Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

There is no excuse for death or violence threats, but I can understand that people get crazy because sometimes decades of muscle memory (e.g. the vanished start menu, the ribbon stuff in Office/the rest of Windows) get lost or scripts that have not been touched in years have to be updated because of backwards compatibility break.

Software vendors in general really need to invest in BC testing - and run early, public beta tests where real users' feedback is heard. Because big companies ignoring their users frustrate people and it takes only a small company's mess up to tip the iceberg...

edit: It might also be an idea if you have a millions-usages-product and you feel the need to redesign or break BC, you should explain to your (paying!) customers why you negatively affect their lives. Or make the change revertable (an option in a config menu, or just a config.ini entry), so that new users (which you A/B tested your new idea on!!!) get the new behavior, and old users with muscle memory training can continue to use the old way.

This is my favourite rant on the topic of software upgrades:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/04/volatile-software/

Boy, how I dislike upgrading Django. Look at all this breakage (and this is only the intentional, documented changes, and only across one release):

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/releases/1.9/#backward...

I appreciate much more policies like these:

    Suggestions to change the default output of these
    commands will not be treated with patience.

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/CompatibilityRules#Introd...

> This is my favourite rant on the topic of software upgrades:

> > and dammit the documentation on the project’s website is autogenerated from the tip of its git repo and so it doesn’t apply to the latest actual version

Oh yes. Hell yes. And no way to refer to old docs (suuuper cool if you inherit a project which was dormant for a year and you have to add features)

> the vanished start menu

Frankly what the H... where they thinking? It made absolutely no sense at all. I still don't understand who and why it was approved. Nobody I know, likes this whole metro/modern UI thing on desktop, NONE. X years later I'll still be complaining about this fiasco, windows 10 or not, it wasted the time and the energy of so many people I can't believe it.

Death threats are obviously unacceptable but I hope someday someone write a blog post or a book about that single stuff and the process that led to that insane mistake. Was it Balmer? Synofsky? someone else? I don't know but for god sake, people work on Windows like 9 hours a day, you can't change stuff just because it looks cool on a tablet...

Pet theory: someone at MS saw Apple taking a 30% cut of app store sales. Hmm, people seem to tolerate gatekeepers on mobile/tablet more than on desktop. So the obvious answer is to get into that business. But the competition has already got trained users. No worries, just make the next version of Windows work like MS tablets and phones. People take whatever they're told is the upgrade, so shortly after the upgrade there'll be a market of people ready to buy Windows tablets and phones, with MS getting a cut of sales.

A while later, it didn't work out that way and 8.1 came out.

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