The Black Liszt

Category: Microsoft

  • Summary: Software in Government, Big Business and Big Tech

    This is a summary with links to my posts on the many ways that large organizations including government, big business, big tech and the rest diligently apply modern software procedures as taught in academia and required by professional management; they consistently produce disastrous results in software quality, cost, security and everything else that matters.

    There are of course issues that are common to all these large organizations, for example in cybersecurity.

    https://blackliszt.com/2015/06/systemic-issues-behind-the-cyber-security-disasters-at-opm-citi-anthem-etc.html

    Government

    Government software disasters are government-as-usual, so much so that disasters that wreck lives barely make the news. For example, over 10 million people world-wide enter a government-run lottery for immigration slots that can lead to US citizenship. How hard can picking a bunch of random numbers be? Apparently too hard for the government software people, with the result of horrible consequences for the declared lottery winners whose immigration slots were invalidated.

    https://blackliszt.com/2011/07/software-quality-horror-tales-electronic-diversity-visas.html

    Consider the sets "Excellence" and "Government IT." There is a great deal of evidence that these are non-overlapping sets. I learned there are organizations promoting and celebrating digital government. They hold awards ceremonies. I tried to find out what the winner had done to deserve winning. Surprise, surprise, the link at the organization’s website explaining it all was broken. Pathetic.

    https://blackliszt.com/2015/05/excellence-in-government-it.html

    Even simple things like making Social Security statements available on-line appears to be beyond them — including of course lying about it.

    https://blackliszt.com/2024/03/excellenece-in-government-it-the-social-security-administration-.html

    The NSA (National  Security Agency) has a budget of over $50 Billion and is touted as being the world’s best at cybersecurity. It turns out the only reason we know their super-top-secret budget is because their security was blatantly breached with massive internal data made public.

    https://blackliszt.com/2014/05/bureaucracy-regulation-and-computer-security.html

    Given that this army of highly-paid cyber geniuses can’t protect itself, it’s not surprising that its analysis of a high-visibility security breach may have sounded good to the public, but was in fact entirely fraudulent.

    https://blackliszt.com/2017/01/russia-hacks-dnc-podesta-email-fake-news.html

    What do you do with such a huge budget when you’re unable to do what you’re supposed to do even with your own secrets? You set up a massive program to teach students your excellent methods and hope to train over a million certified experts. I tracked the program from a local community college to the NSA’s own description of its program – which was both broken and insecure!

    https://blackliszt.com/2017/06/government-cyber-security-tops-the-oxymoron-list.html

    Unfortunately, this isn’t just about keeping information safe. Government ineptitude kills people. Instead of taking a quick, simple approach to preventing train crashes:

    https://blackliszt.com/2015/05/an-app-to-prevent-train-crashes-like-amtrak-philadelphia.html

    The government presses on with its super-expensive solution using obsolete technology, which leads to yet more preventable crashes and deaths.

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/10/scandal-hoboken-train-crash.html

    It’s not just big governments. The little government of several islands in the Caribbean managed to create a multi-front disaster using best practices to foist a digital currency system on its innocent citizens.

    https://blackliszt.com/2022/03/dcash-government-cryptocurrency-shows-why-fedcoin-would-be-a-disaster.html

    https://blackliszt.com/2022/03/what-is-behind-the-dcash-central-bank-digital-currency-disaster.html

    The US government continues to pursue a national digital currency of the kind that has already proved to be a disaster in the Caribbean. They do so ignoring the fact that the US Dollar is already largely digital, with extensive software support structures that are in place and working well..

    https://blackliszt.com/2020/12/we-dont-need-fedcoin-we-already-have-a-national-digital-currency.html

    Important things like voting systems are some combination of broken and insecure. I took the trouble to define a simple combination of tech and non-tech to build a modern, secure voting system that was auditable, with operations visible to every voter while keeping what they voted for secret. Will any government institution pay attention, much less implement it? We all know the answer.

    https://blackliszt.com/2025/03/voter-id-and-paper-ballots-dont-prevent-cheating.html

     

    Big Business

    Executives in big business want to succeed and advance, but this can only happen by avoiding risk. The best way to avoid risk is to do what “everyone else” is doing, what the experts say is best. That’s where industry advisory groups come in.

    https://blackliszt.com/2017/05/the-value-of-computer-industry-advisory-groups.html

    Giant advisory firms counsel their customers on how to make the best decisions. Getting your customers to like you is high on the list. Carefully crafted words are of supreme importance to such large organizations. Actions that match? Not so much.

