This is Why Windows 10 is So Unreliable (Premium)

It’s can be painfully hard to watch, but an ex-Microsoft employee has posted a video explaining why Windows 10 is so unreliable. He’s right, but I can fill in a few more details to provide a more complete picture of the problem.

The background: Jerry Berg is a former senior software developer at Microsoft. He was let go after 15 years at the company and decided to pursue self-employment via a tech enthusiast YouTube channel. And, yes, he’s almost certainly correct about what happened to Windows 10 from a reliability perspective.

Here’s the story, according to Berg and with additional information he doesn’t provide.

Before the release of Windows 10, the software giant employed thousands of people who were dedicated solely to testing Windows quality. There were multiple teams, each covering specific parts of the OS, and representatives of each would meet daily to determine if the previous night’s build could be moved upstream in the build process towards winmain, which was “basically everyone’s code smashed together from all the different [parts] of the operating system, like UI, networking, in-box applications, drivers, display, kernel, HAL [hardware abstraction layer], etc.”

These meetings were critical, Berg says: It was a chance for real human beings to come together and debate whether code was good enough to ship. The bugs that they found were present on real hardware, he says, during automated tests run in a lab with thousands of individual computers. (I’ve actually seen various testing labs like that he describes, multiple times, at Microsoft’s campus during various visits over the years.) These machines were representative of the hardware diversity as was out in the market, at least as much as was possible.

Though Berg says that Microsoft still does some testing like this today, the software giant laid off the entire Windows Test Team, “with a few minor exceptions,” and “basically replaced it with the team that was testing Windows Phone.”

A bit of background here.

As you may recall, when Steven Sinofsky was ousted from Microsoft after the Windows 8 and Surface RT debacles, Terry Myerson, who had been leading the Windows Phone team previously, took over Windows. In doing so, he removed all of Sinofsky’s key lieutenants over time, and reversed all of Sinofsky’s terrible policies, most notably around development secrecy. This was both good and bad: The now-ineffectual Windows Insider Program came out of this change, which was initially good. But the people who had been creating and testing Windows for years were replaced, frankly, with a bunch of B-Teamers from the Windows Phone group. And it’s very clear now that they had no idea what they were doing.

“The whole reason the layoffs occurred is because three different divisions at Microsoft that were [essentially] sub-companies---Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows---were all merged together … They wanted them all to share the ...