There's also a complexity explosion to factor in, and saying that there was a time before Google and Stack Overflow seems a bit dismissive of that. Chances are, your app today is built on at least a dozen dependencies that require documentation and reference lookup several times throughout any given day.
Point taken, but reference material can cover a lot more than API docs. Changes in dependencies, dependencies of dependencies, and their change in source over time are often critical pieces of information. Further, it's difficult to cover all possible material for dependencies that have been taken for granted; OS, HTTP server, drivers, and unexpected complications like OEM-level defects in specific revisions of hardware models are difficult to account for.
Some shameless promotion for a PR I worked on: If you're using the AMD features of TypeScript, support for named AMD modules also made it out in TypeScript 1.4. An example of the syntax can be found in the following file: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/v1.4/tests/case...
Nokia/Meego and Nokia/Android both nixed at launch. Could the redundant Microsoft Nokia people be hired by Nokia Research in Finland? Launch a new device when the Nokia smartphone trademark reverts in 2016?
Comments like these genuinely make me wonder if a non-trivial chunk of the crowd here is paid marketers and/or folks not being honest about full disclosure.
Touting the HN echo chamber in the context of the Surface is hard to take in good faith. Frustrated Surface engineers? As someone who waited in line on launch day and returned their Surface within a week, how about frustrated Surface customers? After reading a review where the device sounds like a strong step back and was developed in isolation without customer feedback, I think your sympathies are misplaced.
I'm not sure how a reasonable person can see that article and think Microsoft doesn't have to worry about justifying features, project management, testing, documentation, group policies, localization, security, or anything else that makes a "simple" feature for Windows complicated because the source saying so happens to be more than ten years old.
The process and consideration outlined is certainly in-line with my own experiences at Microsoft.
The fact that the article is old doesn't meant we should ignore it, but on the other hand, you have to consider the possibility that things change over the course of a decade, and the article may be out-dated. You can't use 10-year-old evidence as 'proof' of anything currently happening at Microsoft, though you can use it as evidence to weigh probabilities.
Probably more important to have that on the product page, yeah? I looked at the landing page, couldn't see what was going and had a nagging animation to install the app before being given sufficient information on what it was. Not a great experience.