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/07/gartner-group-big-company-customer-service.html

    A giant health insurance company “lost” the personal information of "tens of millions" of its members sometime in 2014; they're not sure how many, whose records were "lost," or when it happened. The details are an astounding illustration of big-corporate IT incompetence.

    https://blackliszt.com/2015/02/the-anthem-of-cyber-insecurity.html

    I soon found out that my information had indeed been stolen. The company’s response to the theft was right in line with their letting it happen.

    https://blackliszt.com/2015/02/my-anthem-account-was-hacked.html

    What company doesn't want to be part of the digital revolution and have an app? If you're a major health insurance company, why wouldn't you replace old-fashioned insurance cards with something always up-to-date that comes on an app? Here’s what ensued when one of the industry giants tried.

    https://blackliszt.com/2021/02/why-cant-big-companies-build-or-even-buy-sofware-that-works.html

    I've covered many big organization face-plants. The awfulness encompasses a broad range of consumer-dissing inconvenience, Here’s a case of some software that "works" but puts customer inconvenience front and center.

    https://blackliszt.com/2021/03/why-cant-big-companies-build-software-that-works.html

    Here’s a case of a giant company software issue that is low on the “it matters” scale, and high on the “a smart high school student could have done it better” scale. It’s the kind of issue that leads one to wonder whether we’d all be better off if they refused to hire any more people with college degrees for any job, and in particular, management.

    https://blackliszt.com/2021/05/anthem-needs-my-feedback-reveals-deep-problems.html

    Big Tech

    Whether the software is a cool social app, an academic website or a real business, there is a common theme: the software is poorly designed and, even worse, it just breaks. You might think the cool internet apps like Facebook and Twitter are an exception, but they’re not.

    https://blackliszt.com/2012/01/internet-software-quality-horror-shows.html

    How can you innovate? Did the leaders of the current big tech companies benefit from training in innovation? Once they became large, have the big guys like Google demonstrated excellence in innovation? Uhh, sorry, the facts indicate otherwise.

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/05/organizing-for-successful-innovation-recent-history.html

    The widely-accepted logic is: Facebook is wildly successful; FB is built on software; therefore, FB software must be excellent. I should hire people from FB to help me build excellent software! The history and facts support neither the logic nor the conclusion.

    https://blackliszt.com/2014/12/fb.html

    I looked at FB’s mobile app when it had over 700 million people using it. Over 20 million people had written reviews, more than 6 million of which were 3 stars or less. A random sample of those reviews yielded juicy results.

    https://blackliszt.com/2014/11/facebooks-software-quality.html

    The difference between image and reality at FB is astounding. Here is an interview and a recent book that should lead any ambitious young company to avoid hiring people from there.

    https://blackliszt.com/2017/03/software-giants-image-and-reality-facebook.html

    Large organizations have trouble building software. This has been true since the dawn of software history, and shows no signs of changing. The decades-long, rolling disaster of Microsoft Windows is a great example of this.

    https://blackliszt.com/2015/08/large-organization-software-fails-the-case-of-microsoft-windows.html

    Microsoft illustrated multiple issues relating to digital ownership in a case I dug into. Among other things they attempted to require use of their own pathetic browser.

    https://blackliszt.com/2014/05/giant-software-bureaucracies.html

    There are big problems with software quality. The social apps in particular have decided it's embarrassing. But instead of actually, you know, fixing the problems, they seem to have decided to mask the problems! Twitter is a great example of this disease.

    https://blackliszt.com/2013/05/twitter-software-quality-stinks.html

    I did detailed studies on Twitter and found that they do indeed produce provably bad search results.

    https://blackliszt.com/2013/05/twitter-software-quality-an-oxymoron.html

    People write and talk about what's "trending on Twitter" as though the trend meant something. It doesn't. It's based on deeply flawed Twitter search software that gives random, widely varying results.

