Hacker News Reader

Comment by cambo | Hacker News Reader

For all the hate Microsoft gets, this is one area where they've got it right.

Microsoft's dev support framework, while not directly interacting with MS engineers (usually), the community of MVPs, Regional Directors, and even now the occasional Dev note in the opensource work MS is doing on github, has lead to a great ecosystem of support. This trickles down to Stackoverflow, the old Alt.Net crowd (and the associated .NET user groups that still persist), and the MS dev blog'o'sphere mean this type of issue is much rarer.

*edit: oh and I forgot the UserVoice pages, where the community can vote on issues, and they'll get assessed by the product teams.

View on HN

I had the exact opposite experience with UserVoice pages, at least the one for Accessibility. Someone requested that MS integrate my startup's reading technology into MS Word/Outlook/etc on the Accessibility UserVoice. This suggestion gained steam and was the top-rated suggestion for years. MS never engaged with the suggestion, and when I later asked an accessibility person why this was, they told me that the UserVoice is staffed by outside contractors, and that it's not one of the more important places they look for feedback. This was consistent with what I saw, which was that they didn't engage with the most popular suggestions on the Accessibility UserVoice — they just ignored them.

I think it's pretty lousy that they set up a page to solicit feedback (especially accessibility feedback) and don't pay attention to it. It causes people to waste time describing issues, asking for help, and voting on other suggestions. A year or two ago they got rid of the UserVoice page, and they now tell people to use Twitter to make suggestions.

I posted an obscure MS C++ compiler bug to their Web feedback thing, and it got acknowledged and fixed relatively quickly. Whining and complaining over on the r/cpp subreddit also tends to get the polite attention of the relevant Microsoft people (some of whom are mods).

They eventually got it right. I remember being a sysadmin circa 1999 and having to pay to file a bug report with Microsoft. IIRC if they determined it was a real bug you got your money back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com