I also spent quite a lot of time during the Windows 10 preview phase, and a while after release, diligently reporting bugs, and voting on well thought-out feature requests. But after noticing that none of these bugs ever got any attention, and how the Feedback Hub was mostly just noise, I started to wonder why I even did free work for a multi-billion dollar company, on my own time. Right around that period I switched to Linux and now only use Windows for some games that absolutely won't work on the former. This way I no longer care how bad the UX of the system is, and how many bugs there are, as long as my games launch.
Just want to say that the time you spend reporting bugs on Linux environments is not in vain but much appreciated.
I try to give back to the community and spend time fixing issues people have for the Linux desktops MATE and XFCE, at least a few times a year.
Giving back to the Linux ecosystem is definitely much more enjoyable than reporting Windows bugs. I'm active building packages and reporting/fixing bugs for Solus, as well as contributing some code to a variety of projects from time to time. It's more of a relaxing pastime for me than a chore. Also you mostly are in direct contact with the actual developers of the apps/libraries, which is a huge improvement.
Really? FOSS software very often has the same problems in this regard that Microsoft does. Almost every time I have an issue with something I will find it already in their bug tracker, several years old, at best ignored and at worst closed by the stale bot.
In my estimation it is roughly the same as it is with Microsoft: if it doesn't directly affect a developer's workflow it will not be fixed and they're annoyed you even brought it up.
The big difference of course being that Microsoft expects you to pay money for this treatment.
Are there any Linux desktops that don't require you to sign up for an account to submit a crash report, and keep crash report details private until triage? That has kept me from reporting reproducible bugs in KDE apps before.
Whenever a game I play is released on the Nintendo Switch, I am a little bit happier (eg Diablo 3, Tetris Effect). There’s honestly nothing keeping me in Windows except for video games (which I have less and less time for each year). I’m sort of looking forward to the day I won’t need to play video games on Windows and just be happy with a MacBook and a Linux workstation.
I'm the same. My drive doesn't have enough space so I'm stuck using WSL2 for React/Node development, and I'm waiting for an unreleased game to see how it will perform on Linux before I make my permanent switch.
Every other game I play is on Steam and have decent Proton support, or is a retro game where I can use Retroarch and PCSX2 natively.
Me, too. I'm so happy if a newly purchased game "just works". It feels like Windows by now is deliberately wasting my time with updates and unexpected configuration changes.
I once even spotted a Microsoft employee who took the time to raise their concerns on the public tracker:
That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible?
On the other hand, what I can find in the news about internal protests at MS are all seemingly SJW-ish topics, and absolutely none about the quality of the products themselves. I think that alone says a lot about who's working there and what they actually care about doing --- which is clearly not improving their products. The people who do care about that are being heavily outnumbered, and perhaps a lot of them have already deemed MS to be unsalvageable and left.
I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.
I mean, I'm a long time linux user and think windows has been steadily getting worse too, but in reference to your linked comment complaining about "inclusively designed" being a meaningless buzzword - I was confused what it meant too, but reading the actual article the full sentence is:
>We’re proud that Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows, built with and for people with disabilities.
so that just means it's designed to be more accessible to people with disabilities. I don't really think that's the problem, and it is a concern that is directly related to product quality. Seems like you just have a bone to pick
It is a meaningless buzzword, and has taken on an almost doublespeak connotation.
Remember when Windows let you adjust the sizes, colours, and fonts of every single UI element? Windows 3.x had that.
They removed that 3 versions back (Win8).
Then they removed some more in Windows 10, and in Windows 11, even stopped you from moving the taskbar to a different edge of the screen; and then, they have the gall to say it's "most inclusively designed".
Windows is not accesible even to people without disdabilities. I have to carefully select the background color or else i will end up with a light text colour on light background or dark text colour on dark background. Or to search half of hour for the cursor in a Word document because Microsoft decided that blinking the cursor is so 80s and the cursor is hidden.
Internally, Microsoft is chock full of super pissed-off people. Everyone's pissed at everyone else, since everyone there is constantly bombarded by angry friends' and relatives' complaints. A decade under Ballmer of firing anyone who wasn't good enough at weaseling ("unregretted attrition") has resulted in a company full of people who literally don't work at all 90% of the time.
