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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft are selling an incredible suite of products and services. They are dependable, responsible and innovative. When I choose to use their platforms, I know they are taking me seriously, that they have a very long product support horizon, that they are embracing openness, have excellent documentation and integration with their tools (one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical).

I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.

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Do others have similar experience? I'm not a fan of Microsoft products however I sometimes have to use them or want to give a try to something like Azure, and so far my experience has been pretty bad. I had to contact their customer service in 2 cases and in both cases they couldn't help me and told me to create a new account (one case was me asking to change billing country in Azure so that I could provide credit card from another country). Also in both cases I had to go through a few emails and a few phone calls and even after they told me they can't do anything, they kept calling me just to check whether I'm satisfied with their solution (!) so that they could close the ticket in their system.

I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places.

Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.)

Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.

I agree, though I wouldn't say my experience with Azure has been "profoundly awful". Not all that great is more like it. I'm commenting because you mentioned the horizontal blade scrolling thing. For me, that has to be some of the worst UI/UX. Drives me absolutely nuts.

GCP is quickly becoming my favorite. The UI/UX of the web console is light years ahead of either AWS or Azure. The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with AWS as my primary provider for now, but for new projects the bias is GCP. Most of the services I have used on GCP are well documented and easy to get around. Compare this to the AWS experience where documentation is often non-existent or out of date or the product itself just feels incomplete and broken.

>The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air.

I've found that some areas of the GCP docs are fantastic and some are appallingly bad. Two examples I dealt with last week that I particularly hated were trying to find a good resource on unit testing parts of a Cloud Dataflow and how examply to access the private key for a service account on Appengine Standard. (The switch from Java 7 to 8 really fucked this up).

There seem to be two versions of a LOT of Google's APIs and it's often not clear which one is the correct one to use.

Another annoying issue is that I'll be looking at the Java documentation on something and will suddenly be told to run some Python commands (which mean installing python and PIP and a bunch of other stuff) just to get some Java thing working.

But, all this aside, I agree it's miles better than the last time I looked at Azure.

My experience with Azure was awful. I moved a desktop app with 5000 paying customers to SAAS and wanted to not have to worry about the database management side and wanted to use azure. So not a huge business by any means, but growth potential is good.

I signed up, started to look around, maybe a test table and that was it. It was end of the day. Next day, account deleted for breaking the TOS.

Tried to contact support, few days later, got a reply saying I had broken the TOS. Yes I know. But how? What did I do? You broke the rules. No I didn't. I am from the EU (personal details / bank etc) but live abroad, this sometimes causes issues when I say I am from a country that doesn't match my IP so I ask if this was the issue ? No reply, I was just blanked after that.

I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package.

But all of my experiences (up through "startup" size), and virtually all the stories I hear from below "major corporation", are terrible. Endless compatibility issues, awful interfaces, flatly inaccurate documentation, and support which is more time-consuming than GCP's approach of "buzz off" but equally unhelpful.

> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package.

I work at what has been all-in Windows-.Net-Office enterprise, and despite an existing investment in Azure AD that we’re staying with for now, the experience with trying to work with Azure has been such that our comprehensive cloud transition effort is centered around AWS (which seems like it is going to have a side effect of making us less of a Windows and .NET shop, as well.)

> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant.

I do not. I imagine that there is a point at which the decision-makers and the Azure sales team can have many lunches and have many Serious Conversations.

The further away purchase power is from implementation responsibility, the more likely one is to wind up hands-on with something as immediately-obviously deficient as Azure.

All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). Office works well. OneDrive used to work well, now it's just "okay", but still fine. My Surface Go is a champ and feels great, despite being silly cheap. My Microsoft Ergonomics keyboard + mouse are still going strong, and is still my all-time favourite Ergo keyboard. Xbox One X is a nice piece of kit. Azure can be kind of overwhelming, but it works well enough and is far less overwhelming than AWS, despite offering mostly similar services.

Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings.

Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).

