ThrowawayB7

Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.

MS did a round of layoffs that was specifically targeting low performance last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan... and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again. I doubt that anyone there is unaware that hanging on isn't a realistic option if they're not delivering.

MS has had many rounds of layoffs already in the past 2-3 years. If there was anyone visibly checked out, they'd have been gone quite a while ago.

There are so many senior leaders that rose through the ranks at MS from India and the rest of Asia that the claim is simply laughable. They wouldn't tolerate being paid any less than American natives themselves nor would they tolerate their immigrant subordinates being paid less than natives.

Windows 10 was the most recent big push for memory reduction actually, back when MS still harbored ambitions in the smartphone space and wanted a single OS across smartphone, desktop, and server. The minimum RAM requirements for the 32-bit version of Windows 10 was 1GB.

Now we have smartwatches with 4GB of RAM (rolls eyes). WTF do they even do with all that memory?

The product is named Visual C++, that it happened to do C was always kind of a sideshow as far as I could tell. Aside from that, I seem to recall that VC++ had the WORD, DWORD, and eventually QWORD macros to specify unsigned 16, 32 and 64 bit types respectively.

The parent poster said "Linux gaming community". "Most commercial games work fine on Linux now" because a multi-billion dollar corporation, Valve, is paying to maintain Proton to protect their business model, not the Linux community.

> "These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem."

That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.

Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.

Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.

Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.

IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x. At the end of the day, it was all about the price.

(Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)

This is a serious answer: Microsoft dissolved its test discipline in 2014, early in Nadella's reign, in favor of developer-led testing and telemetry based bug detection. The results you can judge for yourself.

My first guess (and probably the first guess of many of the old school nerds) was that the MS Word codename is from Opus the penguin from Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strip and that seems to be correct.

High five for anyone who still remembers the brief Bill the Gates arc in the comic or the Banana Computer parody ad of Apple starring Gene Simmons (https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-banana-junior-6000-comp... , about halfway down the page).

Odd that they received a brain teaser at a MS interview in 2015. IIRC that's several years after internal interviewer training was updated to recommend that brain teasers not be used in interviews because they weren't useful.

Microsoft doesn't police IHVs -> Geeks: "MS is negligent!"

Microsoft does police IHVs -> Geeks: "MS is an evil monopolist!"

Well, it's at least interesting in the sense that the user doesn't have to dig up a copy of Windows NT to run the toolchain, which is what was required for the original Windows CE for Dreamcast SDK and Platform Builder. I seem to remember that it wasn't forward compatible with Windows 2000 or any later OS, which was an annoyance.

Windows CE for Dreamcast ran a custom port of DirectX 5 and subset of Win32 so developers could create a game that supported both desktop Windows and Dreamcast more conveniently.

For games that didn't need to be cross platform, it was still less of a hassle to develop on Windows CE because you got all of the services that having an OS provides you instead of having to write to the bare metal, which is what the Sega SDK required. Many developers chose the Sega SDK anyway because bare metal was what they were used to but IIRC that generation was the last console generation where bare metal was an option for developers.

Windows CE isn't in ROM, the binaries are loaded from GD-ROM disc for games that chose to use it. And booting it wouldn't do you much good anyway since there's no graphical or text shell. It's intended to launch straight into the game.

Lends some credence to the suspicion that Phil Spencer's retirement might not have been voluntary.

Not a tool per se but I miss Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book in its earliest editions. People forget how difficult it was to find well written programmer documentation in the pre-Internet and dialup-era Internet days. His book was a shining example of how good a programming book could be.

And what would you do with the Windows 2000 source? It's 32 bit x86 code and the driver model for Windows has changed significantly since those days so it wouldn't run on modern x86-64 hardware anyway. Maybe it would run in a VM but I wouldn't care to bet on it.

Parent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.

Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.

On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processes or to be doing much computation anyway.

Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.

"¿Por qué no los dos?" A lot of the issues that he has seems to be running on hardware that Linux doesn't currently support well. Used 1 liter PCs that are old enough to have solid support under Linux but still fast enough to do serious work are $200-400 and can be accessed remotely from Windows by VNC or RDP.

To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?

And the contemporaneous counterexamples are what? The various UNIX windows managers and X11? System 6-8 on the '90s Macs? None of those were great UI/UX IMO.

To paraphrase the old taco ad, "¿Por qué no los tres?" I use all three daily and any of them are fine, provided you know what you're doing.

> "Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware."

Huh? Sun Microsystems pretty much owned the workstation market by the mid to late 1990s, having beat out HP, DEC, IBM, etc. It was their game to lose, which they did. And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

The main buoyancy behind Microsoft's push into the workstation market around Y2K is that Windows 2000 was much cheaper and ran on also much cheaper Intel processors. Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

The funny thing is I actually had Windows 11 reliably black-screen on me after creating a local account. On a recent Surface Pro device, no less.

I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tolerated the absolute bullshit going on at Microsoft today.

Back when the word hacker still meant something, that was the opinion of most hackers. Microsoft being bad guys did not make early Java versions good.

[EDIT] I'd actually say MS losing the J# lawsuit was a net positive since it gave Hejlsberg the opportunity to create C#.