Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub
thomask.sdf.org
thomask.sdf.org
Every other game I play is on Steam and have decent Proton support, or is a retro game where I can use Retroarch and PCSX2 natively.
The recommendation here is to buy a larger drive (and a usb->sata adapter if necessary), clone to the new drive, and keep the old one as an offline backup!
So they hate people publicly distributing an open source switch SDK, but they'll happily give it to you (including full source) after you sign their NDA.
Linux to me is the "light" side.
This is how a lot of software should be developed. Time to reflect and think about how to make things better. Not some weird money and authority driven scheme.
In my estimation it is roughly the same as it is with Microsoft: if it doesn't directly affect a developer's workflow it will not be fixed and they're annoyed you even brought it up.
The big difference of course being that Microsoft expects you to pay money for this treatment.
On the other hand, I had filled bug regarding some encryption functionality and was given useful and respectful comments that helped me with the non-bug but user error issue. I also reported on some power management feature I was missing and got it implemented in merely few weeks. This two are from fedora maintainers, but I also had some unknown dev on github to implement additional auth options in his product per my request, got this delivered on very short time and could proceed to do POC of the product for a customer.
Something so obvious I didn't feel the need to explicitly state it in my post. I guess I should know better.
Here's one affecting me recently, When the app on another workspace is closed and the workspace is switched, it crashes GNOME shell. I found that there have been several bug reports raised regarding issue[1].
The oldest related bug report was opened in upstream Ubuntu launchpad a year ago. Granted this is relatively small period compared to some other bugs.
Yet this bug affects me regularly(I guess it has to do with trackpad) and no workspace until it can be fixed. So I'm planning to create a debugging setup to contribute towards resolving this issue.
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4801
That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible?
On the other hand, what I can find in the news about internal protests at MS are all seemingly SJW-ish topics, and absolutely none about the quality of the products themselves. I think that alone says a lot about who's working there and what they actually care about doing --- which is clearly not improving their products. The people who do care about that are being heavily outnumbered, and perhaps a lot of them have already deemed MS to be unsalvageable and left.
I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.
Presumably, that's "Thanks, <my username>@" as a signature, since the name matches.
>We’re proud that Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows, built with and for people with disabilities.
so that just means it's designed to be more accessible to people with disabilities. I don't really think that's the problem, and it is a concern that is directly related to product quality. Seems like you just have a bone to pick
No OS is as flexible as Linux and it can't be, since desktop Linux frequently doesn't offer support so you can do whatever you want to it but it's on you to fix it.
Remember when Windows let you adjust the sizes, colours, and fonts of every single UI element? Windows 3.x had that.
They removed that 3 versions back (Win8).
Then they removed some more in Windows 10, and in Windows 11, even stopped you from moving the taskbar to a different edge of the screen; and then, they have the gall to say it's "most inclusively designed".
"Actions speak louder than words."
With Windows 11 still in the future, isn't Win8 just one version back?
You’ve no basis to point to social causes or anything else and say “something is causing a stink round here and it’s that!”.
Software is built by people. People have viewpoints. There will inevitably be overlap in those viewpoints. There’s no reason to think any of this has anything to do with the thread.
However, commenting generally (with all the caveats that implies), it's abundantly clear from personal experience and the commentary of others that there are certain causes which have a habit of absorbing all the air in the room. You claim there is no basis for this observation. This Feedback Hub discussion gives us one example, where a "zero negative feedback!" mandate takes the air from things that would be more beneficial to (in this case) product quality.
In the OP's example, redefining words to have meaning contrary to their prior accepted usage is an example of air (or energy or attention or whatever you want to call it) being spent disproportionately, with quality suffering as a result.
To borrow an old metaphor, a falling tide grounds all boats. A cause, any cause, whether it's a zero negative feedback mandate or whatever, that lifts some boats while lowering the tide overall, will eventually leave every boat stranded, including the ones the cause is trying to save.
