The Windows Shutdown crapfest

[giza]

The Windows Shutdown crapfest has been making the rounds, so I thought I'd link to it here.

It's a blog entry by a developer who worked at Microsoft, talking about the insane layers of politics he had to deal with, the gigantic meetings, and the fact that it took him a year to write a few hundred lines of code. He also discussed some of the technical challenges, like how long it would take code to be moved around the repository.

The blogger also admits that not all departments are like this, his may have been an exception to the rule.

Comments

[simbab.livejournal.com]

You hear stories like this about Microsoft from time to time...for me, it just tells me that Windows and Win32 really _are_ as scary as they seem.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

I do remember finding that menu irritating the time I tried Vista

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

What's really scary about this, is that the end result was a feature that had a menu hidden behind a little triangle...next to a nice button with the international symbol for "on/off" on it.

The action taken when pressing that button? Sleep.

Sleeping Vista in a VM in Parallels is equivalent to a freeze requiring a reboot. There's no hardware, and no ACPI, to wake the kernel back up. Oops.

Needless to say, if you Google for the problem, there are already pages showing the unlikely place that the setting that changes the button to do what the pictogram says. Which begs the question: If it's easier to find out how to fix the problem (that shouldn't be there) using the web, isn't there something wrong with the design of the OS?

[streakthetiger.livejournal.com]

Creepy. Heh, why get an imitation of Mac, when you can get the real thing? I`m fed up with Windows, i`m switching to at LEAST Linux, if not Mac when I get home.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that's everywhere in American business now. Anyplace with an MBA in charge has optimized for efficiency to the point that nothing gets done anymore.

Of course, in Engineering, we just wait until they all go home, work late and get things done when the system isn't watching. :)