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Comment by anon1900 | Hacker News Reader

anon1900

As an engineer working at Microsoft in Windows, I 100% agree...it's just as frustrating seeing these from inside as well

(edit: from throwaway as a protective measure)

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just wondering 1 thing.. is there anyone in microsoft that looks at the feedback hub or forum at least? They never seem to listen to ANY feedback..

Microsoft's OS business is a classic "cash cow". It's very big and very profitable, but has limited growth prospects and its revenue is currently growing at only single digit percentage points per year. Every MBA course teaches that the way to handle a cash cow is to milk as much profits from the users and spend as little money maintaining it as you can get away with. You do this to maximise the amount you have to invest in other, faster growing businesses that will be the future of the company, even if it causes long-term damage to the cash cow. MS have been milking their OS and Office businesses to fund their cloud and XBox businesses and, so far, it's a textbook example of the strategy succeeding; the cloud already brings in more revenue for MS than Windows and is still growing much faster than it.

The OS features that are getting attention, such as VS Code and WSL are ones that have synergy with the more important businesses and help them sell. Things like fixing the safari park of UI conventions don't have that synergy, so the resources that could improve them go to the other businesses. The ads and forced sign-ins are also part of this; in the long-term, they'll drive some users away from Windows, but right now, they funnel money and users to places that should matter more to the company in the long-term.

MS aren't listening to Windows feedback - and the internal feedback from people working on the product is usually part of it in these situations -, because what's good for Windows isn't what's good for MS.

They do look at it. Just not to do what you'd expect with what they see... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954266

Ha, that's incredible. The MSFT employee (ralvis) cited in the article who complained about the "never combine" change in W11 is someone I know quite well, and he's not a developer. Normal users hate it just as much as us developers/nerds.

I posted an update to that article just the other day - it's a (new?) policy that feedback will be retained for at most 15 months. FBH can be safely disregarded as a waste of time.

(Not a Microsoft employee) Even if you do have the feedback, is it worth fixing issues if your boss doesn't prioritize them, and you won't get promoted for it?

I'm wondering who in the org has a bigger voice and from where he or she gets the political support?

Is it getting raised at meetings?

Not working in MS but I would guess everyone knows about how bad it is. The problem is so colossal (technically and organisationally) thus no one person has the political capital to push for change.

It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to fix it, but by then it would be too late.

I imagine the bigger problem is that you have to have hard user research to back colossal changes like this one up, especially if the change would do something like invalidate a possibly three-digit large engineering team's years of work. The only thing that saves this is Microsoft's continued commitment to win32 apps, which will probably continue for eternity at least until MS recreates the _entire_ os from the ground up.

Personally, I've advocated for many user-friendly scenarios only to get shutdown by "business decisions" higher up by folks who have been in Windows for 20+ years. The engineering culture inside of Windows, from my experience, is poor and not improving

Is Windows Professional relatively free from these shenanigans?

Or do we need to get Enterprise?

As far as I can see everything in the article applies in W11 Professional. It will be interesting, though, to see what happens when more big enterprises start piloting their upgrades to W11. The taskbar changes alone could cause mutinies in thousands of back office departments.

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