And Microsoft botches acquisitions

Not all of them. They've done well with Mojang.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot. Their handling of Minecraft has been mostly great, from both a product and software quality perspective. (except for the modding stuff)

They have, but they've also been helped by the former center of Mojang's fanbase's cult-of-personality going completely off the deep end. If Notch was still "that quirky dude making little games here and there" instead of a chud screaming on Twitter all the time, I tend to think there would be more (unreasonable, but extant) dissatisfaction with Microsoft's handling of Minecraft.

> Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy).

I had an annoying problem last weekend trying to get ray tracing enabled in a video game. After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update and the "windows is up to date" message is a lie. Turns out I was on win10-1803 instead of 1809 and had to download a separate *.exe to upgrade. These types of problems don't happen with a modern (sane) package manager.

There's also a few other problems with windows that stop me from thinking it's great: no pseudoterminal, rigid window manager, registry nightmares, possibly more.

> After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update

It does, graphics drivers do auto-update (unless you've manually disabled it on your system).

They just update slowly, you'll get the latest long-term driver from your device manufacturer / OEM, -- you won't instantly get things like "nVidia Game Ready Drivers, now with experimental ray-tracing" that come out every two weeks or so.

Windows has a Pseudoterminal. It's a relatively recent addition.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...

Woohoo! Finally...

Adding my own anedocte, I tried to read some of their training material, the processes of creating an account was incredibly annoying and un-intuitive. Something that even "Web 1.0" companies back in 1997 had already figured out.

Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.

Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.

My experience falls in line with yours.

I had an MVP in azure web services. I had 20 users in my "beta" phase that were using the product and giving me feedback.

One day, I got a message that I need to update my billing method. Strange, I was using mostly free tier with one paid component and the card on file was good til 2022, but ok. I put in another card because maybe there's something wrong with the system.

The next day I get a call that the site isn't working from one of my beta users. I log in and all of my azure resources are gone.

I immediately try to reach out to azure support via various mechanisms (their support chat, email, twitter, etc). Funny enough, twitter is always the fastest way to get support. Just write that something bad happened and tag their product, and you get someone who can communicate. However, they just redirected me to their support channel.

Two days go by and I get a template email response. I have an email chain going back and forth over the week to try and get the resources restored.

In the end, they tell me that not only will they be unable to restore my resources (a production database. the backups were all "gone" because the resource didn't exist anymore), but that I had to create a new azure account to use any services because of how screwed up my account got.

I tried escalating, but received the same response.

Now I just go with AWS. I'd even go with google as long as they don't delete my production database.

I've previous experience as a Devops engineer for a Large company which at the time was one of the larger customers of Azure (as in they'd put our company on the marketing materials). Support was obviously better when we could get a turn around time of <1 day to talk to an engineer that worked on a piece of infrastructure. Still wasn't a pleasant experience.

It's really unfortunate, all of this. I know that there are so many teams that are putting out great products, but their cloud approach is awful. _Some_ of the offerings are actually pretty nice, but combined with UI churn, the worst support (I'd rather take googles non-existent support as long as my data doesn't get deleted) of all cloud providers (IME) and empty apologies on the internet (you can say you're sorry, but I don't believe you unless you act on the mistake), I don't see myself going back anytime soon.

Typically in the free tiers there is a caveat in the service agreement that it is not meant for production services and your resources can be shut down at any time. It's important to read the fine print.

This is good to know. I'll definitely have to check more fine print when deciding to have certain services on lower tier.

In my case, I was paying for the database and the object storage, both of which had their contents (db data and backups) lost.

>Do others have similar experience?

As a habitual Microsoft hater who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s being constitutionally incapable of writing the company name without a $, yes I have.

They still suffer from an appalling lack of taste and poor design sensibilities, but their enterprise level products and services are top notch. And I'm developing a new appreciation for a business model that involves transparently charging me a known price in exchange for a known service. They could still get better at that though. They still have too many enterprise clients over a barrel.

I had a small app that pulled my agenda (calendar events) from an Exchange server. But my company switched to office 365. I spent a few days trying to figure out where I need to register and what API to use, etc so I can rewrite my app to work with Office 365. Now I don't have an app showing my agenda.