The company does an insane amount of spying ("telemetry") on its users, but all I've ever seen ANY of that data used for was weaseling out of things. "Oh, only 5% of users use that feature" or "Oh, that bug only happens 0.1% of the time". Of course, if you use a product with 1000 bugs and each one of them has a 0.1% chance of occurring on any given month, you're going to run into bugs all the time
From an outside Windows user and admin perspective, I find it weird to blame Balmer here. I recall the era under Balmer as one where Microsoft made a lot of stupid moves, sure, but they were generally still pretty responsive to user feedback and I distinctly recall receiving our paid support on SQL issues from actual Microsoft-employed SQL engineers. Today all our paid support issues seem to go through clueless third party companies, and Microsoft very much seems to actively despise Windows users.
> That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible?
Presumably, that's "Thanks, <my username>@" as a signature, since the name matches.
I heard the issue is that there no longer are "people responsible". Since Windows was moved under E&D, there is literally no one claiming ownership of Windows. So divisions like WebXT (the folks shoving advertisement in the OS, forcing Edge usage, etc.) are doing as they please with no oversight.
Windows is no longer a 1st class product at MS, it's 3+ layers below the CEO, same tier as Teams, or OneDrive... so no wonder it's going down the shitter.
Pretty strange if you ask me.
PS. This is 2nd hand info from friends that are MSFTers.
A team that ignores product quality will soon run out of money to spend on solving social etc. issues. Effort follows attention, so attention should be weighted appropriately across issues, but it's not uncommon for companies and causes to over-index on just a few issues and sacrifice other aspects of team dynamics and product quality as a result.
Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive aggressive between departments. For a brief while I would diligently prepare bugs for the dog food software. I would even walk over to visit people responsible for it and chat about it. Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero bug bounce by exhausting the very people trying to help them.
Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.
Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only.
Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.
> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.
The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable".
Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit.
Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.
Those bots drive me insane; it punishes the most helpful the most. I would much rather they leave it open. I often find myself digging around closed issues to find people with similar problems.
Agree, but forever open issues doesn’t give any value too. Because you don’t know if this issue still applicable for latest version of app/library.
I think stalled issue should be closed, especially minor one.
I would rather have a bug report basically ignored than actually modified. There is a big difference between ignored and modified because it speaks to not only we are going to ignore this but no one will respect the content of the forum.
I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
Totally agree, beyond the pale. My experience predates the Feedback Hub, but I’ve only heard it has gotten worse after my tenure. I assume bugs would still get copied into a separate internal bug tracking which has an edit history. I assume it was an overzealous contractor with a cultural misunderstanding.
> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left.
What you're describing does not comport with my experience there.
Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate).
What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company.
> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.
This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on.
> Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals.
Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media.
Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.
Hi Phillip, you are a very unusual PM in a very unusual group that is able to derive a lot of value from user feedback who are usually very technical experts. I'm not sure how much your personal experience generalizes. Same could be said for my experience I guess so that is a fair point. I definitely had a bad time at a bad group. In the Steves era there were a lot of bad groups. I predate your tenure by quite a bit but I do keep in touch with former colleagues and exert soft influence to get the things I need built. I also think there is a selection criteria bias on the type of PM to be on HackerNews. Why does it happen to be you posting here out of such a large company. Also I thought you left - I would have counted you as one of the ones who cared leaving? I know others who also care haven't left but I think it's safe to say that on average they care less. You will be missed. You also started at MSFT right? I think you're taking things from Microsoft on face value that perhaps you shouldn't be.
This is my experience as well. I am a PM in Edge team and we take user feedback in our app extremely seriously. There are entire teams which parse the user feedback and add bugs for them. All top feedback is expected to be fixed under a specific SLA and these metrics are often tracked at leadership level.
In fact, for a lot of feature teams fixing the top user feedback issues is often part of their OKRs.
So yeah, I don't know if there are groups in MS which really don't consider their users' feedback, but from what I know that isn't the common behavior.
MS has its faults - every megacorp will have its own share of warts, but this specific one, i am not sure I can believe.
Issues filed on GitHub != process that goes through the Windows Feedback Hub. The latter is a completely opaque process and product team engagement varies wildly from feature area to feature area.
Azure is vastly bigger than VS Code and GitHub. In my opinion the monetization needed for a hard carry would risk their popularity. There is potential for interesting synergies but there has always been potential, just ask Ray Ozzie how that went.
They don't need to compete with amazon they just need to be profitable. Their AAD integrations are nice and their portal+ux(including api+powershell) and Defender ATP for E5 customers make them much better than GCP and in some cases AWS. The big three are here to stay.