The company does an insane amount of spying ("telemetry") on its users, but all I've ever seen ANY of that data used for was weaseling out of things. "Oh, only 5% of users use that feature" or "Oh, that bug only happens 0.1% of the time". Of course, if you use a product with 1000 bugs and each one of them has a 0.1% chance of occurring on any given month, you're going to run into bugs all the time
yet it doesn't reflect reality
Windows is no longer a 1st class product at MS, it's 3+ layers below the CEO, same tier as Teams, or OneDrive... so no wonder it's going down the shitter.
Pretty strange if you ask me.
PS. This is 2nd hand info from friends that are MSFTers.
Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.
Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only.
Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.
I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.
I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product.
Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.
What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving?
I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.
The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable".
Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit.
Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.
stalebots serve a purpose but they can be extremely annoying also.
I literally have 10+ issues bookmarked on Github I have to keep responding on to prevent the stalebots from wiping the issue out.
They are all issues affecting my software, and I don't want them closed by a bot just because nobody has gotten around to fixing them.
Maybe I should just go in there and submit a PR, if only I could find the time.
What you're describing does not comport with my experience there.
Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate).
What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company.
> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.
This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on.
> Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals.
Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media.
Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.
One thing I'll say is that it really does feel like the worst decisions about software there were made during the Steve Ballmer era. In my case, trying to keep compatibility with absolutely insane software behavior where it tries to do way more than it reasonably should made up the bulk of my toil and issues customers had.
A former coworker described to me that it was a very different time then. People believed they were the best engineers in the world, building software nobody else could make. In some small cases maybe that was true, but generally it was not. The combination of arrogance and willingness to try to bolt on as many capabilities and unbound extensibility features as possible led to a severe problem for people (sometimes the same people!) later on in life. It's actually been cool seeing how that complexity was methodically tamed. But it also makes me fear for any future company where a similar level of arrogance is practiced.
In fact, for a lot of feature teams fixing the top user feedback issues is often part of their OKRs.
So yeah, I don't know if there are groups in MS which really don't consider their users' feedback, but from what I know that isn't the common behavior.
MS has its faults - every megacorp will have its own share of warts, but this specific one, i am not sure I can believe.
Sometimes I have to open edge on multiple costumer servers, with new user profile in each of them and with no customization of the defaults in place. Terrible experience, multiple clicks to do what you came for in the first place, and then again serving you the delightful and stylish MSN homepage,
I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while.
My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.
It's a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have done something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don't change anything.
The link "what we do with your feedback" I'm sure is just Rick Astley
A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.
Based on my experience I call it the “Fuck-Off Hub” because that’s where they send you so you can feel like you’re submitting feedback, but they really just want you to fuck off and stop bugging them. It’s like whispering into the Grand Canyon. No one that matters is ever going to hear your feedback, so why bother?
Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug.
Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.
Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me roll back to Win10 last week. "Just give it time", even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).
> Previously you could choose to “never combine” apps so you had one-click access to each document. Now you are required to use two mouse actions to open each.
If you have "foo.txt" and "bar.txt" open in, say, notepad, you get one notepad icon on your taskbar that you click on once to open the list of windows and then once more to actually switch. Previously you could tell windows to never combine the taskbar icons so you'd have two separate icons you could change to in one click.
Clicking the left icon bring up the document on the right monitor and clicking the icon to the right brings up the document on the left. You very often end up picking the wrong document and must do over. That pretty annoying.
But it gets worse. If you have only 1 window with some app open (browser, terminal..), and this window has two tabs inside, clicking on the taskbar icon representing this window won't bring the window up. It will first bring up these small previews above the taskbar for every tab that you then have to click again (pick any) and then finally you get the window brought up. This is horrible because when you have tabs side by side in the window (terminal example), it doesn't matter which tab you choose as the same window pops up showing both tabs anyway. However you have to click twice (or hover for a bit to get the previews and then click again).
Congratulations to "Windows" version where switching "windows" is painful.
FWIW, I'm a Microsoft employee (not in Windows org) and I complain about "never combine" in any feedback forms we get. Maybe it will make a difference somewhere. (opinions are my own)
If they really wanted to that then:
* too bad they only copied one superficial aspect without the others needed for it to make sense
* there is actually no reason to remove the option for the sane behavior, only the default has to be kind of Mac like
Of course some would say that not being able to use UWP apps is an enhancement, not a bug.
