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Comment by nzoschke | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious how quality is so poor at MS. Tech debt and deadlines and red tape?

This is the company that invented the term dogfooding and forced everyone to use Exchange until all the bugs were worked out.

I’m building a next gen web mail app at work and there are a ton of UX edge cases but the performance of the core UI is not rocket science.

I’m looking for help play testing to squash bugs, improve the last mile of performance, and to add Outlook support.

https://housecat.com/

The incentive is the mail app is “malleable” so you can craft custom workflows and UI widgets to help you get to inbox zero.

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I work in what used to be Exchange. (my opinions are my own).

There is no one reason for the quality issues. It's a thousand small decisions and problems that have compound against each other over decades, coupled with the sheer feature complexity+scope+impact and multiplied by the titanic scale and volume the platform handles.

Additionally, the engineering culture really prioritizes backwards compatibility for customers (for good reasons) which bleeds into all aspects of the platform/decisions in both good and bad ways - and means that the big and obvious step-change platform improvements that could be made internally to make things better are not really invested in, or are deemed to expensive.

It's still a great place to work, and I'm proud that my work is in some small way directly contributing to and helping billions of people's work lives but there's still a long road ahead to improving the customer experience of using the platform for both internal and external customers.

Hard to blame (new) Outlook issues on backward compatibility... seems like it's a ground-up electron app that supports basically nothing from the classic version.

I clicked, saw this "The email app with its own AI agent" and closed. Another "Let's shove AI into something".

Outlook already provides me this, it's terrible at it since context is key and context is probably buried in several places it has access to and despite that access, it still falls flat.

Fair feedback and sentiment.

As I build this out there's actually less and less AI in the product and more good old-fashioned UX, writing and data entry tools, and automations.

Some examples...

We're simply bringing a CRM CRUD form into an email thread, populated from email sender / domain, for the end user to review and submit.

You can add your own notes into a thread, and copy / paste from

Similarly good pre-defined templates with variables perform way better than AI generated drafts.

Context is indeed key. The person at their email inbox has most of the context in their head, they need good tools to organize that context down for their future self and their team. AI can help but its really about just building a great tool for the operator.

I second this feedback. The demo video was also clicking on emails and having Claude research and answer them automatically? Is this really the inhumane kind of communication we want to be pushing and normalizing? The UI looks nice, and I would love a better e-mail client, but the egregious pushing of AI convinces me not to try it.

If the developer is suggesting answering emails with agents without reading it, how do I know this project is shoved full of unchecked vibe-coding? Don't want to be so harsh, but I wanted to second this feedback since you seem serious about hearing it. All the best with the project, aside from the immediate AI turnoff it looks great.

I hate this type of disguised ad paired with a running commentary on important issues.

It’s funny because your demo is full of spinners.

At some point they gave up on quality control. Not sure why but things went downhill at Microsoft years ago already. With the rise of AI slop and Microsoft turning into microslop, this trend just became amplified.

Yes. That point in time was long before AI. Remember Longhorn/Vista? Windows ME? Etc, etc…

They fired all of their SDET, eliminated the SDET role/discipline, and made SDEs responsible for quality and shipping their features, a major conflict of interest.

This happened ~2014/2015.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-microsoft-doe...

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