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Moishe's Blog
Personal blog · moishelettvin.blogspot.comprogrammingcareer
Moishe's Blog is a personal blog at moishelettvin.blogspot.com about programming and career. Since 2007, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)”. The last post was in 2011, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its 2006 post on why Windows Vista's shutdown menu took about a year and 43 people to design. Commenters cite it as an example of bureaucracy and slow decision-making in large companies.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
**This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.**
Most-linked posts?
- The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)26 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2008-04-24
What Hacker News says?
An explanation of why the Windows Vista shutdown bit is in a weird new menu: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006) as a story · 150 points
HN discussionThe design history of Skype for iPhone was particularly misguided: First it was a native UIKit app, then MS put a lot of effort into making it look and behave exactly like a Windows Phone app [1], down to the unusual gestures. When they gave up on that, the app reverted to a native UIKit design, but just a few updates later we got the current Snapchat clone instead. Needless to say, features regularly got lost durin…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006) as a story · 95 points
HN discussionThree big problems with a split up codebase: 1) Instead of doing one large release every week (which facebook does: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977 ) you now have dozens or hundreds of smaller releases, a lot more heterogeneity to test for. 2) If you have inter-dependencies on modules you have to grapple with the "diamond dependency" problem. Say module A depends on module B and C, and su…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Facebook hit git performance issue on large repository”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest as a story · 77 points
HN discussionThis oldie seems relevant: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... 1 year to build Windows Vista's new shutdown menu, with a total of 43 people somehow involved in its design. If this is how Windows developers still have to work, it's no wonder. That said, I would readily believe that the roots of this story have more to do with the complexity of modern OSes than any particulars of Microsoft…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “.NET Core 3.0 Concludes the .NET Framework API Porting Project”Submitted Less programming, more skill? as a story · 22 points
HN discussionAn assumption? We've been told pretty directly how complicated the process is (often with pride). See the 14 steps which turn a 5 minute code change into a multi-man-month-mammoth: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298... Or the now infamous Windows Shutdown "crapfest": http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... There's more. And I have no problem with the author stating h…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding”Submitted Large companies and 'A' talent as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> When you use Win32 you get the latest fixes and features even in applications that haven't been updated for two decades - for example you get new common dialogs and access to shell extensions (e.g. TortoiseSvn/Git integration) that didn't exist back when those applications were made. What you're describing is not backward compatibility, it's forward compatibility. The OS is backward compatible with old application…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “GTK 4.0 Released”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWell, then problems with such process are pretty well documented[1]. For comparison, at Google global refactorings are pretty common and usually painless, there are even custom tools to support such changes (push them through code review, ensure no tests are broken etc.) [1] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Search: .lenght - Github”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMS is a pretty ponderous beast. Remember Joel's pointer to the story about someone trying to fix the shutdown experience? http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... Sounds like it takes years to get the legs moving together, which means it's too late for IE9 on the phone for a while...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps”Submitted How Windows shutdown became so complicated as a story · 4 points
HN discussionActually, according to the following sources, the content is written to disk _before_ entering sleep. This can be done very quickly because most of the data is already in swap file. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1757?viewlocale=en_US http://www.macworld.com/article/53460/2006/10/safesleep.html http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html?showComment=1164433980000
on “Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?”Submitted How committees suck the life out of software... as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBut some of it was just math -- a large company with many teams that need to coordinate slows things down. I like this anecdote from a Microsoft engineer about how it took a year to design a really crappy shutdown menu with nine (nine!) options. It turns out there 43 different people who had a voice in the feature, which was hashed out over a series of grinding meetings involving teams responsible for kernel, shell,…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL”Submitted Software and craftsmanship as a story · 4 points
HN discussion>they are unable to conceive of a company as anything other >than a single, gestalt entity, with a single opinion and >purpose, whose actions are driven by the most basic >emotions and can be classified as good or evil with >absolutely no grey-area. Seems like quite a straw man argument, there probably isn't a single person that actually fits your description. And it certainly does not describe a typical developer.…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Java EE”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSome insight around this time. http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on ““I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)”Submitted The Windows Shutdown crapfest as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhen Microsoft started out it operated under a pretty flat organizational structure, similar to how Google is run. They've gotten fat in the middle (management) over the years and it's stifled any chance they've had of getting anything done. See this blog post from a former MS employee about the year it took to design the shutdown menu in Vista: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant”Someone linked to this post in the comments, which I'd never seen before. It's by the guy who wrote the Vista shutdown menu, and it's pretty depressing reading: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “NY Times all but says it: Ballmer must go”The contrast here is being made between two development styles: A centralized, controlled, and focused production system at Apple, versus what Microsoft apparently had before Windows 7: A network of fiefdoms which fought each other over implementation and design details but nevertheless had to secure each others' approval for changes. This brought about stalemates and some truly bizarre outcomes. Here's the famous s…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Meet Microsoft's Antidote to Vista”> there is a dedicated team of around 50 people just devoted to managing the "Start" button. Worse: it took 43 people just to build the shutdown feature. http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... This article will tell you everything you ever needed to know about why Vista turned out the way it did.
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Apple posts profit of $1.05B, ships nearly 2.3 million Macs”Probably what happens when no one's in charge and the legal, backwards compatibility, etc. teams have veto power over the UX people. See also: (re: windows vista shutdown UI) http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Why Windows 7 is not the answer”You may not have read this article before: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... Here's a relevant quote from the article: In Windows, this [centralised] model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one l…
Comment linking /2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
on “Let’s talk about DVCS”
