Having STEs as full time employees benefited MS greatly. They knew products from the end user and UI/UX perspective inside and out in ways even the SDETs didn't.
UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.
Imho, there are two key values that I've seen QA bring to software companies.
1. Deep user/product expertise. QA (and support) almost always knows more about how users (including expert users) actually use the product than dev.
2. Isolation of quality from dev leadership politics. It should be unsurprising that asking an org to measure and report the quality of its own work is fraught with peril. Even assuming good intentions, having the same person who has been developing and staring at a feature for months test it risks incomplete testing: devs have no way to forget all the insider things they know about a feature.
The best places I've worked were places where QA reported up an entirely different leadership chain than engineering, and where they got their own VP with equal power as the engineering VP, and their own seat at the same decision-making table.
When QA is subordinate to engineering, they become a mere rubber stamp.
A good question to ask when joining a software company is "Does QA have the power to block releases over the objection of engineering?" I have found companies who can answer YES to this put out much better products.
There was a real problem of QA becoming bloated and filled with less than qualified people. The really good engineered would transfers out to SDE orgs and so the senior ranks of QA tended to be either true believers are people who weren't good enough to move to SDE orgs.
Especially with QA outside of Microsoft at the time paying so much less, it was a wise long term career move to move to SDE as soon as possible.
Under Satya Nadella's early leadership, Microsoft eliminated the test role on their engineering teams in 2014, transferring QA responsibilities to developers and detecting issues through telemetry. That's slightly over 10 years ago. Windows 10 was their last version of Windows built with a full test infrastructure in place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together.
This guy is in for a disappointing future since he seems to be unaware that Windows is more than than the consumer editions. Revenue from Windows Enterprise (which has management tools like Active Directory and backwards compatibility with non-game apps needed for large corporate deployments) and Windows Server (needed for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) is still in the billions and there's nothing on the horizon in the Linux ecosystem to replace those. Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.
None of the software and services you mentioned require Windows though - they could be made to run on Linux, and some already do.
As more and more revenue shifts from desktop/servers to cloud and services, it doesn't seem too far-fetched for Microsoft to decide maintaining the entire OS stack themselves makes less and less sense. A Microsoft Windows linux distro would free up resources to focus on what makes Windows unique.
Exchange is very dependent on Win32 and .NET Framework. As is ODSP and Dynamics.
Azure under the hood is Hyper-V with most services built upon that dependency.
Yes, millions of man hours, monkies, and typewriters you could transform this to Linux. The economics aren't there when Azure/M365 keeps pulling in money running on it's current platform hand over fist.
Over 60% of customer workloads running on Azure are Linux. And that statistic is skewed by those using things like AzureAD (basically workgroups).
At some point it will become a burden to develop new technologies on Windows instead of Linux. If that hasn't already happened.
Desktop already is a dwindling revenue stream for Microsoft. Microsoft is already pushing for companies, from small garage startups to mega enterprises, to migrate to online services where the underlying OS doesn't matter.
Windows has inertia, a lot of it. But all things in motion eventually come to rest.
Well, for one, you may have noticed that MS put in the work, over years, to make .NET the same implementation across all three platforms. So that’s at least one pillar of impossibility removed.
Except ODSP/EXO/Dynamics don't use CoreCLR -- they use good ole fashioned .NET Framework. Those products with their 20+ year old code base would require a full rewrite.
His take is that for consumers Microsoft will abandon windows in favor of Linux. He predicts Linux will get better. And windows will get worse in development and support. And so Microsoft will give up on windows. And that worsening trend plus abandonment plus Linux improvements will cause Microsoft supporting Linux.
The probability of each event happening is high enough. But the probability of all three happening at once is low. And that is why this prediction is difficult to believe.
I think it is true windows dev is much more difficult now. The platform has an identity split. It used to favor power users. Now it favors the rich mac users. And upcoming kids who are attached to iPhones. And this means… it gets worse … Or it changes audience. The latter will be hard to pull off.
I think Microsoft also has less need for windows. We know this because its core business has been shifting. They are platform agnostic now.
So what becomes the incentive for Microsoft to continue windows?
Because they're a corporation that makes money. They have incentives to employ people, and the vendor lock-in with Windows is far too large to change anything at the moment or anytime in the foreseeable future. Changing Windows to become a Linux-based distro would be a massive corporate undertaking; Microsoft isn't in the business of pleasing tech-minded people. They're a business that makes money.