They need large amounts of exponential growth, it’s baked into their current value which they need to justify their investments. Microsoft has reoriented itself around Azure and if Azure was merely just profitable Microsoft would have to jettison a lot of what they do. Without another money printer it would be a blood bath.
I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while.
My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.
It seems Feedback Hub is a way to give people the feeling that they have somewhere to be heard, without them actually making any difference.
It's a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have done something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don't change anything.
I've heard the tool's internal frontend (OCV) is equally frustrating to use by employees; and because of the huge amount of useless replies (that the author mentioned) in most teams it's only used for sentiment analysis on keywords ('people generally hate/love the new FooBar feature').
A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.
From the perspective of someone not at Microsoft, it feels like part of the reason it's such a mess is because it's obviously really badly curated, to the point that the Feedback Hub app encourages it. Older versions of the Feedback Hub had categorization on the left so you would naturally browse into a category, but then they changed it to not very visible drop-downs and auto-suggested categories. The result is feedback goes to random categories and is never moved to the correct ones, nor is there a way to report miscategorized feedback. There is also still old feedback for bugs that were fixed in the Windows 10 pre-RTM previews, and even some that are just complete gibberish random characters.
Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug.
Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.
I wonder if they’d get better replies if it didn’t seem like an effort to silo feedback into a tool they control so they can ignore it and keep negative feedback that gains traction out of the spotlight.
Based on my experience I call it the “Fuck-Off Hub” because that’s where they send you so you can feel like you’re submitting feedback, but they really just want you to fuck off and stop bugging them. It’s like whispering into the Grand Canyon. No one that matters is ever going to hear your feedback, so why bother?
> W11 taskbar is missing several key pieces of functionality which have incentivised new users to get into Feedback Hub and cast votes. By far the biggest and most controversial submission is about having multiple documents open in the same app.
Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me roll back to Win10 last week. "Just give it time", even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).
It's different (IMHO better) on Mac, even though it looks superficially similar.
On Mac, there is conceptually a two-level hierarchy of apps and windows. Every app maintains its own stack of windows. You can switch between apps with a single click (or keyboard command) and then switch between windows in that app's window stack if you want to bring a different one to the top. So a single click och keypress lets you switch between any pair of windows that are topmost in their respective apps. (There is also a keyboard shortcut to switch windows within an app.)
On Windows, you can't switch to apps (only to windows) but the windows are grouped by app into a hierarchical menu, so every time you switch window from the taskbar it takes two clicks and you are forced to hunt through a list of thumbnails.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about, so perhaps you could explain something that I just can’t figure out.
I use multiple desktops and run almost every app in full screen. Oftentimes when I focus a window on a secondary desktop that isn’t fullscreen (like a Finder window), then click on the Dock icon of a full screen app, MacOS will focus the primary desktop instead of the desktop with the full screen app.
Do you ever experience this behavior? Is there a better way to switch between apps?
We have to use Macs at my new job, for compliance reasons. What a shitshow of UX. How on earth is anyone supposed to know to use snowflake-click to switch between app instances? That isn't "strictly [better] than Win 11" (per the article), because at least the method in Win 11 is discoverable (there's also the well behaving alt+tab, and win-number). You have to use snowflake-C + snowflake-V, unlike every other OS in existence. This not only screws with muscle memory, but it's genuinely uncomfortable for such a common action (especially on their keyboard).
Windows 10 was the peak. After that, Microsoft seems to have joined Apple's race to the bottom. The Linux desktop is the last bastion of sanity.
MacOS has a very powerful built-in shortcut changing system that appears to date all the way back to NextStep based on some of the names of prefs and plists to change.
But, every Electron app and productivity website hard-codes the old Mac shortcuts based on naive platform detection instead of using native OS inputs, so the muscle memory conflict is even worse.
To anyone who just "doesn't get" this complaint, which is a lot of people I have met, it's like riding a bike your whole life to the point of being able to do downhill mountain terrain races, and then switching to a bike with the steering reversed, while wearing image distorting glasses. Except it's worse, because it feels more like someone chopped off your fingers and reattached them in random places.
It is literally nauseating, because when you are so deeply familiar with a complex tool it becomes an extension of your proprioception, and the tool misbehaving feels like you've been poisoned.
You can, but there is just one icon to represent the group of windows of that given app. It's visually hard to tell when there's more than one and impossible to tell how many (there is a little border suggesting there's more).