Having been forced to dabble in the Microsoft world I have in general found documentation to, at least in some cases, be very sparse. Or maybe I've just not found the right resources?

For example, I was looking for some documentation on how to tune the CLR, and performance tips for writing C# in general. In Java there are lots of books on the topic, and I know of some blogs on the JVM internals, but for .Net all I could find was one small (selfpublished?) book. I'm not sure it would be fair for me to judge the state of the blogs and online resources, but at least I did not find what I was looking for at the time.

Similarly, I had to try some stuff with Service Fabric, and it felt more or less impossible to get it working with the publicly available documentation. I'm really not sure how they think one is supposed to learn how to use that technology.

Lastly I've been dealing with shipping and releasing natively compiled binaries for Windows etc, and here I've found online resources, but mostly unofficial ones. This whole area seems rather hairy and it feels a bit scary to rely on some random blogpost or stackoverflow answers for what (not) to do.

In general from what I've seen is that the Microsoft documentation is very much How-To focused. But there is often a lack for more comprehensive documentation like a man page, and in particular I've found it hard to get "sharp" information, like what are the exact guarantees for this thing.

>they are embracing openness

I've been personally burned over and over and over again by Microsoft "embracing openness" and I will never trust them again on this point.

What is Microsoft? It's not a singular person born in the 80s and is now 40 years old. It's individual people who have come and gone over decades. The same people who were ultimately responsible fpr "personally burning you over and over again" are either retired or happily leading at other companies that you support. And new people with fresh ideas and fresh ideals may have replaced them.

It's not a sudden replacement, the old guard are naturally going to promote people who have the same mindset.

> one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical).

I read this initially as a red flag as it looks like they are coupling Azure with Windows/VS development. A better indication of how serious they are in creating an open platform would be how magical the experience is for people not using MS blessed tools.

I think many people working on development tools outside MS either don't understand value of debuggers, or don't have enough resources to implement them well.

I've been programming for living for 20 years now, did/doing various stuff including mobile, embedded, videogames incl. console, desktop, servers, a bit of web. In my experience, debuggers only work well on microsoft platforms.

Integration is simple on surface, press F5 and it will launch with debugger. Implementation of that can be very complex, launching may involve complicated deployment (over network, USB or worse), starting virtual machines, connecting multiple TCP streams using weird protocol each, and so on.

It works consistently for MS platforms, even very old ones like WinCE. It's broken consistently for the rest of them, even Android or iOS which have larger install base than Windows.

I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.

The underdog has to do better to compete.

https://www.adweek.com/creativity/how-avis-brilliantly-pione...

Let’s not occupy ourselves with establishing narratives. These are all stories and perspectives from which to view the world.

Microsoft has huge swaths of critical legacy systems held hostage. Governments, etc. How many of your tax dollars go to Microsoft? How much of their government influence is due to superiority of product versus lock-in, etc?

This comment turned out an interesting experiment in internet crowd dynamics. I have over 40 upvotes at this point, but all the replies to my post have been more-or-less negative. My guess is that the people who are happy with Microsoft or generally agree can't be bothered to reply, while the few who've been burnt would take this as an opportunity to take out their anger (very justifiably so).

Most of us know internet opinions behave in this manner where you mostly get to hear discontent, but it's still fascinating to experience it first hand.

(I'm not in any way criticizing the replies to my post, which have been diligently written with real life examples and definitely given me some things to think about)

Well, its certainly much easier to upvote than to write a comment - you don't have to actually justify your upvote nor will the words be scrutinized. If you feel happy with MSFT products, you can just upvote, but if you don't like them you can't just say "Well, I don't agree!".

And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon - there is no incentive for some to downvote a comment like yours at this point, because nearly all replies are negative! If a comment thread surfaces some bad things about someone you don't like, and it becomes popular, you actually want it to become more popular isn't it?

> And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon

There may be another factor as well. I don't downvote comments based on whether or not I agree with them (if I disagree enough to want to express that, I just make my own comment saying so). I downvote comments if I feel that they were egregious in some way (overly combative, insulting, nonsensical, etc.)