    https://blackliszt.com/2013/05/the-bogus-basis-of-trending-on-twitter.html

    Twitter fired boatloads of software engineers in 2022 leading some to predict that software disaster will ensue. But then, most people don’t know much about software and don’t realize what a disaster Twitter software has been for years.

    https://blackliszt.com/2022/11/twitter-can-improve-software-quality-by-losing-most-of-its-engineers.html

    Then there is Apple, the high-prestige computer company making expensive devices. In 2016, terrorists killed a bunch of people in California. Law enforcement and the FBI worked hard to find out what happened and who else might have been involved. This required looking in the government-issued iPhones used by the killers. What happened? Apple did its best to protect the criminals. Here are the highlights.

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/03/the-apple-fbi-fiasco.html

    And here are the details:

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/03/apple-can-help-fight-crime-while-maintaining-privacy.html

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/02/apples-cancer-prevention-strategy.html

    https://blackliszt.com/2016/02/apples-approach-to-privacy-terrorists-and-criminals.html

    I reviewed a book about government security on Amazon. The author was impressive and had loads of experience. Many of the reviews were positive, with a few pointing to obvious bias. I wrote a review that pointed to the positive aspects, but also mentioned some of the bias. The review disappeared. I interacted with Amazon, and was told that suppressing the review was a mistake. It appeared again. Then it disappeared. I tried to write a review and was told I've been banned!

    https://blackliszt.com/2023/03/early-evidence-of-criticism-suppression-by-intelligence-agencies-.html

    Yelp isn’t as big as the industry giants, but it’s pretty big. A random plunge into their system demonstrates the same kind of slick surface with rotten underpinnings as their larger brethren.

    https://blackliszt.com/2021/05/yelp-big-tech-incompetent-corrupt.html

    Conclusion

    There is a better way! The winning methods aren’t even new – they’re proven in practice by small groups that need to win. See:

    https://blackliszt.com/2023/07/summary-software-innovation.html

    https://blackliszt.com/2023/07/summary-wartime-software-to-win-the-war.html

     

  • Microsoft And Intel Detail The Deep-Seated Problems With Blockchain

    Both Microsoft and Intel are big supporters of blockchain. They think it's going to be "bigger than the internet," contributing trillions of dollars to the economy before long. At the same time, they spell out the overwhelming obstacles blockchain must overcome to reach this pinnacle of achievement. Guess what, surprise surprise, the special version of blockchain created by Intel and Microsoft is indispensable to solving the problems and achieving success!

    You can see their deep thinking here and here. Before diving in, I'd like to point out that the custom, private blockchain they advocate is a contradiction in terms, as I illustrate here — even if they implement what they claim perfectly, it will still be a joke.

    Here are a few of the little obstacles that blockchain has to overcome before becoming acceptable for enterprise use, according to Microsoft and/or Intel:

    • Performance: Normal blockchain performance is a few transactions per second. "Reed said the trusted execution environment of Intel SGX enables Coco to deliver a novel consensus mechanism that can deliver up to 1600 transactions per second…"
    • Confidentiality:Normally, everything on a blockchain is public information.  "Microsoft uses Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) to protect the Coco Framework. Reed said the trusted execution environment of Intel SGX …  helps Coco transactions remain confidential among blockchain participants."
    • Governance: With a normal public blockchain, no one is in charge. This doesn't come close to meeting enterprise requirements. Microsoft's private blockchain enables classic management, access controls and all the rest.
    • Processing power:Intel says "Public cryptocurrency blockchains require huge amounts of energy to verify transactions through node consensus. Analysts have estimated a single bitcoin transaction can require as much energy as the average American home uses in a week."

    The other big vendors, like IBM with its team of 1,500 people working on its Blockchain effort, have similar stories about what's wrong with Blockchain and why you should use theirs. When you add it all up, it does make you wonder about this revolutionary new technology, and exactly why important new initiatives should depend on this brand-new, largely untested code that obviously was not built with practical, enterprise use in mind.

    This was originally posted at Forbes.

