Being a Vista user, I’m used to getting smacked in the face, and yet even I was curious when Vista wanted to download a 56 megabyte update — is it installing something completely new?

So naturally I checked out the Knowledge base article:

The words “Friendster,” “Klum,” “Nazr,” “Obama,” and “Racicot” are not recognized when you check the spelling in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008

Oh, noes! That’s serious indeed. And worse: it applies to such critical applications as Windows Mail! — The Office apps seem to “correctly” accept all of these words.

So to re-iterate, 5 words weighing in at 34 bytes compresses down to 56 megs. Giving a compression factor of ~10^jeeze-louise-people!

Seriously guys, I don’t want to hear any more about how XML adds a lot of overhead.

p.s. I’m pretty sure I know why this happened. The PM in charge of this had two choices: EITHER have a dev write code to do a diff, and get an SDET to test it which could take a long time, and get slagged in the .01% of cases where something goes wrong OR just throw resources at it, in this case the bandwidth of millions of people. It might have actually been the right choice from their perspective, but it betrays some poor design somewhere.

p.p.s. Standard disclaimer: I used to work for the Borg as a PM, but I know nothing about this particular team.