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Comment by chandmk | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, Microsoft login echo system sucks big time in the context of office. You have no idea which URL to use to login to office 365. Between login/logout/timeout/other office apps/personal accounts/business accounts/forgot password workflows browser redirects to various URLs at least a dozen times. And you keep seeing new URLs I am wondering how less tech savvy people are coping with their authentication workflow.

Depending on how you are authenticating you will see URLs with various words in them.

loginlive office.com outlook.office.com office365 outlook.com account.live products.office.com login.microsoftonline.com

and this list goes on and on... I am wondering if they made an announcement that they are fixing their messy authentication workflow instead spending resources in rewriting office in JavaScript, that would have gotten this much attention on hacker news.

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When you have multiple accounts it's even worse - especially if you've got a work account with domain authentication, a private one with 2-factor, a sub-account email under another...

I'm usually pretty savvy about typing information into a rando web form, but with windows logins it's a major chore to figure out what exactly I'm looking at.

I hope they staff up to meet the 18-month rewrite cycle for modern JS apps. I'll stick with my 2003 version on the desktop for now.

This reality bit me when my Skype account was rolled into Microsoft's Live/Outlook/something system. Both accounts had the same email address, and suddenly my Skype account was no longer accessible. I finally figured out how to delete the non-Skype account, but it was a major pain and I had to wait 60 days for it to finally go away.

I often go to outlook 365 to view mail and it logs me out. No reason. I didn't go to the logout url. Just logs me out. Happens almost every day now. Sometimes I get a content corrupted error. I have no idea what that even means and I've been doing web development for over a decade. There are at least two ways to reset your password and they each have different, incompatible password requirements with each other. And finally, I'm asked to change my password constantly and to follow stupid password rules as if my random 32 character string needs rotating. If this is the new Microsoft, it's just like the old Microsoft: absolute fucking shit. Garbage that now spies on us. We switched to MS email from zoho, a system that looks like it was last updated in the 90's and it's an absolute total disaster in comparison. I guess they're too busy rewriting everything badly in Javascript to care about actual, real user and UI issues, however. That's another stupid idea in of itself, but since I'm using a version of Office that no longer even gets security updates, it's irrelevant as I will likely never upgrade. If this is the changed Microsoft, I prefer 90's Microsoft. At least they didn't pretend they were something they were not, nor pretend like they actually care about users or developers, something they clearly don't.

All public facing URLs should go through Marketing. On macOS, when an Apple app contacts an Apple service and my firewall shows me the domain/host, it almost always looks very thoughtful and pretty. Compare that to MS Office on macOS. So many different requested domains with no thought and coherence behind them.

Have you ever looked at a WebObjects/iTunes URL?

My favorite thing I noticed recently; if you buy a book on the Microsoft Store and open it in a web browser, the url is hosted on zune.net. What year is this?!

Oh it gets better. If you look at the appx package names for "Groove music" and a couple others they're still Microsoft.Zune prefixed

Thats because the team that wrote Groove Music (and Movies & TV) originated from the Zune desktop player and Windows Media Center. In fact it still used a lot of core code from the Zune days for things like library management and DRM.

Source: former dev on the team.

The Zune desktop app has to be the best music player I've ever used, it was awesome. I continued to use it long after I moved on from my Zune HD. Sad to see something so awesome abandoned.

The UWP music player is slowly but surely shaping up into something just as good, if it weren't for the comical UI density.

Appx package names seem almost entirely uninteresting and most consumers will never look at them. Why would anyone bother changing them?

Disclosure: Microsoft employee, but not on Groove (or anything related to appx packages for that matter)

The thing is, they created the name when Zune was already dead lol

Doubt it. Even if the app wasn’t published previously, it likely descended from existing code that already carried the name.

I work on a codebase that still carries product names that stopped being meaningful almost a decade ago. No value in renaming across the codebase and it’d be expensive because of how much code has to be touched.

It's a huge problem for MS login flows and Google's login flows. As they absorbed various disparate products with various logins and tried to force a unified login flow on all of them they end up with a mess.

For Google, see the very many failings here: https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v. Someone (me?) should do the same for MS.

Everybody I support at my office gets super confused about this. Add on top of that local vs web versions of every app, plus UWP vs standard desktop applications (OneNote, OneDrive). Plus naming conventions that change, and applications that have 70% overlap. Just use the classic portal for this, and the new portal for that...

Heaven help you if you have multiple accounts. Logging in and out remains dicey after all these years.

Recently got caught in a loop of trying to create an Office 365 account and being told that my email is already in use, then trying to say that I forgot my password and was told that my email is not associated with an account.

I wonder at what point the number of domains and subdomains that you can log into becomes its own phishing vector. At least with most services, you can look in the URL and pretty quickly know whether or not you're in the right place!

Some login servers that you go through, like Skype's, share the same IP address that many "anti-telemetry tools for Windows (10)" are blocking.

That has to be a deliberate choice on the part of Microsoft.

They recently improved this to make it easier. I think they realize that it can get pretty complicated.

When will that be rolling out? Hopefully soon since as of this morning it is still a nightmare.

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