Hacker News Reader

Comment by zenexer | Hacker News Reader

I recently had nearly the same exact problem with Microsoft. Security department is a black box—zero communication. A friend working for Microsoft even escalated my case internally at the time, but nobody could do or see anything. My account was eventually unfrozen without so much as an email to notify me, never mind an explanation.

The point is, this issue isn’t limited to Google.

View on HN

The difference is Microsoft doesn't provide you with your phone service do they?

I think this highlights the dangers of bundling all of your services through a single point of failure. Something Google probably is the most known for.

Wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft saw how much money Google saves by not having support, and decided to follow their lead.

They used to have decent support.

With Microsoft, it makes good sense for them to not have any support. They can save a lot of money that way, and there's simply no downside. Does it anger customers? Sure, but who cares? It's not like the customers are going to abandon Microsoft.

With Google, there is at least a chance they could move to the Apple ecosystem.

Why wouldn't I abandon MSFT? There is google docs, chromebooks and mac os already. Only a small power user use case needs to stick with office specifically nowadays.

Lots of people already abandoned them years ago. It might be the sort of thing that isn't a problem... up until the moment the firm goes out of business.

Last I checked, Windows is still the OS of choice for consumers, businesses, the space station (check the recent HN post and zoom in on one of the ThinkPads), etc. So MSFT still has a good chokehold on modern computing.

> So MSFT still has a good chokehold on modern computing.

Many of us breathe quite freely (at work we're free to us any OS as long we don't bother IT.) It has like this for a little more than half of of my 10 last years (notable exceptions: 3.5 years as sysadmin on old system running Windows, 4 months consulting and 3 months with a boss who demanded everything ran Linux.)

Oh: and almost everyone demands we host on Linux or on cloud.

As I said above, everyone who would abandon MS, already has (this apparently includes you). Everyone who hasn't yet, never will. So at this point, MS has nothing to lose by treating their customers like crap. The people who still use MS desktops certainly aren't going to switch to Linux, and the people who use MS servers and other business products are locked in and probably not interested in changing anyway because all their IT expertise is invested in that ecosystem. The people who demand you run everything on Linux aren't MS customers at this point, so MS doesn't care about pissing them off.

Oh, I hear people complain all the time about them and how they're going to switch to Linux (usually because of Win10's spying), but I actually have yet to see anyone make the jump. It's all just hot air.

Anyone who actually would abandon MSFT already did so, many years ago. People who haven't abandoned them by now, will never do so.

It’s always been questionable.

Nowadays even Premier is garbage. The guidance from a TAM is to log calls before 10AM local time, so that the support don’t queue you to a desk that will pretend to contact you after you’re gone home.

The funniest thing is that if you answer after hours, you get someone not prepared to do anything, as he’s there to attempt contact to push the call out so they hit the SLA.

i don't know but last august i had an issue with my surface and i talked with chat support as well as phone support without any issues.

There are so many companies that could make customer service an absolute breeze compared to the nightmare they have created by just offering customer service chat with reps that are actually empowered to do something.

Of the few companies I know that have chat support, a very select few can do anything more than apologize and give you a phone number to call or place to open a ticket.

As an Xbox developer, Microsoft support is actually pretty good. They reply to questions pretty quickly and when needed you can even speak directly to the engineers responsible for the parts of the system. But then again, I imagine Xbox development team and their number of customers(developers) is tiny compared to the rest of Microsoft, so they can allow this kind of tight support.

>They used to have decent support.

In 2001 it was apparently on par with the "Psychic Friends Hotline" - https://slashdot.org/story/01/04/27/1715203/microsoft-tech-s...

Archive mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20000424210912/www.bmug.org/news...

My experience with Microsoft is very positive one. I had issue once with Windows on my old gaming machine. I called them, regular support couldn't help me, but they scheduled call with their dev center or something. I got to talk with very knowledgable lady, who not only directed me what to do to resolve problem, but also explained well what was the issue and all made perfect sense.

I was genuinely impressed. I think this was because my issue was not trivial and I got to talk with developers.

I had a problem with an old USD10 purhase through their Windows store. They called me back and sorted the problem the same afternoon. Was genuinely impressed, haven't seen anything like that since IBM PC support in the 90ties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com