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Comment by projektfu | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could understand why product managers come up with these ideas and developers implement them. Every release, Microsoft improves Windows in one way (like WSL) and then adds two reasons why it should be uninstalled completely. I use OneDrive on certain computers in my business. In others, it's inappropriate. On all my business computers, Xbox, Candy Crush, MSN etc. are inappropriate. And Edge was great for a while until it became the preferred route to feed me clickbait and more annoying pop-up ads. Why chase your users away?

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> I wish I could understand why product managers come up with these ideas and developers implement them.

To become Senior Product Managers. You can't advance your career without putting your mark on the product.

Isn't that supposed to be a positive mark?

"Yeah, he ruined the product, let's promote him to Senior Product Manager" is not a thing that people say very often.

I get it, there's usually another metric that's at fault. Increasing Edge browser use by underhanded techniques on every install is easier than convincing users to install it. Boosting MSN hits by having a hundred million computers constantly downloading content is easier than making content people share. But the net result is going to be more of us opting out. It's a real Yahoo approach.

The sad thing is, aside from the feature bloat, Edge is actually very good in terms of performance. And it has genuinely useful features like vertical tabs, workspaces, etc.

Agree. I put up with it on Windows in spite of its flaws for that reason. It's frustrating that many of the little "features" you have to disable are not considered part of your profile so you log into a different computer and you have Bing again. At least they made the new tab settings sticky.

The next guy that reverts the feature gets the promotion. And so the wheel turns.

But this person gets to give a presentation to leadership about the reasons users disable OneDrive and propose am ambitious plan to improve it. Users filling up their OneDrive means more money while probably not only a tiny minority will move away from Windows because of stuff like this. The cost of moving to a new OS you aren't used to is huge for most users.

It's not "he ruined the product", it's "he shipped what leadership wanted". And yes, it gets rewarded all the time. Besides, 'good' is a matter of perspective... if this reduced app closes by even 1% there are lots of people who see that as successful.

> Isn't that supposed to be a positive mark?

As long as it is positive to the person who writes your cheques, does it matter?

Six to twelve months after you've left, that 'feature' is unceremoniously killed, like so many of these little features in Windows has over the years, such as Active Desktop -- who didn't want a <blink><marquee> webpage embedded as their desktop?

> As long as it is positive to the person who writes your cheques, does it matter?

I guess that depends on whether or not you value taking pride in your work.

If you can afford to make that call, more power to you. Most people can't -- most are told what to do.

My integrity in regards to my job goes as far as not doing things that are illegal or straight up immoral, but other than that'll do pretty much whatever my boss wants me to. Something that's annoying but relatively harmless like this I wouldn't even bat an eye at. It's a pretty rough job market out there at the moment and I'm not looking to make any waves or get on anybody's radar by being difficult.

Fair enough, but this was going on during the good times, too.

Well to be fair the last sentence is also applicable to my philosophy regarding my job even during the good times :-^)

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