These all very interesting points of view and conjecture and like they say, everyone has an opinion. What I don't see here is comments from anyone who has actually worked at MS. So to fill that little gap I'll post my observations and comments. I live just south of Redmond and inevitably, if you do contract work around here, you will spend some time at MS. I've been there a few times. Two of them in test labs. I'm not new to test labs. I've run a large testing and certification lab for a local airplane manufacturer as well as a porting lab for a large rival software manufacturer. When I first walked into the MS lab I'd be working in I was appalled. I thought they were joking. Were they SERIOUS?? Was I really going to be testing their next generation OS with this crap equipment, in this dingy cramped room they called a lab? Granted, I was only testing a part of the OS, but I was incredulous! And that was just the beginning of my bewildering year testing "Longhorn". The only goal was to get the tests done. Do not interpret this as trying to find the defects. Yes... the goal of testing is to find defects, but the goal of the team I worked with was to run the tests and be able to report they had run a certain number of tests. I routinely developed test scenarios based on what was coded, not what was spec'ed. I was told writing test cases based on the specification took too long and I needed to write the test cases based on what was coded. So I ran the installations, configured the software, used it and wrote a test scenario based on what I had just done. Also, since testing is part of the development division, I routinely saw emails from the Longhorn developers. That's another story, but I'll just say not everybody was happy with what was coming out.
So these are a small sample of my experiences working as a contractor at MS. I have other experiences doing other things at MS that are just as enlightening.
But my observation and comment on what I saw of the Longhorn development is GIGO. Quality is NOT job 1.
One final comment... There are some very fine engineers at MS that rail against this approach, but they get overridden and sometimes, if they protest too loudly, get fired.
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These all very interesting points of view and conjecture and like they say, everyone has an opinion. What I don't see here is comments from anyone who has actually worked at MS. So to fill that little gap I'll post my observations and comments. I live just south of Redmond and inevitably, if you do contract work around here, you will spend some time at MS. I've been there a few times. Two of them in test labs. I'm not new to test labs. I've run a large testing and certification lab for a local airplane manufacturer as well as a porting lab for a large rival software manufacturer. When I first walked into the MS lab I'd be working in I was appalled. I thought they were joking. Were they SERIOUS?? Was I really going to be testing their next generation OS with this crap equipment, in this dingy cramped room they called a lab? Granted, I was only testing a part of the OS, but I was incredulous! And that was just the beginning of my bewildering year testing "Longhorn". The only goal was to get the tests done. Do not interpret this as trying to find the defects. Yes... the goal of testing is to find defects, but the goal of the team I worked with was to run the tests and be able to report they had run a certain number of tests. I routinely developed test scenarios based on what was coded, not what was spec'ed. I was told writing test cases based on the specification took too long and I needed to write the test cases based on what was coded. So I ran the installations, configured the software, used it and wrote a test scenario based on what I had just done. Also, since testing is part of the development division, I routinely saw emails from the Longhorn developers. That's another story, but I'll just say not everybody was happy with what was coming out. So these are a small sample of my experiences working as a contractor at MS. I have other experiences doing other things at MS that are just as enlightening. But my observation and comment on what I saw of the Longhorn development is GIGO. Quality is NOT job 1. One final comment... There are some very fine engineers at MS that rail against this approach, but they get overridden and sometimes, if they protest too loudly, get fired.