On Mac, there is conceptually a two-level hierarchy of apps and windows. Every app maintains its own stack of windows. You can switch between apps with a single click (or keyboard command) and then switch between windows in that app's window stack if you want to bring a different one to the top. So a single click och keypress lets you switch between any pair of windows that are topmost in their respective apps. (There is also a keyboard shortcut to switch windows within an app.)
On Windows, you can't switch to apps (only to windows) but the windows are grouped by app into a hierarchical menu, so every time you switch window from the taskbar it takes two clicks and you are forced to hunt through a list of thumbnails.
I use multiple desktops and run almost every app in full screen. Oftentimes when I focus a window on a secondary desktop that isn’t fullscreen (like a Finder window), then click on the Dock icon of a full screen app, MacOS will focus the primary desktop instead of the desktop with the full screen app.
Do you ever experience this behavior? Is there a better way to switch between apps?
We have to use Macs at my new job, for compliance reasons. What a shitshow of UX. How on earth is anyone supposed to know to use snowflake-click to switch between app instances? That isn't "strictly [better] than Win 11" (per the article), because at least the method in Win 11 is discoverable (there's also the well behaving alt+tab, and win-number). You have to use snowflake-C + snowflake-V, unlike every other OS in existence. This not only screws with muscle memory, but it's genuinely uncomfortable for such a common action (especially on their keyboard).
Windows 10 was the peak. After that, Microsoft seems to have joined Apple's race to the bottom. The Linux desktop is the last bastion of sanity.
But, every Electron app and productivity website hard-codes the old Mac shortcuts based on naive platform detection instead of using native OS inputs, so the muscle memory conflict is even worse.
To anyone who just "doesn't get" this complaint, which is a lot of people I have met, it's like riding a bike your whole life to the point of being able to do downhill mountain terrain races, and then switching to a bike with the steering reversed, while wearing image distorting glasses. Except it's worse, because it feels more like someone chopped off your fingers and reattached them in random places.
It is literally nauseating, because when you are so deeply familiar with a complex tool it becomes an extension of your proprioception, and the tool misbehaving feels like you've been poisoned.
Also to free up Win key combos more you can either disable it entirely via regedit, which I do not recommend - or explicitly disable certain letters individually by putting them into a string in regedit. This then frees it up for better remapping under any remapper, including mine kinto.sh.
``` Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "DisabledHotkeys"="B"
``` restart explorer.
I wonder if a MSFT employee was typing a response to you, but accidentally clicked edit on your comment and it overwrote your content before they realised what they have done, then panicked and just hit submit.
Particularly considering his comments were just echoing all the other comments in the thread - and the message "hello there" is strange and doesn't really make sense to me (if they have the power to edit a post, they probably have the power to delete it outright, which would have been less suspicious and not generated this post).
-There are no MS Employees there (but professional Call/Text Centers)
-MS gives a *it about your opinion (as every big IT Company)
-But MS wants you to feel that your part of the family (inclusive developers developers!!)
You're better off shouting into the void than expecting to get anything useful out of those channels.
How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience.
I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such.
Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out.
I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot?
I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store.
(Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)
Image management is a lot easier when you own the platform it needs to be managed on. Microsoft used to have a User Voice board. I wrote a complaint at length about Teams being a steaming hot pile of <Unicode poo emoji>. Lots of other people did too. They're retiring it now and have "ended their partnership" with user voice
Moderators on web forums everywhere need to learn that this kind of editing, when done without a publicly visible indication that the post was edited against the nominal author's will, is unacceptable. I've gotten into this argument on Stack Exchange in the past (although fortunately on Stack Overflow at least the mods already have a policy against this - they can delete a comment or leave it standing but may not put words into someone's mouth). It's especially bad when, as is the case here, the edited comment reflects poorly on the author.
It's not just discourteous, it's a tort in at least the UK where I live (namely a violation of the "moral right" against "false attribution") and likely many other jurisdictions too. Do this enough and eventually somebody sufficiently litigious will sue you, and you'll deserve it.
