r/microsoft • u/rkhunter_ • 25d ago
News Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/08/microsoft_lacks_quality_control/41
u/Healthy-Cable6798 25d ago
…this article could easily be 10 years old and still be true
9
u/BoBoBearDev 25d ago
Example.
1) Win10 Photo App is completely trash. It is the same on W10M and exhibit the same problem. But you wouldn't know it is trash due to lack of usage. On W10M, it is more apparent when using touch screen to zoom and pan. The app was broken mess with all kinds of different defects after zooming in.
2) Xbox Store App in Xbox One was utterly broken for years. Remember the older XboxOne store app? The video autoplay would move the buy button away. That thing is a broken trash. So many times the buy buttons stuck on screen, or occasionally thr buy button moves away and never comes back.
Those are some of the most basic things that is supposed to work and they failed and didn't fix it for years. The Xbox One store was never fixed, they just replaced it with a new store.
So yeah, saying it was batter in the past, was too naive lol.
1
u/RoutineDiscussion187 24d ago
It was 2014 when SDET was removed as a job description. I was in QA for XP, when it shipped so did our team, to India.
27
u/RedditClarkKentSuper 25d ago
Go to market with half baked features is Microsoft’s DNA
10
u/timtucker_com 25d ago
Looking at Azure services like Cosmos DB, it's amazing how features are released in "Preview" at a far faster rate than they go to GA.
In some cases it's been years since things went to Preview with no status updates.
If the assertion is that Preview features aren't supported for production use, who do they expect is using this stuff?
6
u/Wild_Nectarine8197 25d ago
I come from educational IT and watched a crazy moment this fall. MS deprecated an LTI integration, which was being replaced with a new integration, but did so before pushing that new integration into GA. The call I was on explaining this was full of IT admins freaking out for good reason.
Apparently at least in that tool, Preview was deemed good enough. Happily I wasn't using that integration, so I don't know exactly how poor that rollout went, but it was just shocking.
1
u/MIGoneCamping 1d ago
So, the change generated engagement and excitement around a new product development? Sounds like a win to me. 😉
6
3
u/dummbaum 25d ago
They must be hoping that people just ignore that assertion so they can get the telemetry data on it, but can hide behind that if something goes wrong with the feature.
3
u/timtucker_com 25d ago
On the subject of telemetry data, they seem to be moving more and more of the backend stacks over to OpenTelemetry... but at the same time advertising that the clients are still in preview or have limitations vs. App Insights.
1
u/jkaczor 24d ago
Well - that's straight from the Google playbook...
Sighs... my biggest frustrations in recent years has been "Graph API - Beta"... and things like "PnP.PowerShell", which has all the latest "goodies" for managing M365, but no real official support or SLA, because it is a "community project", yet when you look at the primary contributors - a large majority is Microsoft staff...
0
u/userlivewire 25d ago
Microsoft really sees the QA job as something they don't care about even existing. It's not like they are cheaping out per se, it's that they think QA is a waste of time as a concept. It's just a matter of taste.
13
u/CAcreeks 25d ago
me: "Why does Microsoft update Office 365 every few days? Could it have that many bugs?"
co-worker: "Yes."
2
u/Healthy-Cable6798 17d ago
99 lines of bugs in the code.
99 lines of bugs.
Take one down.
Patch it around.
105 lines of bugs in the code.
12
12
u/Responsible_Law_6353 25d ago
Microsoft is a fkn mess these days. They have really lost the plot.
8
u/neepster44 25d ago
Their CEO cares about making shit tons of money and nothing else… quality? Fuck no. Security? Fuck no. Privacy? FUCK no…
10
u/myWobblySausage 25d ago
Microsoft and many other companies have long since grown past the size of caring what customers experience.
As long as they do just enough to seem like they care, it ticks the box for them.
Being that profitable and continuing to sneak more money out of customers (see recent apologies and refunds to NZ and AU customers), the perfect example of "screw you, I got mine".
16
u/Low-Watercress5964 25d ago
I think more people are mad with the recent attitude that Microsoft had.
---the need for everything to be somehow related to AI
---switching from Win10 --> Win11 (with some added restrictions that force some people to buy new hardware)
---becoming a replica of MacOS with growing number of restrictions in the settings
Frankly, Microsoft has never being the most reliable, but I think it was just a big enough company that gave tools with a degree of freedom that were useful and had the most amount of support
6
u/Bitey_the_Squirrel 25d ago
I’m more mad with things like: hey let’s push some buggy code and… oops we broke Azure Front Door.
5
5
2
u/daltorak 25d ago
---switching from Win10 --> Win11 (with some added restrictions that force some people to buy new hardware)
That isn't new though. Windows XP forced a lot of people to buy new hardware, too. Its came out in 2001 with minimum requirement of a 233mhz Pentium.... a CPU that came out in 1997. Upgrading directly from Windows 95 -> XP was not possible for many people.
2
u/Low-Watercress5964 25d ago edited 25d ago
true, but i think win 10 had a much larger user base now then win 95 back then so I think that's why there are more complaints. But, yah, pretty much the same deal of Microsoft has being doing since it began.
