Somewhere at Microsoft some bean counters decided that formal QA was costing them too much and “agile” was a perfect excuse to scuttle QA (move fast and break things.) It’s bullshit that has been propagated throughout the software industry. “Well, Microsoft doesn’t do it this way anymore so...”. I work for an MS partner and this is exactly what’s happening in-house here. You’re just making your customers the beta testers.

Agile has nothing to do with releasing products early or in testing. It allows the development process to run more smoothly, but it should be completed by the time it is released to the public.

>the industry and consumers forced their hands with fast update cycles with meaningful feature adds.

Yeah, sure. To hell with reliability, let's have features instead.

Reminds of chinese android forks.

Personal swipes will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

That’s the Microsoft line, but it’s bullshit. The company squandered like 5 years on the Windows 8 disaster, which was a failure based 100% on Microsoft pushing forward with a bad strategy. There’s still a PC on every desk, and some helpless saps are scrambling to upgrade from Windows 7 in 2018.

Nobody, anywhere is or was pining for high tempo Windows changes. What I’m seeing is that more and more institutional customers are looking at mobile, Chrome and other offerings.

The real disaster was XP. Windows 8 was a relatively straightforward push forward from where Windows 7 was at the time. It just didn't get that chance at a benefit of such doubt because the vast majority of (especially corporate) users weren't even trying to upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7, they were still trying to wrap their heads around upgrading out of Windows XP before Microsoft dropped an overly-generous run of decades of security updates.

Stability is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS priority #1 in an operating system!

Unless it is a development phone, then it is fun to play with new, partially supported features.

It all depends on the context of your statement.