I may be the only one who votes like this, though.

I think that your comment turned into a "topic" of "opinions on azure". Perhaps it's that topic, rather than the content of your single starting comment, that is being upvoted.

I thought that the subcomments listing out experiences was valuable to me. I would be conflicted on downvoting your comment though, because it would hide the subcomments that I do feel are valuable to have visible.

To clarify, I don't think you wrote anything off topic or bad for discussion (which is why I would downvote something). Even though we have different perspectives, I feel both are valuable to have a comprehensive view.

One of my colleagues in a previous job had this super boring but very critical task - making sure the financial numbers entered in the system are correct. One mistake could cause serious problems for the company.

My boss (CTO) once remarked - "we never hear from or about Patrice, she must be doing a fantastic job!"

Point being, when things work, it is rare that people talk about it (like my boss), they just take it for granted. When things don't work though, that is a different story.

I suppose it is just human nature.

I've had similar experiences on HN, and funnily enough the last time was for a comment that was fairly supportive of Microsoft. I got absolutely roasted in the comments, but received a ton of upvotes from the silent majority.

There are three areas I'd disagree with you though.

The first is Microsoft's Surface line of tablets and laptops. I literally cannot find a kind word to say about the (very expensive) Surface Book devices we bought en masse about 18 months ago. They are awful[1] and we are already starting to phase them out as a result. It makes no sense because Microsoft can clearly do hardware well: for example, I have no complaints about my Xbox One X - it's all round great.

The second may substantially be connected to the first, and that's Windows 10. I increasingly hate using it because I find it slow, finicky, and unresponsive/a serious resource hog. So much of the time my laptop is running hot and draining its battery because Windows is doing something or other not related to what I'm working on.

The third is Microsoft Teams. The functionality it offers is good and, for VOIP and video calls, it's probably second only to Zoom so does get a thumbs up from me there. However, it's painfully slow to switch views, doesn't support multiple windows (so you can't sensibly look at chat and wiki at the same time), takes an age to start up, and behaves like an absolute moron when it comes to switching networks or losing and regaining network connectivity (usually requires a restart of the app).

[1] Underpowered, overpriced, poor battery life, run very hot, ropey WiFi, poor speakers that are insufficiently loud, crappy trackpad, only a single display port built in, poorly designed/laid out ports, unreliable (and often weirdly slow) charging, drains battery within 12 - 18 hours whilst asleep, I could go on (and on). In short: DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU HATE YOURSELF!

I wholeheartedly agree that the Surface (4 Pro for me) is an absolute garbage, but not for the lack of trying. It’s a good product in concept but requires a level of polish and software/hardware integration that - IMHO - only Apple has.

Microsoft teams is featured packed. But some ui decisions and bugs won't let it be great. And the problems are not only on the desktop version. On android I receive a notification only to open the app and the message hasn't loaded yet, and doesn't load for at least 20 more seconds.

I have a morning meeting in teams that I often wind up calling into on my phone + bluetooth in my car... it often borks out and won't stay connected without force stopping the app. That's about my biggest complaint with teams... I also think the desktop version should use the material/android interface for starting a new thread... it's to easy to think you are replying but actually starting a new thread. Looking/finding old messages is pretty nasty/hard too...

Interesting. I've never really had any of those issues with my surface book. I might not recommend it if the tablet mode won't see use, though.

I do have the original, so I suppose if you got the newer ones things may have changed, but... heat is high but not problematically so, wifi works without noticeable issues, trackpad works fine. I really can't figure out what you're talking about with the ports - 2 usb + sd card reader on one side, charger + mini display port on the other, all bog standard. Not a spectacular selection, but not poor design/layout from my experience.

Charging... the cable can have issues, especially with bending near the connection, but charging itself has always been fine (assuming no cable issues).