Linux isn't a corporation; it's really more of an idea. They don't have marketing departments or people trying to sell you licenses. They don't have vendor lock-in or active-directory or a cloud based infastructure. They don't have an entire advertising division or a search engine. There aren't any shareholders to please or paid employees to keep on payroll for government kickbacks. They're not targeting the casual, media-focused, average computer user like Microsoft, which makes a lot of money by doing so.
In my last job, I worked in a mid-sized suburban office. There weren't any "Linux reps" knocking on our door, making sure we were getting the most out of Ubuntu.
Hardly, SteamDeck will get those Windows games, that game developers write using Visual Studio on Windows, because they push Proton instead of making the studios interested into native ports.
> Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.
That would make sense … if Microsoft didn’t have the second most bonkers track record in history (after Google) in the domain of “fragmenting and releasing competing reimplementations of products already in your core portfolio”!
> "...Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps."
A lot of FOSS people think this but it's not really true. It was a thorn in the side of MS executives as a competitor, sure, but I never met anyone in the rank and file that could be bothered to hate Linux. More than a few of my colleagues played with Linux at home in the '00s. I cut my teeth on the commercial UNIXes so there wasn't anything interesting about Linux to me until it had caught up with them around 2010 or so.
you're trying to rewrite history here, Microsoft used to be a well known linux hater, but linux became popular and they had no choice but to accept it. Remember the "linux is cancer" years...
Might want to schedule an appointment for a neurologist because acting like MSFT wasn't anti linux is revisionist history that borders on medical intervention.
I was there, too, and I remember all of the FUD from MS. I remember the Halloween documents, MS funding SCO’s lawsuit, etc. MS saw Linux as a threat, especially in the server space. The goal was to stomp it out, like they did to Netscape.
My respect for Nadella or whoever among his leadership team greenlit this diminishes further. Having access to an extremely comprehensive technical library was invaluable for R&D and also one of the powerful invisible privileges available to Microsoft employees for those who wanted to take advantage of it.
The Windows 8 start menu is no different from Launchpad on macOS throwing up a grid of icons that takes over the screen. Except macOS doesn't have the benefit of live tiles to excuse it.
Yeah I never used or liked Launchpad. On macOS I only ever used Spotlight (and Raycast for the past few years).
The only redeeming thing I could say about Launchpad is that it did not replace Spotlight (unlike Windows 8 Start Menu which was a replacement to the previous start menu)
But at least you can use the distro's repo for most things. On Windows, it's all "curl | sudo bash" equivalent, unless you actually use the Microsoft store.
I can't tell if you're missing the key information or merely trolling.
Steam on Linux went from 1.4% at the start of 2025 and hit 3.58% at the end of that year. That's a 156% increase in device adoption in a single year. Most platforms would be happy with such growth.
The more important point is this: look at the growth trajectory. Windows11 and - I'm being told they've changed their name to Microslop, can anyone confirm? - are on the nose. Linux growth at the current rates would see a ~10% adoption rate in 2026. That then establishes a serious threat to the current gaming platform hegemony.
A lot of which had to do with being under a consent decree.
> "When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed."
By "missed" you mean that MS was at the top of the mobile phone heap after defeating Palm Computing when the iPhone came out and swept Windows Mobile, Palm, Research In Motion and everyone else away.
I expect the GP was referring to missing the boat in responding to the iPhone after it swept away Windows Mobile.
Microsoft was late to respond, eventually bought Danger and released the Kin phone before cancelling it within weeks, and only released Windows Phone in 2010 a solid 3 years after the iPhone release.
Windows Phone was actually pretty nice to use, but they were already too late to the scene and didn't have a chance to steal ground from iPhone or android who already had solid app ecosystems.
That still isn't missing the boat. The pivot to the improved UI in Windows Mobile 6.5, the last of the old school Windows CE based releases, and skins by OEMs like HTC was IIRC in response to the iPhone's successful UI innovations.
And let's not forget that Google specifically interfered with access to their services on Windows Phone to hamstring it.
Huh? MS did ok in the nascent consumer market. RIM owned commercial, completely.
I had an iPaq in 2004 when we got married. It was like living in the future, where the future was a scaled down Windows 98 box. We took a one month road trip and was able to Priceline hotels on the road as we explored. Amazing device but not an iPhone.
Ballmer was so butthurt about iPhone he would berate people who appeared before him with one. As a customer, my boss and I were invited to a meeting with high level Microsoft people and asked to not carry iPhones out of respect.
UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.
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