Comment by GuB-42
8 hours ago
The lack of QA isn't felt right away. They are accumulating tech debt, which mean problems are becoming more frequent and harder to solve over time until they fix the fundamentals, and it doesn't feel like they intend to.
1. "isn't felt right away" then what's the correct timescale? Is it 2 years? Is it 5 years? We are looking at 10 years now. Do you have any studies on this that you can quote to prove that at Microsoft scale and for the product they develop, 10 years is the time when things go bad?
2. "becoming more frequent and harder to solve" how much more frequent and harder? Things works pretty fine during Windows 10, but these days I run into a bug in Windows 11 every other day myself.
It would be a surprise if this has more to do with QA from 2014 than vibe coding.
Updates breaking stuff already started when they moved from the security/bugfix-only updates to the add-new-features-into-the-mix model with Windows 10. That was roughly 10 years ago.
For example: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-on-windows-10-annive...
These things have been keeping happening.
These are multipliers. First, the QA left, but nothing major happened for years, automated tests did suffice. Then, vibe code happened, that with the lack of QA, led to disaster.
I doubt "studies" exist and proving every little assumption takes too much effort as per Brandolini's law.
Windows 10 managed to mature in a way that 11 still hasn't over four years in, though.
Windows is like a fractal layer of progressive enhancements. You can drill into esoteric windows features and almost physically see the different decades windows has existed in, not unlike a physical tree (with leaves).
They won't fix the fundamentals, the next API layer will just be built over the broken one.
I'm waiting in morbid anticipation of the obvious next broken layer: They'll rename Windows to CopilotOS, and 90% of how you interact with the OS is through a LLM chat box. Of course, as is historically the case with Windows, there will be that 10% not brought into the new way, so you'll need to launch a traditional windows desktop+start menu to access that stuff. Just like 90% of the system today uses modern UI, but there's still that 10% using the legacy Windows look and feel, like the Run dialog and the Disk/Device manager.