I have to jump in here because I'm a software developer and I have worked for MS in the past. You people really have no idea what your talking about. Of all the companies I've worked for (Microsoft, ATI, AMD, S3, 3dfx, Intel, and McAfee), Microsoft did FAR more testing than anyone else. Code is frozen for months and changes require several signoffs.
I guess I have to jump in there, too. I'm an embedded systems programmer and MS is one of the 3 household names on my resume. And no, I'm not currently employed by MS, but some of my friends and previous co-workers are.
You all act like MS is some fly by night companies with 3 guys in a garage that purposely don't test their stuff because they don't give a crap about anything or anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have personally been involved in the death march of 60-70 hour weeks leading up to releases. Every night, every engineers test machines (usually there are 3 or 4 of them) run "stress" on nightly builds of the OS which is a test matrix of hundreds of different programs all run at the same time with the sole purpose of trying to kill a machine. Their first job every morning is to debug and find the root cause of any failure from the night before...anywhere within MS.
That is not correct. While nightly builds and automated stress tests are a norm in many divisions, that is not the case "anywhere within MS" -- with MS Hardware being one notable exception.
Furthermore, stress tests usually catch the 'lazy programmer" bugs that shouldn't be there in the first place if the devs had exercised due diligence before check-in.
MS is not careless or negligent.
I have to disagree. As before, there are big differences between different groups. In MS, bugs are often classified as features, or resolved as won't fix without fully understanding their impacts, or without knowing the root cause.
The fact that they had to pull a FW update in itself is a proof that the Surface group was careless and negligent -- that should not have happened. Whether it was due to insufficient testing or due ignoring/underestimating a bug, that I do not know.
In another place, even if a bug wasn't fixed, someone had to do a root cause investigation, show that it can't and won't have any serious user impact, and then, and only then could a bug be closed as a "won't fix". Sometimes a bug may have several different manifestations -- one may not even be noticeable to most, but another may be a major issue, and guesstimating user impacts without fully investigating and understanding the root cause can be error prone.
The problems introduced with the last firmware are unfortunate and will be fixed.
Yes, and they have no choice but to fix it.
Worst case scenario, you restore your factory image which doesn't include any of the updates.
End users cannot undo firmware updates.
