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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

If that, been an enterprise customer with a company that is a gold partner and been using Office365 for 7 years now - it's down so often we stopped monitoring it, easily the most flaky, unreliable, slow and poorly managed online service I've personally used. (Words are my own, not necessarily those of my employeer(s) etc...)

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It takes them forever to fix stuff as well. For about 6 months it had “Reply Al” instead of “Reply All” on OWA. Trivial but it shows how crap their QA is.

> “Reply Al”

Maybe they're just fans of Paul Simon[1]:

  If you'll be my bodyguard
  I can be your long lost pal
  I can call you Betty
  And Betty when you write me
  You can call me Al

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-gYOrU8bA

Great reference :)

They fired their testers. Now users - both paid and free are testers. Then they go extra-miles to ignore user/tester feedback.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-23/microsoft...

And also it shows they don’t use their own products (the Reply All typo should shock the guy who owns the UI). The one software the dev team does use is Visual Studio, and it shows. It keeps evolving, not frozen in time in the 90s, the evolutions make sense, they are user centric, pretty much every version is a visible improvement over the previous version (except vs 2013). It’s basically the exact opposite of Office.

That theory breaks on Windows though. Is Microsoft a MacOS shop?

About Microsoft not eating their own dog food.

Nadella used an iphone secretly for a long time and then openly and then finally killed Windows Phone.

And it's also the only major Microsoft software that doesn't use a ribbon!

You still can't actually change your billing country in Office 365 without starting over with a new account. Even support can't do it.

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...

It's a complete shitshow.

The same goes for Azure. Set up the wrong country / VAT / thing? Better migrate all your cloud services to a new account. No dropdown, no changes, no nothing.

It's the same on Azure, so I created a new account to circumvent that issue and then they randomly banned me for doing that.

The same goes for Google Checkout / Pay / ... or whatever it is called this quarter.

My company has a subscription and the search functionality mysteriously and randomly doesn't work at times, or is really slow... I have to guess which one it is _this_ time when it starts acting up...

I find the same issue, on several occasions I've done some wireshark / tcpdumps on Outlook (desktop) traffic and it was quite shall we say 'messy', additionally as we notice emails sent via Office365 at times go missing or just never arrive (with no NDR), a couple of us started inspecting headers of Office365 sent emails and found them to be bouncing around internal Microsoft servers with broken certificates and NTP so out of sync that exchange online (or whatever component does this for their system) moved on to another server until it got to one that was working.

That's weird because I and all my clients use o365 and it works fine

It leaves very little place for interpretation(works for me) when most of these reports have a kb/issue tracking# in microsoft dashboard - check the comments for issue numbers.

I find most of the time when Office365 (especially the mail or calendaring component aka Exchange online) is down - their status pages all say everything is fine, if you contact support no matter what you tell or provide to them they want you to reinstall Outlook.

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