by Aaronn on 1/16/22, 8:14 AM with 224 comments
by dEnigma on 1/16/22, 10:27 AM
by userbinator on 1/16/22, 9:58 AM
That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible?
On the other hand, what I can find in the news about internal protests at MS are all seemingly SJW-ish topics, and absolutely none about the quality of the products themselves. I think that alone says a lot about who's working there and what they actually care about doing --- which is clearly not improving their products. The people who do care about that are being heavily outnumbered, and perhaps a lot of them have already deemed MS to be unsalvageable and left.
I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.
by cjbgkagh on 1/16/22, 2:00 PM
Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.
Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only.
Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.
by perlgeek on 1/16/22, 11:07 AM
It's a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have done something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don't change anything.
by gigel82 on 1/16/22, 9:20 AM
A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.
by matsemann on 1/16/22, 11:51 AM
Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me roll back to Win10 last week. "Just give it time", even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).
by posnet on 1/16/22, 10:16 AM
I wonder if a MSFT employee was typing a response to you, but accidentally clicked edit on your comment and it overwrote your content before they realised what they have done, then panicked and just hit submit.
by sundvor on 1/16/22, 11:29 AM
How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience.
I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such.
Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out.
I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot?
I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store.
(Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)
by azalemeth on 1/16/22, 9:13 AM
Image management is a lot easier when you own the platform it needs to be managed on. Microsoft used to have a User Voice board. I wrote a complaint at length about Teams being a steaming hot pile of <Unicode poo emoji>. Lots of other people did too. They're retiring it now and have "ended their partnership" with user voice
by XCabbage on 1/16/22, 11:49 AM
Moderators on web forums everywhere need to learn that this kind of editing, when done without a publicly visible indication that the post was edited against the nominal author's will, is unacceptable. I've gotten into this argument on Stack Exchange in the past (although fortunately on Stack Overflow at least the mods already have a policy against this - they can delete a comment or leave it standing but may not put words into someone's mouth). It's especially bad when, as is the case here, the edited comment reflects poorly on the author.
It's not just discourteous, it's a tort in at least the UK where I live (namely a violation of the "moral right" against "false attribution") and likely many other jurisdictions too. Do this enough and eventually somebody sufficiently litigious will sue you, and you'll deserve it.
by olvy0 on 1/16/22, 3:08 PM
But no.
During the last year, a Microsoft PM called Gloridel Morales has thoroughly gone through hundreds of Developer Community suggestion for Azure Devops, and closed each and every one of them. Quite rudely. Just check out each and every link in [0]
Some were suggestion from fellow Microsoft people.
She did it using the following eyebrow-raising text, quoted below, suggesting either that Gloridel Morales and her team have no idea how to manage themselves by prioritizing a backlog of requests, or that her paycheck/review depends on having a clean backlog.
Thank you for taking the time to share your feature suggestion. Due to the high volume of suggestions in our queue, we are not able to respond personally to every suggestion. As a result, we depend on the community to validate the request via votes and comments. Suggestions that the community doesn't prioritize, we close out in order to maintain a manageable list of suggestions. It is our policy to close suggestions that are inactive in the community based on no change to customer comments or votes in the last 90+ days. We love your enthusiasm for our product and hope you will continue submitting ideas for the community to validate. [1]
The bit about "suggestions that are inactive for 90 days" might have looked good on Github with its somewhat primitive but sensible community around issue discussions, but the developercommunity site is inundated with garbage issues, making it almost impossible to search for proper issues.
That's just for Azure though. I must say that a couple of bugs I opened there for the Microsoft C++ compiler actually got prioritized and fixed in the last couple of years. Others were ignored.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D...
[1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-previous-b...
by polotics on 1/16/22, 9:13 AM
by forgotmypw17 on 1/16/22, 9:37 AM
Not as polished as Win95 or 2000, but at least everything is consensual.
by xkbarkar on 1/16/22, 2:59 PM
Microsoft is remarkably terrible. Riddled with the hierarchies and politics of IBM or Oracle, but the lack the self awareness that they are slow and terrible. And Azure solutions are not good at all. They have truly bizarre backwards apis and SDK. Imagine you do not have admin access to the company DC. Now, your Azure k8s cluster pods need rw access to an azure keyvault that you created.
It is entirely possible to do this, but enjoy the hell ride there.
My hats off to you if you manage to figure it out in 1 workday.
by rvba on 1/16/22, 11:34 AM
Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? Windows is supposed to be the productivity system and it kills productivity now.
by phkahler on 1/16/22, 2:22 PM
by hdjjhhvvhga on 1/16/22, 1:23 PM
by snielson on 1/16/22, 3:02 PM
It looks like they have imported feedback from other places such as the feedback hub.
by Yizahi on 1/16/22, 12:34 PM
Since Win10 is a pretty much perfectly working and a very functional OS, we might as well stay on it till the EOS,and then upgrade to this 10S kadaver-renamed-11.
by jrootabega on 1/16/22, 11:02 AM
by freediver on 1/16/22, 4:13 PM
Having worked in a large organization I know that the more hops this information has to go through to get processed, the more likely it will end in limbo. Granted, so far limbo happened in 100% of my opened cases but I could clearly see an employee willing to help and probably being limited by the internal org structure which is not optimized for reacting to user feedback (sadly same goes for most other big tech companies).
by pndy on 1/16/22, 1:21 PM
I expect that at some point in future, perhaps included within some W11 build that changes users workflow once again, the "never combine" taskbar feature will be added back and presented as a breakthrough.
by cloudengineer94 on 1/16/22, 1:11 PM
I can't wait for the day I'll never have to use a Microsoft service again in my life
by dathinab on 1/16/22, 12:38 PM
No sane system should allow that.
Censoring (umm moderating) a comment, sure.
Visible blacking out part of an comment, jikes but maybe ok.
But editing a comment?
Absolutely no go.
The Microsoft employee basically committed identity theft!
by mongol on 1/16/22, 10:59 AM
by valyagolev on 1/16/22, 11:27 AM
by tekstar on 1/16/22, 2:37 PM
by moffkalast on 1/16/22, 1:15 PM
General.. Kenobi.
by suction on 1/16/22, 9:19 AM
Yet the topic the author of this article and apparently hundreds of others are describing as a show-stopping miss of Windows 11: The ability to see open documents ungrouped on the task bar. That's not a "bug" which needs to be addressed directly by developers.
And really? That alone is a reason to go through a harrowing downgrade process to an earlier OS version?
Not a regular Windows user, but I found that feature to be almost toxic UX - the open documents on the task bar all looked the same, and not different enough from the app icon, to make it a time / click-saving feature. I ended up clicking on each one until the correct window was in front.
It surely was worse UX than simply cycling through all open windows by the keyboard shortcut. Which isn't exactly power-user knowledge.
by tasogare on 1/16/22, 9:06 AM
by usbqk on 1/16/22, 9:28 AM
by bradwood on 1/16/22, 1:17 PM
Vote with your wallet and get the fuck off Windows and all the attendant bullshit that comes with it as soon as possible.