Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked? | Hacker News Reader

Ask: Why does everything Microsoft create lately feel fragile and half-baked?

13 pointsnothrowaways11 comments

Microsoft has seemingly abandoned quality and craftsmanship a long time ago.

But more recently they are rushing to force-feed us unfinished AI and web apps just so they can stay in the AI hype race.

Call it teams, copilot, LinkedIn I've never liked anything that comes out of Ms lately, yet our company defaults to MS.

At what point should we tell our employers to say no to MS treating paying customers as unpaid bulk beta testers?

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Microsoft changed its strategy around testing in 2014 [1], eliminating the Software Developer Engineer in Test position and having a goal of shipping faster.

12 years later, most of their software is crap. Maybe it comes out faster?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...

That is correct. Those pesky testers kept finding bugs and sending modules back to rework, when they could have been letting the users find those bugs by themselves on the cheap. /s

Having worked with a client using Microsoft now, I feel ya. Logins are broken, exchange, admin, entra, everything feels so fragile.

Microsoft is a big place. I recommend focusing on the parts they do well rather than getting tribal. All of the following products and services are fantastic in 2026:

  Windows Server 
  SQL Server 
  .NET/C#/F#/Nuget
  Visual Studio [code]
  SSMS
  AAD/EntraID
  Defender
  DirectX
  Excel

I agree that Teams still kind of sucks and that Azure is a complete dumpster fire of a cloud, on average. But that doesn't mean we should throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. We should employ a multi-stage filtration system and extract whatever value we can.

This always comes to mind: https://axelriet.medium.com/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trilli...

I just helped setup a new O365 account and joined Win 11 machines to Entra (Cloud Active directory) for a company.

Total mess. The cloud services each had partial outages where I was met with "Data not available at this time" or various errors. At first I thought I was holding it wrong, but no, hours or even a day later things that didn't work suddenly worked. Going forward if I hit a wall I take a break, try again later and it works.

I am no MS fan but the integration of Win11 and O365/Azure seems to be headed in the right direction but the execution is a total mess. One beef is OneDrive integration is an idiotic duality as its not a "drive" and given special treatment by office apps such as only allowing auto save when saving to Onedrive.

MS, get your shit together.

Microsoft pays significantly less than most other big tech companies. I'm not sure why they go this route, or if they think having a few super highly paid engineers to manage/lead the lower paid ones is the way to go, but it may be related.

I personally find a lot of Microsoft software products to be a little buggy. Use Linux desktop for a while then use Windows and you'll see what I mean.

C# is the best thing microsoft made, but was forced to be open sourced because of node.js.

Microsoft and others don't need quality to sell their crap.

This is the benefit of being big enough to control a large chunk of the market.

I feel the same about Big G, with my leading hypothesis being that they are leaning into hands free Ai too much. I certainly have direct evidence for that from Google in the form of a slop deck they sent me, and perceived evidence through Google Cloud degradation.

> lately

You must be new here.

Big companies always have internal conflicts and politics. Looking at Microsoft's products, you can see similar product lines competing with each other, and they're a mess. Personally, I think C# is a well-polished language, but the frameworks are terrible.

Google is similar.

All of Microsoft's recent products feel unstable and unfinished to me. Honestly, I think all big companies become bureaucratic and end up the same way. Google, in particular, had issues with the Antigravity IDE. And Gemini is also terrible.

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