Maybe its time for Microsofties to study programming?
We've all been there, hopefully not personally for many years, but the general signs of a programmer in trouble is when they go into 'gopher bashing' mode where fixing one bug invariably breaks something else. They'll tell us "Its all very complicated" but that's unfortunately the job -- we have to design to reduce complexity to manageable levels so if the code is truly incomprehensible then its effectively unusable and needs a redesign.
I know how this can come about, though. I have occasionally to work on a piece of embedded code that's insanely complex, it was written by someone who embraced object oriented programming without first learning about what objects are, how they're used and how to design with them. The result is an astonishing pile of spaghetti, random interactions and variables all over the place, which has driven many a competent programmer to seek employment elsewhere. (You can't critique it because you're obviously old-fashioned and don't understand proper programming techniques so you just leave it to the genius that designed it and have as little to do with it as possible.) Now I'm not saying that this is the cause of MSFT's woes but I'd guess that there's a failure of software design methodology somewhere because they're struggling with what should be trivial bugs, they've not managed to compartment their system but at the same time they're trumpeting quite trivial changes as major improvements. This is a very large red flag for anyone who's had to manage software projects.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