See the itemization of reasons to edit a post for. It also explicitly mentions that the meaning of the post may not be changed. You can, as the owner, also always roll back edits. Another option is to take it to the meta site and voice your complaint. One of the reject reasons in the review queue (note that moderator's edits don't go through the review queue) is if the edit changes the meaning of the post; the edit system is really meant (as the page says) for fixing typos and on occasion updating/adding information like if the post became outdated or to consolidate info from comments.
Everyone can also see the revisions of any (non-deleted) answers and questions, so if someone changed the meaning, it clearly says "person x edited this post" (right next to the original author's name) and you can click that link and see who actually said what.
Comments don't have this history or indication of being edited by a third party, though, which is why only moderators have the power to edit them and most such edits are considered unacceptable and banned by policy.
I think the solution is platforms which make this sort of editing impossible by using cryptographic signatures and user accounts backed by private keys.
TheDonald users were trolling the crap out of spez by pinging his name repeatedly, so he trolled them back by obviously editing in TheDonald mods' names.
Then TheDonald users responded like a bunch of angry children about it
That said, it's good to get the word out that Reddit's always been complete BS through and through. The site was all sock puppets initially, and nowadays every sub with more than 100k users or so is extremely heavily censored and moderated in a completely non-transparent way.
But no.
During the last year, a Microsoft PM called Gloridel Morales has thoroughly gone through hundreds of Developer Community suggestion for Azure Devops, and closed each and every one of them. Quite rudely. Just check out each and every link in [0]
Some were suggestion from fellow Microsoft people.
She did it using the following eyebrow-raising text, quoted below, suggesting either that Gloridel Morales and her team have no idea how to manage themselves by prioritizing a backlog of requests, or that her paycheck/review depends on having a clean backlog.
Thank you for taking the time to share your feature suggestion. Due to the high volume of suggestions in our queue, we are not able to respond personally to every suggestion. As a result, we depend on the community to validate the request via votes and comments. Suggestions that the community doesn't prioritize, we close out in order to maintain a manageable list of suggestions. It is our policy to close suggestions that are inactive in the community based on no change to customer comments or votes in the last 90+ days. We love your enthusiasm for our product and hope you will continue submitting ideas for the community to validate. [1]
The bit about "suggestions that are inactive for 90 days" might have looked good on Github with its somewhat primitive but sensible community around issue discussions, but the developercommunity site is inundated with garbage issues, making it almost impossible to search for proper issues.
That's just for Azure though. I must say that a couple of bugs I opened there for the Microsoft C++ compiler actually got prioritized and fixed in the last couple of years. Others were ignored.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D...
[1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-previous-b...
In fact the clusterfuck going on with desktop frameworks seems to be related to WinDev not knowing where to go.
Most likely it isn't any accident that many key figures that are still at Microsoft have now moved into Azure division, where I also have to acknowledge, POSIX has won on the cloud space (aka timesharing rebranded).
I've decided to install Windows 11 preview around June 2021 and have been using it ever since, so I could eventually help my coworkers, validate our workflows etc...
I am curious on why people in HN dislike Win 11 so much. For me the upgrade was basically about minor UI changes, which I got used to in 1-2 weeks. I am a sysadmin / cloud whatever and it broke none of my stuff, I use the same workflows I used in Win 10.
We still haven't migrated our users to Win 11 out of pragmatism , but honestly there is nothing I hate about it. Maybe my expectations for MS are too low already, IDK.
Also, the bullshit minimum requirements are obviously about pushing DRM.
Source: I’m an insider.
Edit: And don't even get me started about trying to incite people to replace perfetcly good computers with new ones at a time we should avoid wasting resources before all.
I would love to see something I missed showing that it is actually a good idea, but for now however I take it it seems a terrible move.
A large portion of devices that were arbitrarily blocked, had no issues running the previews even with all the new security stuff. And on top of that none of the supposedly "new" security stuff is actually new. Its all been in Windows 10 for a while.
for a long time i have been debating whether i should try a MacBook M1 for my hobby projects or not. i don't use Windows for anything else. and migrating my projects would be a pain, but not a huge one.
they made the decision for me. (and other people like me, who had only one or two reasons to remain on Windows.)
