Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TwistedWeasel 4379 days ago
Yes, me too. However i'd hope that for a product as big and important to MS as this then there would be more checks and balances in place to make sure that such things don't get overlooked.

It's understandable for one engineer to overlook it, maybe even a whole team but for an entire division of design, engineering, QA, marketing etc? Something is rotten in their process.
2 comments
josephlord 4379 days ago
The developers were probably using non-final hardware and/or sharing engineering samples if they had samples at all rather than developing drivers to the datasheet. By the time the marketing team got their hands on them the advertising may be booked and pre-orders received from retailers (if they ever actually get their hands on products rather than just arranging final mock ups or production trial run results shipment for photo-shoots etc.).

QA should have had a short window to study this type of issue but is it something that they would delay shipment over?

Basically I would expect the product to ship on schedule unless there was a really critical problem and that there wouldn't be slack in the schedule for weeks of refinement. Component orders may be place 6 months ahead to secure supply so it is hard to flex the schedule without causing inventory problems not to mention messing customers about.

Based on my experience in a CE company that wasn't Microsoft.

link
lhc- 4379 days ago
People make mistakes. Every piece of software ever written has bugs: I don't think that means everyone's process is rotten. It just means they are human.
link
TwistedWeasel 4379 days ago
Ok, but large corporations are supposed to be able to avoid human centric mistakes with good operations workflows that provide checks and balances in their pipeline.

I would assume MS is not shipping products directly from the engineering lab to the factory, so for something glaring to get all the way to the customer then there is something wrong in their process that failed to correct for human error.

link
stcredzero 4379 days ago
Ok, but large corporations are supposed to be able to avoid human centric mistakes

They are not supposed to be worse?

link