Battery life is spectacular when you set it to focus on that, and performance is good when you aim for that. I've never really liked 'balanced' settings, because then it's either not powerful enough (usually games, I think I've needed it in perf mode for data processing once or twice) or chewing through too much battery for what I'm doing (programming while on the go is not particularly demanding, but I want time, so I set it up for battery life). I do rarely use it without the base, because the battery life then is poor - being able to connect it backwards is very nice for managing that in some cases, but makes it quite heavy for handheld use.

Possibly connected, my experience with Windows 10 is great on my Surface Book, but it takes forever to boot on my desktop (with an admittedly rather old processor/hdd). Windows defender, on the other hand, is definitely bloated and can be a pain to keep under control if I haven't used the Book for a while.

Re: Windows 10, I've found the LTSC (formerly LTSB) version to be much more tolerable. Still bloated compared to, say, Windows 2000/XP, but much better than even Windows 7, let alone 8/8.1 or non-LTSC 10.

I have mixed feelings... I think Azure in general, and o365 specifically are pretty nice. I do think Azure is a bit overpriced, but they do offer a lot of discounts in a lot of ways, which offsets it for some. They've been a bit better than most at adapting to changes in tech, and if you put Windows aside for a moment, are overall moving in a very nice direction.

Windows' changes have been pretty bad in terms of invasiveness since Windows 8/10. I just really don't like several bits of it. I think LSW is pretty nice, but iirc SystemD support is probably over a year off still, and docker/podman still a ways off. Windows vs Linux containers and Docker has seriously muddied the waters so to speak.

MS, like most corporations isn't a single entity... there's various child entities with some areas of cooperation between them. I'm glad that Windows no longer steers the ship and appreciate a lot of the efforts I've seen. Open tooling and platforms in particular. I love VS Code, the Azure Data Studio (or whatever it's called) is nice and progressing for cross-platform. I do think its' weird that Teams is the odd man out as an electron app from MS without a proper Linux release. Moving Edge to blink/chromium is a good move overall.

I'm anywhere from luke warm to positive on MS in general. That said, it isn't generally my first choice for a lot of things (outside o365). I'm often frustrated with working in Windows at work after about 6 years working outside windows. I use bash (from git) with windows, and there's quirks, but less than with LSW.

I really want them to succeed as I think with the current leadership and direction a better MS means better options and tools for all. I wish they'd redouble their efforts on linux support for everything around Office and Teams though. I'd also like to be able to build/deploy a damned SQL project without windows too.

In 2 years, by my own estimation, it will be a very different world running Windows as a developer and at that point it may become my favorite environment for building Linux apps of all things. MS/Windows progresses while Mac stagnates and alienates its creative/development/pro users more and more.

People with less than 500 karma can't downvote though, so it's possible to end up with 40 upvotes even if the majority of people dislike Microsoft.

Let's say 200 people wanted to vote on your post. 100 people with > 500 karma vote 45% up 55% down ending up with -10 karma total. 100 people with < 500 karma vote 45% up but the other 55% can't downvote = 35 total upvotes.

I consider Microsoft more trustworthy than the other big tech companies because they behave in a more trustworthy fashion by (generally) being forthright about what they do and what their intentions are.

That said, I avoid Microsoft products because I don't like what they do and what their intentions are.

The difference between my attitude toward Microsoft and (for example) Facebook is that I make my decisions about Microsoft based on their products and services. I make my decisions about Facebook, etc., based on the fact that I don't trust them even a little.

This means that Microsoft has the advantage -- if they cared whether or not I am on board with them (and they have no reason to), they could change my mind very quickly by altering their products.

Facebook, etc., could not affect my attitude in the same way, as my main problem with them is that they are entirely untrustworthy.

Too bad their OS barely works on the hardware it was pre-installed on. Things like wifi, suspend, brightness control are all extremely flaky under Windows 10 on my machine, but on Ubuntu work perfect. Most people I know have ditched Office for the most part, except for hardcore Excel users. Trying to install any sort of development tools on Windows is a pain, unless it's MS tools. As for their services, heard bad things about Azure and they're definitely not on the level of Google or Amazon as far as market share. They've also capitulated to Android on mobile and somewhat to Linux in the server space, so not sure how those are wins.

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