How does any of that software engineering wankery bring any business value?

Well, if you watched the video you would know. Since they are removing whole attack surfaces, which means reduced exploits, which means more security, which at windows scale means millions of dollars saved in prevented security issues for companies across the world.

The way Microsoft wrote code for 40 years was an attack surface. The absurdity and fragility of DCOM and ActiveX without meaningful security or development rigor.

Ok? What's the point? Do you want them to invent a time machine and not do that? Is it a bad idea to fix the issues?

No, I want them to write better stuff going forward, which this seems to be.

It's like them finally admitting the emperor's new clothes is the king is naked.

Frankly, I don't care because Microsoft's ethos is one of hostility, neglect, and irresponsibility.

“Microsoft has a history of hostile neglect!”

[MS moves to responsibly maintain their codebase and patch previously overlooked vulnerabilities]

“Ugh why are they wasting all this tiiiime”

Closing the barn door after the cows left. Too little, too late.

Yesterday would be better, but there’ll never be a better day than today.

How is it too late when they are continuously producing new products?

I actually kind of agree with you, but my god man. Nothing may change today except the ability to innovate forward without living in fear of breaking shit. This is huge.

We are on a site called hacker news. Fuck your ignorant business value. The business view has always been bad at being a hacker & your degradation is just more heaped abuse from the know-nots. Have some decorum, so we smart knowing shit hackers can bother to put up with you presence without being in pain. Behave.

> I actually kind of agree with you [...]

Then it escalated really quickly.

“…these kinds of bugs were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in its own products since 2006.”

Associate a $ number to the average CVE then associate a reduction in total amount of CVEs.

On its own, absolutely none, which is true of everything that's not in service of a business solution. In general, how often are engineers held accountable for delivering direct business value anywhere rather than being subject to arbitrary favoritism performance ratings?

…the roles in question at Microsoft are literal business value since that’s their jobs.

Chill out and read the article.

Microsoft spends a lot of money on software security, particularly on a large body of software written by them in unsafe programming languages; spending less money is good business.

Microsoft makes a great deal of money selling software to companies and governments that are increasingly convinced that memory safe software is in their best interests; maintaining those business ties is also worth a great deal of money.