Right click -> "Open with 7-Zip" is no longer an option. Now it's right click -> more options -> "Open with 7-Zip". It's stupid.
Unfortunately, I'm a side-taskbar user and there is no equivalent registry fix. I had to pay for a 3rd party tool.
Why do that? It makes a smaller click/tap target for touchscreens, it’s genuinely hard to find and hides the discoverability of the keyboard shortcut, it’s inconsistent with in-app right click menu patterns, and it’s just inane for how many other little details could have been fixed instead.
They are incredibly diversified. If anything, they themselves no longer see Windows as the crown jewel, which would explain more than a few HN gripes
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-big-tech-makes-their-bi...
The previous poster is probably 10+ years behind the news.
Not as polished as Win95 or 2000, but at least everything is consensual.
I had a good experience with Mint Cinnamon too, but the system seems overall better-integrated in Fedora KDE.
Since Microsoft continues to treat Windows and its users like garbage, I'm fairly certain a Linux Desktop will be the lesser of two evils in my near future so I'm spending a lot more time working out how to live with it for my workflows. I discovered I really like Silverblue. Immutable OS with Flatpak focus and Toolbox cover a lot of what I want, even if the implementations are somewhat less than ideal.
Unfortuantely, Kinoite (the KDE spin of Silverblue) is hot garbage. Half of the things don't work including Flatpak icons (until a reboot) and running a GTK app in Toolbox causes it to inexplicably pause for several seconds at a time. I can't even report the latter issue (several of the former have 2 month+ open issues already) because the login for the bug tracker is busted. So I'm stuck with GNOME, a 'desktop' that desperately wishes it were running on a phone.
Alternatively you might even be able to fix the bug yourself
A very active community, too, and so far, no real change. I don't want change, managing my windows, my open programs, is a decades old solved problem.
I don't want the new sexy, the flashy this and that. I don't want new styles, changing methods to interact. My Window Manager is not something I want to notice, or spent 10 seconds on.. for the next 20 years.
It needs to be in the background, while I do real work, or enjoy other apps. If I have to do things, configure it constantly, modify it due to new versions, it has failed in its task.
Anyone trying to vastly change, or improve this, is bananas. It needs no massive change, for 1000s of years.
Thanks
I really wish tech companies would look at users as customers who are willing to spend more for better and more useful software, instead of looking at users as commodities ripe for monetization.
When I use Windows I feel like I'm living in a refugee campl and I've entered a digital flea market where the PA announces every 10 minutes you have to get your parking ticket stamped, and you can get a no-admission charge get pass for $10 per month. The market has everything... there are some deals to be had, but you have to lookout for pickpockets and scammers at every turn. The camp? Well, I have to pay for protection (hi antivirus and antimalware industry) and I have to teach my family how to stay safe. It also feels like the host-state for the camp can change the rules at any moment.
When I use a Mac, I feel like I'm living in an apartment and I've walked into the company-run Super Target. The apartment is really nice, but there are lots of little rules. The store? it's a clean, modern place. The prices are higher than down the street, and the products on the shelf are a little different. It certainly feels a lot safer than the flea market. As long as I like the inventory and can afford the extra cost, the experience is great. The painful part is the apartment rules. Sometimes I want to do things Apple doesn't want me to, and well, the apartment isn't mine.
When I use Linux, I feel like I'm in my own home. It's safe. I own it. No one tells me what I'm allowed to do.
Microsoft is remarkably terrible. Riddled with the hierarchies and politics of IBM or Oracle, but the lack the self awareness that they are slow and terrible. And Azure solutions are not good at all. They have truly bizarre backwards apis and SDK. Imagine you do not have admin access to the company DC. Now, your Azure k8s cluster pods need rw access to an azure keyvault that you created.
It is entirely possible to do this, but enjoy the hell ride there.
My hats off to you if you manage to figure it out in 1 workday.
Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? Windows is supposed to be the productivity system and it kills productivity now.
This is the question that is burning a hole through my brain. At a certain point, Microsoft is going have to admit they are fucking over their internal operations, unless they have some secret copy of non-shit windows that is exclusively used internally...