  • Large Organization Software Fails: the case of Microsoft Windows

    Large organizations have trouble building software. This has been true since the dawn of software history, and shows no signs of changing. The decades-long, rolling disaster of Microsoft Windows is a great example of this. I've been hit personally with this. Recent experiences with Windows 8 have renewed my appreciation of the breadth and depth of the on-going awfulness of Windows.

    Windows Screen Saver

    I got a new computer. It had Windows 8. I was setting up my new machine and I wanted to do something simple. I had remembered that in some earlier version of Windows, you could get the screen saver to display the file name of the photo it was showing. This was useful if you wanted to get your hands on the photo that just flashed by. It's a pretty small feature, but one anyone who stores photos on their PC could find it useful.

    So I drilled in to the screen saver. Screen settings

    I went into the settings, and didn't see the control I was hoping would be there.

    Settings 2

    So I clicked on Help, something I rarely do, but what the heck, that's what it's there for. Here's what I got: The content is missing!

    Settings 3

    It's a little thing. It's not like my computer crashed. In the world of books, it's like a footnote was missing — hey, that's an idea, let's compare the new edition of Windows to the new edition of a book!

    Software and Books

    Most of us know how to judge books. If a book is poorly produced, like the pages tear easily and the type is hard to read, most of us will toss it aside — it may have great content, but it's not worth reading. If we get past the first impression, we'll dive in and start reading. The next potential barrier is how well the book has been edited. If the book is full of spelling, usage and grammatical errors, many of us will think poorly of the author, the editor and the publishing house — the author shouldn't have made the mistakes in the first place, the editor should have caught and corrected them, and the publishing house shouldn't have put sloppy trash in print. Then and only then do we get to the style and substance of the book.

    I read a lot of books from many publishers in many genres — fiction, history, science, etc.  — and I'm happy to report that I rarely encounter a published book that has editing errors.

    And by the time a particularly timeless book gets to later editions? There are never errors.

    In that context, how is Windows 8?

    I've got the latest version of Windows, 8.1, running on a new machine. It's hardly a first edition. Microsoft pours out updates, and I'm up to date. Here's a snapshot: Updates

    Note the scroll bar — there were hundreds more updates that had been applied.

    The lovely option that lets you see the file name along with the picture was in an earlier version of Windows. Making a new edition of software isn't that much different than making a new edition of a book — basically, unless you add or change something, it stays the same. In this case, someone had to make a conscious decision to drop an isolated, harmless feature that gave value to many customers.

    Why would someone do that? It's more trouble to drop a feature than just let it ride along on the next edition, so someone had to actively remove it. There is no conceivable objection to the feature. While not everyone would want it, since it's an opt-in feature, it harms no one. It's like someone deciding to drop a short appendix from a book — not everyone will want it, but those who do value it. In the paper publishing world, dropping it might save a page or two. But in the electronic world? There's no conceivable reason.

    I don't claim for a second that displaying the file name on the screen saver is important. I simply claim that the decision to drop it exemplifies the pervasive anti-customer attitude of the Microsoft organization, which unfortunately is typical of large software-building organizations in general.

    It's the missing Help file though, that really set me off. Again, it's a trivial error, like dropping a footnote. But why would you do it? How could it possibly slip though what should be a totally automated editing/QA process?? It may somehow be complicated in the labyrinthine world of Windows development, but it's a fixable thing. You have a program that assures that for each instance of Help there's a corresponding piece of content, and for each piece of content there's a way to reach it. There either is no such program or it's broken. In the overall scheme of things (Windows remains horrifically slow, it freezes and crashes, etc.) it's a small thing, but surely by the edition of Windows 8 I am suffering with it would have been found and fixed?

    Conclusion

    Software is all about productivity, attention to detail and automation. Unless you've got a de facto monopoly, software is also about meeting customer needs. Large organizations in general (for example government, big corporations) and Microsoft in particular don't get that, in spite of the billions they spend on development and (supposedly) quality. I would love to be able to say it's getting better, but most of the evidence is on the other side. Which is why, among other things, good software will continue to be produced mostly by organizations that are small and willing to do things the "wrong" way.

