A member of another team told me that there was a leaked build that had a really bad bug in it. I forget exactly what the problem was, but the details aren’t important. The team fixed the bug as soon as it was discovered, and they notified all the self-hosters and partners to upgrade to a new build immediately, but that bug was also out there in the leaked builds, ready to destroy computers and networks and most of Western civilization.
So how do you get people who are running a leaked build to stop running that build, with urgency?
Great story.
I’m usually intrigued by the “war stories” from inside the trenches, this story could have been interesting but the lack of any details whatsoever makes it kind of lame. What companies were involved, what was the worse of the repercussions? Come on guys, I want to be entertained by stories of industry screw ups
Seriously, it would be neat to hear from someone who knew was going on at MS HQ when a leaked debug build revealed the existence of the “NSA-key”, or hear from the team that manipulated the RTM build of windows such that competing Lotus would run unreliably. Obviously some people know more about these events than they let on, but it’s not clear whether they will ever come out of the woodwork, even anonymously.
I doubt anyone would be all that interested in my stories, given that I haven’t worked for any big-name companies.
Edited 2016-09-06 23:10 UTC
Note that the guy who wrote this blog post also wrote a book basically containing the histories behind many MS anecdotes (coincidentally including the two you mention, IIRC).
Note that you will be disappointed.
javispedro,
I’d probably browse the book, but wouldn’t buy it.
Ha, so that is why they had a leaked pre-release of Windows ’98 with gradients on the title bar. The official release, nor the OSR2 version had it in. It was the only ‘feature’ I liked on ME.
Edited 2016-09-07 04:10 UTC
Win98 did have gradients in title bars. See http://www.helpwithwindows.com/windows98/tune-022.html or http://www.computermuseum.co/Windows/98/ .
(On this topic though, I always thought it was funny that UI cuteness like this first appeared in Office then migrated to Windows; in this case, Office 95 had title bar gradients, which Windows made standard in Windows 98.)
How to get people buying a new phone to stop using their current one?
It is definitely an interesting ‘post-release’ tactic into gaming the ‘pre-release’ community.
I could definitely see it being an issue in the days before internet access was so wide spread.
That said as a tactic, it is really poor. The correct solution is not exactly rocket science; and you have all builds check an update site / call home.
You can even have a blacklist site so you can ‘expire’ beta builds.
If it is meant to be a ‘pre-release’ build and you have don’t have ‘internet access’, then you expire the build after X days.
it’s a very basic piece of logic.
It’s not hack proof, but that’s not the point. The point is to resolve these kinds of issues. I’ve had to do it a handful of times in my life.
Forcing users to upgrade is not something product teams like to do in my experience, but it’s best to have that logic in there from the start, even if you don’t use it much.
At least you have some way to influence things after release.
Edited 2016-09-07 13:53 UTC
I got a strong sense of “here’s how we get warez-like leakers to update for the good of the Internet as a whole” from the article.
…as in, people who have been trained by past experience with shareware/trialware/etc. to seek out and patch away lockout code like that as an almost instinctive thing.
Right answer: Windows Insiders program. No leaks, because almost everything is publicly available. And updates are expected and frequent.
Sorry, but your “right” answer is wrong. That NEVER works. It’s impossible to keep a program from spreading beyond the group. Simply having a group will make people outside the group go to extraordinary lengths to also have a copy. And while the group may regularly update, those outside the group will not.
Changing the wallpaper is a good idea. Another that we frequently used is a major bump in the version number. If we were intending to change the version from 2.2 to 2.3 and a bug is found in a version that got out, we’d instead bump it to 3.0 and make a big deal over what would have been a minor update. The psychology here is “keeping up with the Joneses” – “You’ve got 2.2 build 513? Pfft – I’VE got 3.0!”
Wait, the windows insider program is available to anyone, right? Its not a selective exclusive beta.
https://insider.windows.com/
Apple does something similar as well. Its better to be open and distribute copies as widely as possible early in the development of an important piece of software.
as if its a special build, fools everyone if they are thinking they are getting a special