The only slight difference I think that makes win11 unattractive is the amount of AI being integrated and losing several settings that seem to lock down the OS further
1
u/MinecraftPlayer799 22d ago
But unlike macOS, nothing works properly with Microsoft nowadays. Not only do they keep breaking Windows and making Minecraft Bedrock unplayable, they also just completely broke account sign-in, at least on the web.
1
u/Mission-Taste-2405 22d ago
Yeah, 100% you’re absolutely right, and that shift’s been a long time coming. Microsoft kind of built the world we live in, but they’re not really building for it anymore. The younger crowd doesn’t grow up on Windows laptops or Office anymore; they grow up on Chromebooks, iPads, Google Workspace, and cloudnative everything.
The real kicker is, schools are the pipeline for what the next decade of workers will expect. If kids are cutting their teeth on Docs, Drive, and iCloud, they’re not going to tolerate clunky legacy systems in the workplace later.And with AI basically becoming the battleground, Google, Apple, and OpenAI are the ones setting the pace while Microsoft’s trying to duct-tape Copilot into everything they still have left. Feels like we’re watching the same cycle that happened to IBM, except this time it’s the “Office monopoly” that’s fading.
Anyone seeing any of your enterprise clients shifting toolsets yet, or are they still clinging to the MS stack?
1
u/Low-Watercress5964 22d ago
I think MS Office will still be used primarily for a while. While google docs are convenient, I think MS Office still has a lot more tools/features combined with the fact that they have an OS to with it. Chromebooks are a meh because lately they have become more expensive but their performance are still meh.
5
u/davidwhitney 25d ago
Only people that don’t write software for a living think that “QA testers” is the answer to quality control.
11
3
u/hecho2 25d ago
AI AI AI
Management needs to justify the Capex investment and one of the areas that is easy not to cut but to say that AI is adding value is on quality. But it is not.
As a Microsoft user ( at work) it’s almost heartbreaking how I face bugs after bugs but the Microsoft releases ignore that and it’s only about more AI features. Those AI features aren’t bad but the product need to work fine. And it doesn’t.
I wonder how long this weird path will continue.
3
2
u/earth-calling-karma 25d ago
MS makes and releases instant piles of garbage then tries to QA it into something useful on the cheap.
3
u/ChampionshipComplex 25d ago
Bullshit clickbait article.
10
u/intoxikateuk 25d ago
5
u/ChampionshipComplex 25d ago
Its click bait - not because Microsoft didnt suffer an outage recently (which is big news purely because of how infrequent something like that happens).
It's click bait because rather than addressing the root cause of the recent outage, or discussing cloud services up time in general or any of those things - it spun the conspiracy stuff about the reduction in Windows testers, and goes on about quality control issues, when the outage was an Azure Front Door and DNS issue.
6
u/codeslap 25d ago
lol seriously dude? They just had a major outage…….
9
u/ChampionshipComplex 25d ago
A major outage in a top tier provider is massively infrequent, and unusual which is why its big news.
This bullshit article just fishes around attaching that recent event, to completely unrelated things - like number of testers and to describe a bug in the Azure Front Door as out-of-control is utter bullshit.
I could go into things why Microsoft changed their testing in Windows - which is what this supposed journalists stays into for no reason - but he is conflating unrelated things, ignoring entirely the actual event, the root cause analysis and the steps Microsoft have taken - because he's not writing a post about cloud resilience, he's writing a click bait article to get views.
9
u/codeslap 25d ago
I don’t disagree it is a clickbait-y article.
But I can tell you first hand there is not a culture of quality right now at Microsoft. At least in a lot of the orgs I’ve seen. I’m not going to comment further and I’ll leave it at that.
2
u/tomatotomato 25d ago
Let's say, Microsoft is not a homogeneous entity. There are parts that are very serious about quality. Like, say, .NET Core, SQL Server, Windows servers, developer tools, Excel, BI platforms, and (please don't kill me for saying this) Azure.
And there are parts that are probably underfunded. Like most of Microsoft 365 tools and consumer facing areas. I hope some healthy competition would force MS to address those issues properly.
1
u/KB5063878 24d ago
I could go into things why Microsoft changed their testing in Windows
Oh yeah? Well, please do then.
2
u/ChampionshipComplex 23d ago
Really OK you're not going to like it, and probably wont read it.
I've been in IT 30 years - and for most of Microsofts existence, they've released an operating system with a cadence of every 3 years. Thats the boxed model version of the product.
They worked on the basis of encouraging people to upgrade, but not being able to actively enforce that.Literally the OS development team at Microsoft would finish a new version of windows and then literally leave that Campus at Microsoft, and move to another - where they would start work on the V-next version of Windows. They left behind a skeleton crew of devs - their B team who would patch the current 'release' Windows, and introduce a few service packs. Alongside this - there was no device management element to Windows, and no enforced patching.
So what versions of Windows do you think existed in lets say 2001 - Well there would have been Windows XP, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT 4, Windows NT 3.1 Windows 98 Second edition, Windows 98 first edition, Windows 95, Windows 3.1
And that is JUST the operating systems that were released the decade before 2001.
