| I've worked at MSFT since 2011, on developer tools and Azure. (My opinions are my own, of course). When I first joined Microsoft, it was prior to the launch of Win8, and I saw a lot of complacency throughout many parts of the company. I found it frustrating, because I came from an open-source background on the Java stack, and I wanted to see more innovation. In just a few years, things have changed dramatically, and that is because the market has changed. As others have said on this thread, Windows is no longer the key to Microsoft's business success, it is the ecosystem of products that Microsoft sells. That is why there have been all of these cultural changes, because the industry has shifted, and there are some really smart leaders at Microsoft (e.g. Scott Guthrie) who realize that we have to change to stay viable. So, the terrible practices you once saw just don't even make sense anymore. Microsoft is being challenged in every market it operates in, which means that we're forced to innovate. This turns out to be better for everyone, including employees like me. (I came from an academic research background, and I'd never want to work somewhere that was happy with the status quo.) And yes, the Visual Studio 2015 uninstall takes a really long time. Some installs also take forever. They've made a ton of improvements in the new preview VS 2017. The reason this wasn't done previously was not that a few engineers couldn't change things (though sometimes that is true), but rather that it was a hard engineering problem. It's easy to think that a big company has infinite resources, but the reality is that you can't build a product with too big of a team (see: Mythical Man Month), so you have to choose what you focus on. If you were to ask most customers, they'd rather have new features than have a better installation experience. That is, until the install experience got in people's way. I don't work on anything related to the Windows client, so I can't speak to the telemetry, but what you're describing does sound pretty annoying. It is all anonymized (I know this because I'm familiar with the privacy reviews that all code has to go through), but I can see the case for wanting to opt out completely. Obviously, one post is not going to change your mind (and I'm not looking to do so), but I'd suggest you look at leadership and philosophy changes, not just individuals. |