> HN has had top stories telling programmers not to care about corner cases or to assign a very low priority to them.
That's because HN focuses on startups. Startups have extremely little time, money and resources. Microsoft has over 94,000 headcount.
Microsoft has extremely different expectations from startups. In fact, knowing just about anything about Microsoft's decades of history, you'd know just how much attention they pay to corner cases when it comes to backwards compatibility.
Another example: do startups spend much time preparing support for 50 different languages, including RTL, before a product release? Should Microsoft?
Advice you see on HN doesn't represent anything more than the current hip advice for startups. Certainly not how a multibillion dollar international corporation should design products.
But Apple is a multibillion dollar international corporation (more billions than MS) and they still famously cut corner cases.
If you go into every corner case, you'll never ship and I don't really think it's that practical/easy to keep adding people to a project to fix every corner case.
There's been more than one situation in which they ignored more than just corner cases in backwards compatibility: Windows Mobile -> WP7 -> WP8 and Internet Explorer come to mind. I don't know many examples but that might be because the only MS product I've actually owned in recent times was an XBox 360 (which went RRoD 2 yrs ago).
Also strictly speaking this isn't about backward compatibility, from the comments I've read here, you can still have the same windows password you had before. The password restrictions only apply to their online service (Live account or whatever they are calling it).
Comments
> HN has had top stories telling programmers not to care about corner cases or to assign a very low priority to them.
That's because HN focuses on startups. Startups have extremely little time, money and resources. Microsoft has over 94,000 headcount.
Microsoft has extremely different expectations from startups. In fact, knowing just about anything about Microsoft's decades of history, you'd know just how much attention they pay to corner cases when it comes to backwards compatibility.
Another example: do startups spend much time preparing support for 50 different languages, including RTL, before a product release? Should Microsoft?
Advice you see on HN doesn't represent anything more than the current hip advice for startups. Certainly not how a multibillion dollar international corporation should design products.
Good point.
But Apple is a multibillion dollar international corporation (more billions than MS) and they still famously cut corner cases.
If you go into every corner case, you'll never ship and I don't really think it's that practical/easy to keep adding people to a project to fix every corner case.
There's been more than one situation in which they ignored more than just corner cases in backwards compatibility: Windows Mobile -> WP7 -> WP8 and Internet Explorer come to mind. I don't know many examples but that might be because the only MS product I've actually owned in recent times was an XBox 360 (which went RRoD 2 yrs ago).
Also strictly speaking this isn't about backward compatibility, from the comments I've read here, you can still have the same windows password you had before. The password restrictions only apply to their online service (Live account or whatever they are calling it).