KB5077181 was released about a month ago as part of the February Patch Tuesday rollout. When the update first arrived, users reported a wide range of problems, including boot loops, login errors, and installation issues.
Microsoft has now acknowledged another problem linked to the same update. Some affected users see the message “C:\ is not accessible – Access denied” when trying to open the system drive.
They aren’t capable of doing that.
Source on that is me, I worked for MSFT during the rollout of Windows 8 and the 360 red ring nightmare.
They’re internally wayyyyy too culty and cliquey.
Everyone has to do things the MSFT way, and the MSFT way is team leads all leading their own thing and arguing about why its so cool and necessary.
The culture is diametrically opposed to simplifying things and reorienting around a fundamentally minimized, more stable core system.
Everything has to be able to plug into as many other things as possible, which creates insane nested dependency loops and chains that they fuck up all the time.
The Red Ring of Death was around 2009 or so, Windows 8 rolled out in 2012. That was 14 years ago now.
Headcount numbers:
The median tenure of employment at Microsoft is 5.3 years, so most of those 94,000 employees will be long gone by now.
Also, Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and made major changes to the corporate culture from the earlier Balmer era. Stack ranking was abolished, there were major corporate acquisitions that brought external corporate cultures inside (eg LinkedIn, GitHub, ZeniMax/Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, Nokia).
I have no idea what Microsoft’s current internal culture is like but I think your impression is likely quite outdated by this point.
I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?
V dashes? A dashes? Etc?
The majority of MSFT’s workforce has been temp contractors for a very long time, and they do everything they can to have as few actual employees as possible.
If your source is saying the average tenure is 5.3 years, no, no it is not counting contractors.
Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’, I’m going with no, everything I’ve described has gotten worse.
That’s why I’ve, for years, been able to predict moves that MSFT would likely make, that people at the time think are ludicrous or incredibly pessimistic, worst case scenarios… and then they happen.
As an example, I was saying MSFT probably just set Xbox with impossibly unrealistic profit targets for the Xbox/Gaming division, to more or less intentionally downsize it and then basically kill it off, over time, while acting like that’s not what they were doing… I said that a good deal of time before the news broke, that is exactly what happened.
They are a gormless faceless machine that is unimaginably high on their own supply.
Given the amount of outright caste based racism I saw amongst Indian actual employees vs Indian contractors when I was there, where HR told.me that actually ‘that’s just their culture’ and that I was being racist for pointing out abusive managers literally screaming at their lower caste underlings, whom they had by their H1-B balls…
…yeah, I’m willing to bet it is now even worse.
I’ve also worked at other large corps, a place or two in fairly high responsibilty positions.
I’ve met a fair deal of the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond upper management of various texh and other firms, and the thing they all have in common is an unimaginably inflated ego, elitist attitude, that propogates downward via basically an essentially religious level of respect for people in higher positions… its just expected to be shown by anyone under them.
They really are like the corpos from Cyberpunk 77, they just don’t have the nakedly open bloodlust most of those corpos do.
I linked the source for my information, feel free to dig into it for more detail.
I literally said I didn’t know whether there had been a culture shift. Reread the last line of my comment. All I’m doing here is pointing out that your own view on the subject is likely very outdated at this point. There’s been enormous employee turnover, including right to the top CEO position, and other major companies have merged into Microsoft in the interim.
Based on?
I’m not doubting your previous experience. I’m just pointing out that it was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then, so I’d like to hear some more recent evidence.
Why use their stock ticker instead of their name?
Force of habit, shorter to type, everyone knows what I mean.
EDIT:
It took me an embarassingly long amount of time to realize that does not work with 3RR.
That was the internal code in a fair number of processes, for referring to ‘The Red Ring of Death’, the 3 red lit segments of a 360 that means basically 95% chance its gotta be RMA’d, likely just wholly replaced.