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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here work at Microsoft that can explain how anyone at the company thought this was a good idea?

Seriously. I'm genuinely confused. MS never had the best UI (hello MS Word toolbars) but those happened over time through attrition and added features.

This is one of many intentional user-hostile experiences.

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I don't work at Microsoft (anymore) and never worked on this project, but I can pretty confidently say it went like this...

  Some exec: "Why are people quitting OneDrive?"
  Some PM: "I don't know."
  Some exec: "We should do an exit poll."

...time passes

  Some exec: "Why are people quittin OneDrive?"
  Some PM: "Those that answer say ____, but a lot of people don't answer the exit poll."
  Some exec: "We should force them to answer"
  Some PM: "Fine."

/scene

Any time I am forced to reply to one of these, it is never pleasantly worded.

"Huh, seems like 97% of the freeform text entry boxes contain profanity."

exactly!

this is definitely one of those "well, they were asking for it" defense situations. literally. they provided me a free form text box asking for my opinion. only an ID10T would expect anything less

I usually reply with `undefined` or `null`.

Every time I have to do a new Windows install, where they now force you into entering a Microsoft account, they get a new account added to their database that is some variation of [InsertSwearHere]@[MoreSwears].com so I can finish the install, create a local account, and delete the forced account from the machine.

You’re really showing it to the man! Way to go!

You should just prepare an autounattend.xml to automate the install and be able to skip the OOBE wizard entirely - including the forced online account creation.

Yeah, I know I can even use rufus to burn the ISO and get rid of that stuff for me. But it's easy enough for me to just do it this way.

“My personal opinion is a premium feature please deliver cash in an envelope”

Yeah, I always feel like I’m being gaslit by the options. They are always missing an option for what I actually think: “Every moment I think about onedrive is a moment I could have spent with my children. A moment I will never get back. I may never admit it in polite company, but I quietly anticipate a day when you and your software are exorcised from this earth. Indeed, the only emotion I associate with your product is a quiet rage that never quite goes away.”

Mailchimp is probably the only company that does a good job of this in their unsubscribe page. “You are unsubscribed. If you want, tell us why you unsubscribed. 1. Was the mailing list spam? 2. I don’t recall ever signing up to this …”. (At least I think it’s mailchimp.)

If you don’t give users the option to select the very embarrassing thing you know they actually are angry about (but don’t want to fix), then that thing clearly doesn’t actually exist!

95% of the curse words and middle fingers I deploy in my daily life are now towards similar practices.

The remaining 5% are when I stub my toe on things. Who out that damn furniture there anyway!?!

often times I have been known to give a misbehaving app on my computer the finger. sometimes, when it is really egregious, it gets both barrels. it serves no useful purpose other than i feel a bit better about my silent sign of protest rather than launching into the curse laden tirade that i really want to do. but i've been told (more than once) that is frowned upon behavior in a professional environment.

You don't have to reply to this one. You can just kill the process instead.

I actually did not notice this popup on a new install this week, because I never exit OneDrive the clean and fair way. Nor do I uninstall it the clean and fair way...

> You can just kill the process instead.

> Before gently laying this process to rest we would just like to have a minute of your time to gather some information so we can provide our customers with a better service. [Ten question survey follows]

/me rolls dice to select an answer

>anyone at the company thought this was a good idea

I've been wondering about that since the day I noticed that they include the Xbox app on the enterprise version of Windows 10 and 11.

I think you answered your own question with the admission that is one of many intentional user-hostile experiences. Most people put up with the other stuff so why would they stop?

I was sure the answer would be "most/all of the options don't actually quit OneDrive, but bring you to some 'help' page where it explains why you don't need to quit OneDrive", and MS wants you running OneDrive all the time for reasons".

I'm sure some combination of incentives created this; I wonder which ones.

My bet is on both:

- “Let’s make decisions based on metrics”, and

- “Let’s gather even more metrics”.

In any case it was not acting in the user’s best interest.

- Let's make decisions based on this $PROXY_METRIC for $IMPORTANT_BUSINESS_METRIC.

- People now have to paperclip-optimize $PROXY to get a promotion.

- $PROXY becomes less and less reflecting of $IMPORTANT_BUSINESS_METRIC.

Repeat ad nauseam.

I used to work at Microsoft, so I can field this one: The answer is that they want to gather data about how to improve OneDrive so people continue to use it. The PM who owns OneDrive adoption probably has to talk to a slide in a regular status meeting, and someone up the chain keeps asking pointed questions about why the curve is less than exponential. The fact that they disabled the button until you pick an answer isn't malice, it's just shitty design. In time that PM will learn and grow.

No, it's malice. No one who gets into such a position can be that unaware. Malice comes in small ways too, not caring how your shitty design impacts people is a form of malice.

If a single person in an organization does something malicious, question them.

If many people in an organization do something malicious, question the incentives.

> No one who gets into such a position can be that unaware

I have some stories. Unfortunately I can’t share the juicy details because there’s a microscopic possibility of them putting me in jail. But yes they exist.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this behavior changes one mouse click on a rarely used workflow into three. The only reason people are getting upset about it - the only impact, as you put it - is the cognitive load of providing a reason when they just want the computer to shut up and do what they asked. I don't believe that was intended to attack anyone, it was just a misunderstanding about how it would be received.

> The only reason people are getting upset about it - the only impact, > they just want the computer to shut up and do what they asked.

How do you make something so important sound not important?

But Microsoft makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year, surely they can afford an experienced PM, or some sort of mentorship program.

I mean this one instance of dumb UI clearly isn’t the end of the world. But every stupid little UI quirk like this reinforces the overall sloppy feeling of the OS.

Are all proprietory software doomed to chase this kind of growth at all costs?

Your sarcasm is too subtle for some people here. I hope.

I used to work at a company whose recent TOS changes infuriated their own comunity, and while I was there we received lots of insults thru the crash reporter. I'm sure the people who devise those polls and feedback don't care at all, and these are there just for statistics, in the best case a sort of passive alarm that there is a fire somewhere. What they care about is that feature will be noticed internally and that they get pulled up in the company hierarchy.

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