It looks like they have imported feedback from other places such as the feedback hub.
Since Win10 is a pretty much perfectly working and a very functional OS, we might as well stay on it till the EOS,and then upgrade to this 10S kadaver-renamed-11.
Having worked in a large organization I know that the more hops this information has to go through to get processed, the more likely it will end in limbo. Granted, so far limbo happened in 100% of my opened cases but I could clearly see an employee willing to help and probably being limited by the internal org structure which is not optimized for reacting to user feedback (sadly same goes for most other big tech companies).
I expect that at some point in future, perhaps included within some W11 build that changes users workflow once again, the "never combine" taskbar feature will be added back and presented as a breakthrough.
I can't wait for the day I'll never have to use a Microsoft service again in my life
No sane system should allow that.
Censoring (umm moderating) a comment, sure.
Visible blacking out part of an comment, jikes but maybe ok.
But editing a comment?
Absolutely no go.
The Microsoft employee basically committed identity theft!
General.. Kenobi.
Yet the topic the author of this article and apparently hundreds of others are describing as a show-stopping miss of Windows 11: The ability to see open documents ungrouped on the task bar. That's not a "bug" which needs to be addressed directly by developers.
And really? That alone is a reason to go through a harrowing downgrade process to an earlier OS version?
Not a regular Windows user, but I found that feature to be almost toxic UX - the open documents on the task bar all looked the same, and not different enough from the app icon, to make it a time / click-saving feature. I ended up clicking on each one until the correct window was in front.
It surely was worse UX than simply cycling through all open windows by the keyboard shortcut. Which isn't exactly power-user knowledge.
That said, it's had that sort of functionality forever, and I personally still never use it.
However, assuming good intent: how would you determine whether they are listening? (or continuing the conversation, in the latter case)
I am a small developer who makes apps and puts them on the App Store and play store (Hacker news client HACK for example). I often get emails from users on how to add a feature or fix a bug etc. I email them and instead of just saying “thanks for your feedback”, I address the real problem/feature.
Example- few days ago someone asked me to integrate the Orion browser support in my app.
I wasn’t aware of this browser so I googled it, found it that it’s currently in closed beta and I signed up for a beta. I replied back to the user that currently I can’t add it in because I don’t have access to the beta yet, however I have signed up and when I do get access to it, I will test and add it in unless the user can get me a piece of code from the developers of Orion browser which tells me what identifier to use to launch their browser on iOS.
The user contacted the developers of Orion and got me the info I needed. Today I added it in but since I still don’t have access to the beta, I sent the app update and informed the user that for now, I have added the functionality acting blindly and I think it should work but if it doesn’t, then they will have to wait for me to get the beta. User is happy.
Another example- someone recently contacted me for a feature in another one of my apps which I have no intention of adding. I replied back that I will be honest with them and inform them that I don’t intend on adding it in and here’s my reasons. I gave them an alternative app which has that feature in case they want to try. User was happy and gave me a 5 star review.
Basically, even if you have bad news for the customer, tell them the news and they will be just fine. I try to put myself in the customers shoes and think about what I would think of got the typical cookie cutter response “we are listening to your feedback” with no further details on what they intend on doing with what they are hearing.
That's a good thing: it'll provide more time for review, apprenticeship, mentoring and mastery of individual technical areas, and for mobility and communication between communities.
That's not to say there can't also be pure-enjoyment and hobby software projects; but those won't have the same support demands (or expectations).
Small (or solo) teams maintaining systems with massive inbound demand, significant risk during changes, and limited ability to receive community feedback feels like the less-scalable approach, to me.
That said I'm willing to concede that both approaches appear to work under different circumstances (and may be able to learn from each other).
However, the article we are talking about here is about Microsoft, a trillion dollar company treating some basic user feedback with zero value.
Amazon, another trillion dollar company has been outstanding to me whenever I reach out to their customer support chat (I have done that many times over the years). I get to chat to a human within a minute and they help me either resolve the issue or tell me why they can’t resolve the issue. If Amazon can do it, then there’s no reason why Microsoft can’t do it for basic user feedback.
Also are you really being productive if you are sending template response? A robot could do that.
