I got the chance to evaluate vendors for a huge enterprise because I was assisting their CTO. I vividly remember the sales guy who flew from Redmond to pitch the shiny new Hyper-V virtual machine platform Microsoft had just developed to compete head-to-head with VMware.
“I tried the beta and it couldn’t install successfully if I set my regional options to en-AU.”
“Umm… that’s just a cosmetic issue.”
“It’s a hypervisor kernel, it is going to host tens of thousands of our most critical applications and it crashes if I change one of only three things it asks during setup. My confidence is not super high right now.”
Etc…
I got the impression that Microsoft is used to selling to PHBs based on the look of shock on the guy’s face when I told him that I not only installed the product, but benchmarked it too for good measure.
I absolutely hate that they've reduced it to a single "regional settings". Just because I don't want Norwegian text everywhere does not mean I want dates and time to be displayed in some weird way. However I also utterly despise the Norwegian official way of writing decimal numbers with , rather than . as the decimal separator.
We've had fine-grained control over this for ages, apps can handle it fine, just let us get it the way we want it.
"English (Ireland)" seems to be the closest thing to a sane locale out of the box (could have wished for ISO-8601 dates, but I guess you can't have everything).
That reminds me of the spotlight bar on a Mac that could also do maths, except that if you used . instead of the regionally correct decimal separator ",", it would ignore it, so e.g. 123.7 + 4.50 became 1687.
It is on Windows 10 which I run at home. On Windows 11 which I use at work they changed it to the way you say.
But even then it didn't work to simply have English locale and Norwegian and US keyboard layouts under it. I can't recall what they messed up right now, but I fought Windows 11 for quite some time.
Finally settled on English locale with US keyboard layout, and Norwegian locale with Norwegian keyboard layout, which mostly works in terms of keyboard layout, but now my Weather app is showing Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, despite my regional settings being Norwegian.
Like, how hard can it be to just not fuck it up? They had it working fine for decades!
The shortcuts next to the menu items in LibreOffice apps show me French translations, e.g. "Ctrl+Maj+Espace" for "Ctrl+Shift+Space" even though my language is set to Dutch everywhere (and other texts in LibreOffice are properly translated to Dutch). Apparently it has to do with me using Azerty keyboard layout. I use Belgian Azerty, not French Azerty. Yes, it's confusing.
“I tried the beta and it couldn’t complete the installer if I set my regional options to en-AU.”
“Umm… that’s just a cosmetic issue.”
“It’s a hypervisor kernel, it is going to host tens of thousands of our most critical applications and it crashes if I change one of only three things it asks during setup. My confidence is not super high right now.”
No offense, but to me, the way it written, it shines bad light rather on you. Obviously rep wouldn't answer you something like:
"Well, it said it is beta, didn't it? The quality of the
installer of a BETA hasn't anything to do with the quality of hypervisor itself. "
It was a month from release and it’s a product that’s “even more critical than the OS kernel” for reliability and availability. A failed hypervisor can take out dozens of servers at once.
I also managed to crash or lock it up several times, I just mentioned the keyboard thing as an insane bug. What possible dependency could a stripped down kernel with hardly any user space have on a keyboard layout that’s identical! It is different from en-US in name only.
It’s not about the specifics of the issue, but about the overall impression of sloppiness. They didn’t make a hypervisor that’s purpose-designed for the requirements, they just stripped down Windows and deleted stuff haphazardly so that they were missing the keyboard but still had the installer option.
For reference, I did run it at scale a few years later and my misgivings were confirmed… and then some. It was much less stable than ESXi and the cluster operations were a disaster. Read only operations could cause deadlocks that only a full cluster reboot could resolve. In-place upgrades weren’t available for several major versions! Meanwhile ESXi clusters could be live-upgraded including disk format changes!
After enough decades of experience you get a sixth sense for these things. A single sentence or just one word can trigger an alarm bell in your brain.
With a beta, I expect it to at least be somewhat tested. If they didn't test with anything but the defaults in the installer, I wouldn't be particularly confident about the product either.
“I tried the beta and it couldn’t install successfully if I set my regional options to en-AU.”
“Umm… that’s just a cosmetic issue.”
“It’s a hypervisor kernel, it is going to host tens of thousands of our most critical applications and it crashes if I change one of only three things it asks during setup. My confidence is not super high right now.”
Etc…
I got the impression that Microsoft is used to selling to PHBs based on the look of shock on the guy’s face when I told him that I not only installed the product, but benchmarked it too for good measure.