But it gets worse. If you have only 1 window with some app open (browser, terminal..), and this window has two tabs inside, clicking on the taskbar icon representing this window won't bring the window up. It will first bring up these small previews above the taskbar for every tab that you then have to click again (pick any) and then finally you get the window brought up. This is horrible because when you have tabs side by side in the window (terminal example), it doesn't matter which tab you choose as the same window pops up showing both tabs anyway. However you have to click twice (or hover for a bit to get the previews and then click again).
Congratulations to "Windows" version where switching "windows" is painful.
FWIW, I'm a Microsoft employee (not in Windows org) and I complain about "never combine" in any feedback forms we get. Maybe it will make a difference somewhere. (opinions are my own)
> Previously you could choose to “never combine” apps so you had one-click access to each document. Now you are required to use two mouse actions to open each.
If you have "foo.txt" and "bar.txt" open in, say, notepad, you get one notepad icon on your taskbar that you click on once to open the list of windows and then once more to actually switch. Previously you could tell windows to never combine the taskbar icons so you'd have two separate icons you could change to in one click.
Can't you replace the desktop environment anymore? I remember there used to be explorer replacements and Microsoft even told you how to go back to progman.exe.
As of Windows 10, UWP apps aren’t usable without explorer.exe actively running; window contents don’t update to match frame size changes. So the answer is surprisingly kind of no, unless you want to commit to never using “modern” apps, or manually opening file explorer every time you do.
Of course some would say that not being able to use UWP apps is an enhancement, not a bug.
I wonder if a MSFT employee was typing a response to you, but accidentally clicked edit on your comment and it overwrote your content before they realised what they have done, then panicked and just hit submit.
(author here) I like the thinking but I have never once seen a MSFT rep reply directly to a comment on Feedback Hub. Not once. You're lucky if the submission-level response makes sense. I don't think it explains this case.
I think Hanlon's Razor can be applied here - i.e. never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Particularly considering his comments were just echoing all the other comments in the thread - and the message "hello there" is strange and doesn't really make sense to me (if they have the power to edit a post, they probably have the power to delete it outright, which would have been less suspicious and not generated this post).
The Feedback hub... A few things are completely a dog's breakfast in the Windows 10 world - and their beyond hideous XBox with Windows App Store is one of them. I tried to file some feedback about the experience using the Hub but it felt like a wholly inappropriate tool for the job.
How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience.
I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such.
Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out.
I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot?
I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store.
(Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)
Agreed. I've run into more issues trying to get Minecraft running due to the disaster that is the windows store and related services. if you look at the gaming service, it's nothing but 1 star reviews with similar issues. I'm a technician person and I have no idea how non technical people manage to use Windows today.
Install Windows 10 LTSC. Minimal bloatware, no MS edge, no xbox game store, no windows store, no bullshit. Its the version everyone deserved but only hospitals etc got.
Readit News
In my estimation it is roughly the same as it is with Microsoft: if it doesn't directly affect a developer's workflow it will not be fixed and they're annoyed you even brought it up.
The big difference of course being that Microsoft expects you to pay money for this treatment.
https://www.steamdeck.com/
Every other game I play is on Steam and have decent Proton support, or is a retro game where I can use Retroarch and PCSX2 natively.
Linux to me is the "light" side.
That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible?
On the other hand, what I can find in the news about internal protests at MS are all seemingly SJW-ish topics, and absolutely none about the quality of the products themselves. I think that alone says a lot about who's working there and what they actually care about doing --- which is clearly not improving their products. The people who do care about that are being heavily outnumbered, and perhaps a lot of them have already deemed MS to be unsalvageable and left.
I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.
>We’re proud that Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows, built with and for people with disabilities.
so that just means it's designed to be more accessible to people with disabilities. I don't really think that's the problem, and it is a concern that is directly related to product quality. Seems like you just have a bone to pick
Remember when Windows let you adjust the sizes, colours, and fonts of every single UI element? Windows 3.x had that.
They removed that 3 versions back (Win8).
Then they removed some more in Windows 10, and in Windows 11, even stopped you from moving the taskbar to a different edge of the screen; and then, they have the gall to say it's "most inclusively designed".
"Actions speak louder than words."
The company does an insane amount of spying ("telemetry") on its users, but all I've ever seen ANY of that data used for was weaseling out of things. "Oh, only 5% of users use that feature" or "Oh, that bug only happens 0.1% of the time". Of course, if you use a product with 1000 bugs and each one of them has a 0.1% chance of occurring on any given month, you're going to run into bugs all the time
yet it doesn't reflect reality
Presumably, that's "Thanks, <my username>@" as a signature, since the name matches.
