows 10 has been the most stable copy of Window's I have used for years, they are doing great things with .NET, Visual Studio and TFS at the moment, have finally abandoned that godawful Windows Phone platform *and admitted they were wrong*, office 365 has been another huge success too with nigh on monthly feature updates coming out of redmond..gaming wise they may not be leading the market, but they are making great decisions like fully supporting (and encouraging) cross platform play etc. Should probably mention Azure in that list too as despite all their issues, it's a great platform particularly for small/lone developers.

I could go on - but from my perspective Microsoft were on the way down in the early 2010s, feeling the pressure from companies like Apple and Google who were innovating at the time and MS were constantly behind the curve.

Credit to Nadella and his team for turning the company around. They are currently releasing their best, most stable software than they have done for years.

[Butcher]

I disagree, Visual Studio is very good and Azure is the only credible alternative to AWS for a lot of cloud compute work. Powershell and Windows Subsystem for Linux are also pretty powerful and stable tools.

What I would say is that their consumer software has been... variable in quality.

Much as I like Visual Studio it's a flakey heap of junk a lot of the time. Not something I'd hold up as the pinnacle of stability.