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> I have a lot of faith in this acquisition. My software team is growing fast and we have so many little problems that feel like they should be solved at the GitHub layer but the solutions aren't there. Microsoft will fix that. I'm pretty strongly opposed to the petty naysayers and partisan Microsoft bashing, and I'm definitely firmly embedded in the Microsoft camp from a toolset perspective, but I'm very, very far away from holding the belief that Microsoft will for sure fix the bunch of little things that bother you. On the contrary, despite the near complete 180 in culture under Nadella, lack of attention to fine details, making things "just work", the "little things" in technology.....this is where Microsoft is still just......terrible. This isn't to say everything is terrible, several teams actually have seemed to change in this respect. Power BI would be a fine example. But many, many more have changed very little, if at all. Skype, MS Office, SQL Server Management Studio (and the T-SQL language), and many others are either horrendously bad, or depressingly so much worse than they could be with some serious, well-intentioned and honest effort. A lot of this could perhaps be excused by much of this being legacy code, but then you see brand new products, like the abomination that is Microsoft Teams, or consider that 90% the problems with Skype could be fixed with a rewrite of the UI. I continue to believe that much of the shortcomings wouldn't in fact be particularly hard or expensive to fix, and I think the investment would pay off handsomely for Microsoft in the long run. But I see no good reason to believe that there is any intention to fix any of it. I don't know if it's a blind spot in Nadella's vision, or some fundamental underlying principle (maybe it's not considered "strategic", which is probably technically correct), but I think I'm at the point where I've lost hope any of it will change. What's my point? Microsoft, despite it's dramatic turnaround from a cultural perspective, still has plenty of flaws, with no good excuse. For user's sake, let's hope that these flaws aren't in areas that the future success of Github will rely upon. |
People used to think that Apple did, and now there's a post every four weeks about how bad Apple's QA is because there's a bug if you post an obscure character in a language used by < 1% of the world's population.
Google's customer support is famously useless, and Microsoft has a ton of bugs.
At some point someone will find a mythical company which cares about the little things that bother us, but that will probably happen shortly after the AI singularity shows up.