This is MS we’re talking about. Preview and Viewer are probably made by two different teams in different countries, sharing no code, and prohibited from communicating with each other, even if they know about the other’s existence.
And famously they fired all QAs years ago so there’s nobody to test before releasing.
One leveraging the graphics engine from internet explorer the other using the graphics engine from ms paint 1.0
I work in big tech and this is my life. I envy anyone who thinks you’re exaggerating, because that means they haven’t experienced the joy of spending weeks trying to track down the team responsible for a bug and then months hassling them to fix it.
And if they do talk to each other, the different departments need to go through the whole hierarchy for everything and each manager puts their spin on it, so you get answers back from questions that were not asked.
Here’s a real and true story about how separate Microsoft teams communicate and coordinate:
Few weeks ago, some Microsoft team from the US deprecated some critical service used by other Microsoft products. They just shut it off without notifying anyone. Other teams from other Microsoft offices in the rest of the world found about this deprecation when their production builds started failing to log customers in to the applications that they need for their businesses. People were called in from their vacations, emergency meetings were held to play hot potato with responsibility. Clients were PISSED. I stopped following the drama before it was resolved.