Btw I am in the same basket as you - not only reacting on every piece of user feedback, but actively seeking it, like in this case. (using excellent f5bot.com). It may not be infinetely scalable but will do it for as long as I can.
Btw, question on this search engine of yours.
It says "Entire hardware stack used to run Teclis costs about $200/month."
Would you mind sharing what hardware stack you use?
I have to deal with this pretty frequently: Someone gives feedback about a thing and requests a change. I listen, understand the request, explain that I can’t do this right now because it lands too low on the priority list and there are a thousand critical and urgent things that I need to get done first. Then the person complains (to me, my manager, their manager, in a different context, whatever) that they aren’t being listened to.
Listening doesn’t mean agreeing, nor does it mean solving for a request right now (or possibly ever). Making people feel heard without doing what they ask is a hard thing. It’s extremely hard to do at scale and I don’t envy those trying to satisfy UI change requests from millions of people.
Also I work at Microsoft so I’m probably biased here.
It's not about the size of the business, but whether this is a good way for them to spend money or not.
Coffee shops will often not get back to you within 48 hours depending on the comment you make and how busy they are. It's really a judgement call, as large number of comments are basically spam, but you can't reply with "this is a silly comment" or "this is an unreasonable request on our time", so it's best to just ignore.
For a big business, where individual judgement is replaced with a set of procedures and institutions that try to encode judgement, they most surely will offer some level of support with an SLA that guarantees someone will get back to you in a well-defined period of time.
But you usually have to pay extra for that, and that's a pretty sensible system, since leaving comments is free and there is no way to know how serious you are about the comment and how badly you want it responded to. E.g. worth paying, say, $10? $5? $1? There is some intersection of supply and demand for real support at which a certain price results in you getting answers, but in those situations where that price is not zero, it's not the size of the business that matters, but the shape of those supply and demand curves. And the size of the business, in my experience, will tend to shift the supply curve farther away from "free", because that answer will be an official answer of the business and it may take a lot of time for the poor support guy to track someone down and get an official answer, and in some cases it may be a lot of work to get that answer if the bureaucracy is complex and knowledge is stovepiped. This is why you see tiers in support, and the time required to get someone knowledgeable is often much longer as you climb that support chain and escalate your question. All of that ends up costing quite a bit to a big firm.
I've been on the other side of this, advocating for our internal support team to handle questions about a service we were releasing. Today there is great temptation to rely on social media, etc, and not have a real support service.
For me, it took over a year of lobbying, meetings, etc, just to get the go ahead. Here are the things I had to do:
- gather data on how important it is to provide support by giving examples of customer issues that need support to resolve. - lobby multiple managers - get this into planning docs so it can be funded - create a dialogue tree for support to handle, with triggers for escalating - find actual devs (other than me) to do tier 3 support when support can't help - do regular training sessions for the support staff - build internal tooling for them to use to help look up answers - hold regular meetings that I came to believe were nothing more than reassuring the support staff that we hadn't abandoned them.
And still, after all this, they ended up cancelling the project after a few years in operation when support got new leadership that didn't favor supporting the service. At that point I was too exhausted to go back and fight the battle again.
It is expensive to have someone provide you with answers. I mean, really expensive. And no one wants to do it, because the downside -- publicly embarrassing the company, setting wrong expectations about what the person on the other end of the line can help you with, etc, are all pointed at the person in charge of support, whereas the upsides -- "helping customers" -- is not something anyone in the company uses as a KPI. It rarely gets noticed in terms of an individual's career path.
After that experience, I really understood the moat of luxury brands. Being able to be a company that excels in non-tangible things such as quality that goes above what the rest of the market can provide or great personalized service is incredibly hard and beyond most companies. There is a whole infrastructure behind you that must be maintained and great vigilance is required to keep that customer experience high. It's something that has to be in the corporate DNA, in the sense that leadership is imbued with this as a motivating factor that colors most of their decision making. That's just not gonna be the case for a very big company, and certainly not a monopoly or market hegemon.
Vote with your wallet and get the fuck off Windows and all the attendant bullshit that comes with it as soon as possible.