I happened to notice this story on news.com about Microsoft shipping the Nimda worm (it's not a friggin' virus, dammit!) with the Korean version of Visual Studio .Net. What a hoot. But buried in the story was something very scary.

Microsoft has exceedingly bad Quality Assurance. While trying to play down the sheer stupidity of actually bundling a worm -- by accident -- with their developer software (where's the virus scanning? where's the software manifest?), a MS spokesman said this:

It wasn't until a Microsoft employee was adding the help documentation to the software giant's developer Web site that the worm was found. "We have to go through a conversion process to an online HTML format," said Flores. "During that process we found an extra file hanging around."

"Awww, shucks, silly us, it's not a big deal, see it was with the help files and that's where we found it..."

Hang on a minute. They found it by accident? What?!? Where the hell were the QA people? Where was the QA process? Some web flunky was converting the .hlp files to .html (or I should say ".htm" files, since everyone knows 8.3 file names is the way God intended PCs to be and even if it wasn't, MS would never admit to eveer having being completely lame) and just happened to notice an extra file? Holy shit!

That just blows my mind. It's stunning. If the web guy hadn't happened to notice an extra file, what other QA process would have caught it? Anything at all? What else is the utter lack of QA at Microsoft missing? How many extra files do you have in Windows XP or 98 or 2000? If they hadn't been doing the conversion (like, say, 3 or 4 years ago when .hlp files were just .hlp files and needed no conversion) what would have happened? Has this happened in the past?

Jesus... that's incredible.

I bag on MS often enough, and they do enough to warrant more than a little derision. But this is just mind boggling. This is just one more good reason why I don't use their products. What a load...