Microsoft, AI, and Ethics (Premium)

On the eve of Build 2023, it's perhaps useful to examine the ethics of Microsoft's sudden AI explosion and whether our perception matches reality.

First, a story for context.

Everyone in our community seems to know that Microsoft at some point fired an entire team of internal Windows testers and created the Windows Insider Program as a bigger pool of free labor. But one wonders if this story is, if not apocryphal, then at least not the entire story. That is, perhaps what Microsoft found over time was that this team was less and less effective because of the incredible range of PC configurations out in the world. Or maybe it's just baloney, a story told by Microsoft's detractors that picked up steam and became part of our understanding of the world.

Here's what I do know about it: Not much. I've heard the story. I feel that Windows quality has been on a steady downward spiral since the story originated, so it's easy to believe it could be true. But I don't know if it is true. I'm not sure that anyone does outside of Microsoft's senior leadership.

But I can Google with the best of them, and here's what I found.

In 2014, Bloomberg reported that one of Satya Nadella's first major decisions as CEO of Microsoft was to "shift the culture" at the software giant, with the downside being that doing so would entail "engineering and organization changes," which are codewords for layoffs. We know now that what Nadella had in mind was laying off most of the employees that Microsoft acquired with Nokia when he axed the Windows Phone business. But citing sources, the publication speculated at the time that, "with new cloud methods of building software," Nadella felt that developers could test and fix bugs instead of relying on separate teams of testers.

This led to reports, like this one, claiming that Microsoft would "cut its QA [quality assurance] department," which is more than a bit of a leap: if Microsoft ever had a single "QA department," that was back in the 1980s, as the company grew so big and complex that it required multiple QA teams. But it certainly didn't have one such team in 2014. And what did this have to do with Windows specifically?

Days later, the ever-reliable Mary Jo Foley filled in the gaps. Citing an internal memo from Windows lead Terry Myerson that doesn't specifically mention testers, she wrote that he was indeed laying off "a substantial number of testers" as part of an effort to "decrease the number of testers as compared to the number of developers." But this was part of a broader plan on Myerson's behalf to undo the siloed organizational structure of his terrible predecessor, Steven Sinofsky. Notably, the goal was to "make the OS team work more like lean startups than a more regimented and plodding one adhering two- to three-year planning, development, testing cycles." As notably, the goal was not to get rid of all the testers.

So how did we get from a reasonable streamlining to "they were all fired"?...