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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

I had the same experience. Suddenly Emacs Gnus reader stopped working, about 11:00 on a Friday morning. I posted the bug and had a reply from Lars Ingebrigtsen with an explanation and a workaround by 13:00. I think it was fixed by the beginning of the following week.

My experience of trying to get help from Microsoft on the other hand is, well let's just say not quite so impressive; they kept me on hold for 45 minutes once and never did solve my problem.

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Back in the days Microsoft would have amazing customer support. And I'm talking about "API customers", many times I've seen them go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process. I guess that doesn't work as well at their current scale, or they care less because they're not building up market share.

> go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process

This kind of thing probably doesn't even scale with itself, since there are only so many acrobatics your code can go through before no one can even understand why it's doing something, let alone add new workarounds. So the first K broken programs get special treatment, and the others face a much higher bar to get the same treatment.

They once shipped my company a custom MSVCRT.DLL to fix a crash bug in a third-party application under heavy load. True, it was a bug in the C runtime itself, but they got us a fix for it about a day after we (along with the third party) got in touch with them.

Just a few years later my team had to contact them for a BSOD that kept happening after one of their patches. We were put off for about a week before throwing our hands up on it.

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