Reply to post: It’s a game...

That amazing Microsoft software quality, part 97: Windows Phone update kills Outlook, Calendar

Michael Jarve

It’s a game...

Since the release of Windows 10, be it mobile or else which, Microsoft has been treating Windows as Bethesda treats an Elder Scrolls game- release it now, and we’ll fix it later. The difference, of course is that people rely on Windows operating correctly from day one (or at least reliably enough) whereas people playing Skyrim can wait 6 days or months for a mostly functioning version of the game through patches. It’s not really an important thing. This Windows as a service scheme is not suited to a consumer/semi-pro OS. It works for Linux, because Linux users tend to be more savy ( nevermind that many problems can be circumvented with config/command line mojo). Not to mention that most major Linux distros have a 3+ year LTS version with regular patches, but also have an army of user/developers who also contribute code, based on real-life scenarios and a now more polite overlord who demands the best (even if/when bugs get through), and MS’s new “throw it at the wall and see what sticks, we’ll fix it later” looks even more daft. Peter Bright, Microsoft apologist, recently wrote on another site about how MS’s OS’s were always crud out of the gate, and took a service pack or two to be considered good enough for deployment, and that the fix it as we go Windows 10 meant continual bugs improvements not seen in previous versions. What he failed to concede was that while, yes, the initial release was usually rubbish, the service pack, released a year or so later was solid enough to keep you going for 10 or more years, if you updated, because it was tested up the wazoo before release. The first version of anything is not as good as the later version. Companies learn from mistakes, and not only from the mistakes they made, but why those mistakes were made. Further, you could choose not to bork your system every 6 months with a service pack feature upgrade foisted upon you whether you want it or not.

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