  • Giant Software Company Bureaucracies

    It is the nature of giant bureaucracies to coerce and control the populations they "serve." Giant bureaucracies also tend to resist change, protect themselves at all cost, operate with laughable inefficiency, and become increasingly disconnected from their supposed mission. This is true whether the bureaucracy is a government agency (illustrated on a small, local scale by the wonderful movie Still Mine)

    Still mine

    or a software company. When the bureaucracies are giant software companies, the coercion is often masked in a sickly-sweet cover story about trying to help you, or assuring that things happen with high quality, which just rubs it in.

    I recently ran into an example of this with Microsoft. I was trying to play WMA (Windows Media Audio) files that I had created for my own use from CD's I had purchased. In other words, I was trying to do something I should have been able to do.

    Why CD's? I had bought them a long time ago, why should I purchase them again digitally when it's legal to create a personal digital copy. Why WMA? At the time, it was technically slightly better than the MP3 easily available to me.

    The Random House example (apologies to Random House)

    Imagine I had bought a paper book years ago. Now I was trying to open it to re-read a section. When I tried to open it, it won't open! The book was stuck, and there was a knock on my apartment door. There's a loud voice coming from outside: "Open up! Open up! This is Random House!" OMG! What's this about? I can't open my old book, and suddenly some publisher is pounding at my door??

    I go to the door, open it, and there's a couple scary-looking guys. They say, "We understand you're trying to open a Random House book. Before you open it, we need to verify that you have the right to do so."

    I say, "What do you mean? IT'S MY BOOK! I BOUGHT IT! I'VE OWNED IT FOR YEARS! WHAT RIGHT DO YOU HAVE TO POUND ON MY DOOR AND QUESTION ME?"

    They reply, "We're Random House. We're the publishers. You may think you own this book, but we're the publishers. How do we know you own the book legally? We've got to make sure you have the proper rights for this book. Until we receive that assurance, you will not be able to open the book you claim to own."

    "OK," I say guardedly. "What do I have to do to convince you I own the book I own?"

    "It's simple. Just replace all your phones and your phone service with Random House's. Then our book will be able to call our office and make sure you have the rights you say you have."

    "I've heard about the Random House telephone service. It's really crappy. It's full of static. That's why fewer people use it every month, even though it's free. Even worse, crooks have figured out how to use it to see when I'm not home, so they can break in and steal my stuff. If you insanely want to somehow have the book you published be able to 'phone home,' why not just use the phones I've already got, which work great?"

    "They're not Random House phones. We can't guarantee their quality or appropriateness. Random House books only work with Random House phones. You can say what you want — but we say that we put our name on it and we stand behind them — and they're the only phones we'll use."

    I get the message. I kick myself for being so deluded that I thought buying a book from Random House was a good idea. There's no way I'm trading my secure phones for ones that practically fly a flag to alert all the criminals in the area when the house is vulnerable. I hand the book that I bought and paid for, but which I cannot use, to the agents from Random House, and dis-invite them from my house.

    Microsoft and WMA

    This is what Microsoft did, acting just like the imagined Random House of my example.

    I tried to play my WMA file. It wouldn't play. Instead, just like the agents from Random house pounding on my door, I get this:

    Microsoft fail

    Note the copyright, literally ten years ago! Tens of thousands of supposedly super-bright programmers, and they can't manage to keep things up to date?

    They "don't support" my web browser, which (on this machine) is Firefox. They insist on using IE, which is of course their own browser. Whose utilization has plummetted from over two-thirds in 2009 to about the same as Firefox last year.

    Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg

    Why do I care? First of all, they shouldn't care. It's outrageous that they do. Second, here's one reason among many why I care:

    IE vulnerability

    I might as well fly a flag from my house saying "hey, all crooks in the area, c'mon over, the pickin's are good!" And this isn't the first time — IE is famous for being about the most inept, dangerous-to-use browser in existence. Imagine, a free product with a plummeting market share!

    Conclusion

    This experience didn't teach me anything I didn't already know. Microsoft isn't unique. It's like every other giant, bumbling bureaucracy: it's an elephant, we're mice, and you'd better look smart and be careful or you'll get crushed. But somehow, when your nose gets rubbed in it, and they effectively steal something from you from your own house (computer), and there's nothing you can do about, I at least get aggravated in spite of myself.

     

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