It's not just Windows. It's everything Microsoft.
What steams my clams is that I can press Reply in Outlook and be halfway through the first sentence of my message before the reply window even opens. (M4 Pro)
Almost every time I use Outlook, I have to rewrite my first sentence because half of it was typed before Outlook was finished doing whatever it does in the background. This doesn't happen with other mail clients on the same machine.
It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
You're right, but it's not just Microsoft.
I've been doing software engineering for 20+ years. I've been at a lot of different companies and at almost every single one I'm always kind of flabbergasted at how shabby the engineering is. I think maybe ONCE in my career did I work somewhere that I was proud of the engineering we were doing and it was a 18 month consulting gig at a startup with 3 engineers.
This isn't hubris, I am part of the problem. Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about.
Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
> I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.
Been there, done that, but I wouldn't put the blame on engineers. You said there it yourself:
> Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about. [...] They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?
You know the big O thing. If your algorithm is inefficient, it will ultimately slow down to a crawl at one point, no matter how many cores you throw at it. Now replace 'algorithm' and 'cores' with 'corporate processes' and 'employees' and you get a picture of what is exactly happening at large bureaucracies. Even worse so now that they can no longer afford to infinitely expand and have to cut costs (through LLMs and offshoring) while maintaining an illusion of growth for stakeholders.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this, the core problem (IMO) of managers playing political games and reaching for short-sighted quick fixes like "new agile methodologies" [0] instead of doing their jobs well remains unaddressed. Meta has been recently letting go of middle managers in a (frantic?) attempt to tame the explosion of bureaucracy and the associated loss of efficiency, but the rest of the industry just appears to be repeating "AI" like a mantra. Even though coding itself has already been the most "over-optimized" part of the whole software development process and optimizing (the costs of) it further only results in further "Outlookization" of software.
[0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-managemen...
The solution is competition in software. But it's a really, really dysfunctional market. Outlook persists because it can speak to Exchange. Too many bad software products persist because they're part of a lock-in with something that's difficult or expensive to swap out. Ultimately, Windows itself.
I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.
In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.
I remember the late nineties and early naughties, when I used to type faster than Windows could cope with, and it still never lost a keystroke.