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Comment by hansmayer | Hacker News Reader

I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.

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With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software...

And the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it.

There was also MSDN. But it was also a different world at the time.

> If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support.

But even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot.

It was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them.

Fair enough, everyone delivered software in boxes and with 500 page manuals. I still maintain MS did invest a lot in the quality of their documentation and they cared about developers - otherwise the Petzold series would have never happened (or the MS Press for that matter).

Ah yeah, fair, the Microsoft Press had some absolute bangers.

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