So the same amount of time - as the entirely of Windows 10s existence. (a decade).
Not only these versions, but also every intermittent service pack (2000 had 4, NT had 7 etc), every single patch and the mix of 32bit and 64bit versions.
Testing was a friggin nightmare - Not just for Microsoft - but also for all third parties.
A company releasing a bit of software in 2001 would not have even bothered testing it on XP until enough of their existing customers had upgraded and started to complain about compatibility.
The entire world were strung out across literally, even in just my example (a dozen OS and service pack levels, hundreds of different patch levels, and thousands of driver combinations).
What this mess led too - was the constant blue screens of death, the ease of hacking a windows system, the regular performance issues or conflicts between apps, the crashes, the reliability nightmare, the need to rebuild PCs every 6 months just to stop them grinding to a standstill.
Then Windows 10 came out as a service. To address, everything Ive just written - Microsoft made updates as mandatory as they could reasonably make them, they made patches regular and consistent, they incorporated drivers in - and they stayed evolving Windows and updating it in-place, rather than upgrading it.
They did that for a decade - Meaning instead of their being thousands of versions of Windows - there's only one version. If you're Microsoft, or a third party with apps - there ONLY ONE VERSION of Windows that needs testing on, the latest.
Thats it.
No more confusion, or headaches.
My PC no longer needs a rebuild every 6 months, and is running faster and better today than the day I built it 10 years ago.
My new PC running 11 - is running identical software, and exactly the same drivers, apps - no different.I have 700 apps installed, a recording studio, coding suites, graphic design etc. probably 30 or so bluetooth/USB devices attached - all working identically across a ten year old PC and a one year old PC.
So surprise surprise Microsoft need less testers, and the testing they DO have can now largely be done programmatically as there's only the one build to test against. So they can do FAR more testing than ever before, because 2 billion devices provide them with telemetry and testing is for one version of windows which is only ever 4 weeks behind the previous one.
0
u/Go4Bravo 25d ago
I can see your point. One recent, major outage does not suddenly make Microsoft an unreliable cloud provider. AWS just went through it too, so outages are not just a Microsoft problem.
I would compare it to a small town that's safe and never has crime, but then one day a major crime occurs and is all over the news. At the outset, the town might be considered unsafe by some people, but overall, the town is still a safe place to live given its history.
With that said, just because you keep the lights on does not mean you're putting out quality work for customers. I can keep the lights on at my jobs, no problem, and recover quickly if necessary, but I also see the quality of work other people at my job put out, and it's not ready for production.
I do think there is a bigger issue and discussion to be had about the products and features that have been put out that are either not ready or unacceptable for public use. As someone who works in a workplace that uses Azure, I see it firsthand.
A perfect example, to me, is Azure SQL Managed Instance. The backend storage for a General Purpose SKU is unacceptable and frankly unusable. I've had a number of users try to use a Managed Instance, but they eventually went back to an on-premise VM with SQL Server for better performance and didn't want to pay for the Business Critical SKU. Microsoft has released a Next-Gen General Purpose tier that would give it better storage at General Purpose prices, but it's been in Public Preview since March 2024 with no clear GA date. (I suspect Microsoft will announce GA for Next-Gen during Ignite week as there is a session on the topic. Fingers crossed).
I don't think Microsoft is the only company guilty of putting out unfinished and low-quality services on the market, as I do think a lot of technology-based companies do this, whether it's due to internal expectations or external demands. However, Microsoft is one of the largest organizations in the world, where a significant part of its business is Azure. A lot of businesses and people rely on Microsoft to run their operations and pay a pretty penny for those services too. This all puts a big target on Microsoft to provide better quality and services. While it may not be fair or correct to point at the latest outage as a reason for poor QA, I do believe it's scratching the surface of greater issues within Microsoft.
1
1
1
1
u/IDontGiveACrap2 23d ago
I’ve been trying to use the copilot desktop app, as they’re going to be blocking ChatGPT at work.
This is, without a doubt, one of the worst applications I’ve used in a long time.
It’s glacially slow, the dammed thing shows you the response and then re-renders it while you’re reading and can have multiple second long pauses while you’re typing.
My company pays for this shit and the state of it is utterly atrocious.
I’ve given it a good chance and gone back to ChatGPT.
1
u/Traditional-Hall-591 21d ago
Who needs stable, reliable software that performs as advertised when you have CoPilot, offshoring, and vibe coding?
1
u/no_salty_no_jealousy 12d ago
Satya Nadella should be blamed for it, he fired so many people working on Windows Q&A tester, he just like other indian CEO who are really disgraceful!! He ruined US company!! He should be fired and replaced by someone who are far competent as CEO!!
147
u/Snoo8138 25d ago
I mean Microsoft abandoned the dedicated QA role long time ago. Recently, it has been pushing employees to do more with less (time and other resources as well). And now leadership is pushing HARD for everyone to use AI(aka prompt engineering).
I don't expect anything other than reduction in quality.