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Comment by dejb | Hacker News Reader

The danger here is that they will lose touch with the 80% of their user base that uses windows. If they don't have enough people who intimately understand the computing experience of their users then their products could suffer.

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They will almost certainly still have some windows machines around, if only for testing against IE. Some Google employees almost certainly use Windows at home. I really don't think they're going to lose anything major in terms of familiarity.

I don't think it is the same to test something on a platform as developing it on that platform. Developers will instinctively look to take advantage of the strengths of their main platform and work around the weaknesses. With nobody in an entire team using a platform it will probably become an afterthought, left to a separate quality assurance team who are only in a position to correct obvious errors rather than produce excellence.

You mean intimately understanding feelings of frustration and annoyance?

ducks

Seriously though, I'm sure that the folks who are allowed to use Windows are exactly the ones who need it: Picasa and Chrome devs (and the other desktop apps they have).

True. A very strange decision. How to you develop products for the majority of people when you don't use their OS and can't relate to their 'pain'.

Exactly this happened at a company I worked for! The engineers were too snobbish to use Windows, sticking with their Solaris and Linux boxen instead. Result? Windows user experience sucked. Further result -- Windows workstations forced on the engineers. Further result -- "Hey, this thing really does suck on Windows!"

That's why virtual machines exists i would say.

they are not saying that they are getting rid of all windows machines full stop, they are saying that none of their employers can use windows machines as their dev machine / work machines. They don't want to expose any private data to the windows machines. They certainly will keep around some windows boxen for testing purposes.

Big difference between "I'm gonna mess around on this windows box for an hour or two a day to see what it's like to use" and "this is my machine and it runs windows"

i'm sure they would still run windows under virtualization with vmware fusion, etc. they would still would have to do very heavy testing of IE on their apps, so that would be the easiest way to do it. i don't think google can escape the suffering of writing for IE just yet

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