How's that for a politically correct title...

I stared at Microsoft in mid 1999. A few months into my new job a list of bugs in shipping version of Windows was fell into the hands of a news media organization. The news story I read didn't give many specifics about the bugs themselves but instead chose to focus on the shear number of "bugs"; it was in the tens of thousands if I remember correctly. The journalist wrote a real piece of work slamming Microsoft for shipping such a flawed product. The press seemed to have a real scoop and an e-mail came down from an eccentric Microsoft VP to all employees stating that when he found the person responsible for the leak that employment termination would be the least of their problems. Ah, the good old days. By the way, the product was Windows 2000 (the code-base for Windows XP) and without a doubt a breakthrough in OS stability.

Spaces beta was release with ### known bugs. ...Okay, I'm not that stupid. But what constitutes a bug ultimately determines what that number means and since the answer is everything, anything, and nothing the number doesn't really mean jack anyways.

Design suggestions are called bugs as is the interoperability with the flaws in other applications, text that can't be translated into other languages, truncation vs. line wrapping, an HTML element being 1 or more pixels off from design drawings, and so on. That's not to say that these aren't important. Many if not most will fixed before we get out of our beta stage. Bugs here go through a triage process where one or more representatives form each sub team (product management, development, and test) debate each bug's severity and priority against the overall vision and schedule. The meeting is often referred to as "war" and these meetings can get humors or heated. ...Often from my perspective both!

Allow me to address some of the bugs that we consider our top priority as of today. Once we can answer these three questions with "0" we'll move on to addressing usability issues and design requests: 

• How many of these bugs cause data lose? One; during signup a failure in our storage system could cause your space to be stuck in an invalid state. If you're already signed up then you'll never be affected by this bug. Most of the users affected by this problem were employees setting up their spaces in the hours before Spaces was to officially go live.

• How many know, non-mitigated security bugs do we have? One; but the security issue is only perceived. If your a hacker you might think you've found a way to affect someone else space (post entry and customize it) but you'll really end up changing you own space, often "hosing" it (I'm being purposefully vague on the detail of how to reproduce this one).

• How many privacy related bugs? One; if you create a blog entry, upload a photo, and then cancel you'll still post the image to your blog photos folder. This is the scenario where you upload nude pictures of you wife to a blog post just as a joke and then cancel. But now you've been warned!

The above three issues have been fixed in our development environments and will be fixed on the live-site by the end of this week.

Tomorrow I'll post workarounds for three of the most common usability "bugs" encountered by users in this first week following the release of the Spaces beta and give some updates on others that will be in our up comming quick fix.

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Response to Comments: Steve Cornelius

I’m truly glad you found this post. I’ve taken a look at your space and it appears to be in the invalid state that results from this first bug listed above.

The good: We’re testing a fix now that will *probably* correct the few unlucky ones, like yourself, who created a space at just the wrong moment last week.
 
The bad: The earliest this fix will be out is the middle of next week.
 
The ugly: One option you have is to free up you Passport association to this broken space and create a new space. But in doing this you’ll end up losing the space name that you reserved. If you chose this route, proceed to do the following: 

1. Visit spaces.msn.com and login
2. From your error page navigate to http://spaces.msn.com/members/[YOURALIAS]/SpaceSettings.aspx
3. Select “delete the space” at the bottom of the page.

If you wish to hold out for the fix ping me again and I’ll add you space to a list of spaces that we’ll use next week to verify the fix.

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Response to Comments: Scottie R

"scottie" is a good space name; good find. I'll use the availability of your site to help gauge the effectives of the fix next week. Thanks for not giving up on us.

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Response to Comments: To all with broken spaces

A fix has been released and the following previously broken spaces are now up and running:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/sscornelius/
http://spaces.msn.com/members/scottie/
http://spaces.msn.com/members/monde/