[netruk44]

They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.

These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.

They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.

You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.

(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)

[sumtechguy]

MS needs a 'windows xp sp2' moment. Where they stop jamming new things in and just fix as much junk as possible. They still have a mixed control panel situation. Things just randomly work/break for no real reason. Camera here one day gone the next oh look its back again. Hey my sound is broken again. Linux/MacOS in many benchmarks is faster. Hundreds of old programs now just flake out for random reasons. But then will work again sometimes. Backwards compat is a reason to stick with them. But if it doesnt work, why am I here? SteamOS is going to remove one of the large reasons people keep windows.

MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.

[MandieD]

They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.

We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.

One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.

[rdhatt]

Really impressive since Internet Explorer 5 for Mac was the best browser anywhere at the time. First to support HTML4 & CSS1.