Windows is no longer a 1st class product at MS, it's 3+ layers below the CEO, same tier as Teams, or OneDrive... so no wonder it's going down the shitter.
Pretty strange if you ask me.
PS. This is 2nd hand info from friends that are MSFTers.
Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.
Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only.
Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.
The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable".
Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit.
Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.
I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
What you're describing does not comport with my experience there.
Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate).
What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company.
> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.
This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on.
> Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals.
Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media.
Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.
In fact, for a lot of feature teams fixing the top user feedback issues is often part of their OKRs.
So yeah, I don't know if there are groups in MS which really don't consider their users' feedback, but from what I know that isn't the common behavior.
MS has its faults - every megacorp will have its own share of warts, but this specific one, i am not sure I can believe.
I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.
I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while.
My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.
It's a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have done something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don't change anything.
The link "what we do with your feedback" I'm sure is just Rick Astley
A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.
Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug.
Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.
Based on my experience I call it the “Fuck-Off Hub” because that’s where they send you so you can feel like you’re submitting feedback, but they really just want you to fuck off and stop bugging them. It’s like whispering into the Grand Canyon. No one that matters is ever going to hear your feedback, so why bother?
Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me roll back to Win10 last week. "Just give it time", even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).
On Mac, there is conceptually a two-level hierarchy of apps and windows. Every app maintains its own stack of windows. You can switch between apps with a single click (or keyboard command) and then switch between windows in that app's window stack if you want to bring a different one to the top. So a single click och keypress lets you switch between any pair of windows that are topmost in their respective apps. (There is also a keyboard shortcut to switch windows within an app.)
On Windows, you can't switch to apps (only to windows) but the windows are grouped by app into a hierarchical menu, so every time you switch window from the taskbar it takes two clicks and you are forced to hunt through a list of thumbnails.
I use multiple desktops and run almost every app in full screen. Oftentimes when I focus a window on a secondary desktop that isn’t fullscreen (like a Finder window), then click on the Dock icon of a full screen app, MacOS will focus the primary desktop instead of the desktop with the full screen app.
Do you ever experience this behavior? Is there a better way to switch between apps?
We have to use Macs at my new job, for compliance reasons. What a shitshow of UX. How on earth is anyone supposed to know to use snowflake-click to switch between app instances? That isn't "strictly [better] than Win 11" (per the article), because at least the method in Win 11 is discoverable (there's also the well behaving alt+tab, and win-number). You have to use snowflake-C + snowflake-V, unlike every other OS in existence. This not only screws with muscle memory, but it's genuinely uncomfortable for such a common action (especially on their keyboard).
Windows 10 was the peak. After that, Microsoft seems to have joined Apple's race to the bottom. The Linux desktop is the last bastion of sanity.
But, every Electron app and productivity website hard-codes the old Mac shortcuts based on naive platform detection instead of using native OS inputs, so the muscle memory conflict is even worse.
To anyone who just "doesn't get" this complaint, which is a lot of people I have met, it's like riding a bike your whole life to the point of being able to do downhill mountain terrain races, and then switching to a bike with the steering reversed, while wearing image distorting glasses. Except it's worse, because it feels more like someone chopped off your fingers and reattached them in random places.
It is literally nauseating, because when you are so deeply familiar with a complex tool it becomes an extension of your proprioception, and the tool misbehaving feels like you've been poisoned.
But it gets worse. If you have only 1 window with some app open (browser, terminal..), and this window has two tabs inside, clicking on the taskbar icon representing this window won't bring the window up. It will first bring up these small previews above the taskbar for every tab that you then have to click again (pick any) and then finally you get the window brought up. This is horrible because when you have tabs side by side in the window (terminal example), it doesn't matter which tab you choose as the same window pops up showing both tabs anyway. However you have to click twice (or hover for a bit to get the previews and then click again).
Congratulations to "Windows" version where switching "windows" is painful.
FWIW, I'm a Microsoft employee (not in Windows org) and I complain about "never combine" in any feedback forms we get. Maybe it will make a difference somewhere. (opinions are my own)
> Previously you could choose to “never combine” apps so you had one-click access to each document. Now you are required to use two mouse actions to open each.
If you have "foo.txt" and "bar.txt" open in, say, notepad, you get one notepad icon on your taskbar that you click on once to open the list of windows and then once more to actually switch. Previously you could tell windows to never combine the taskbar icons so you'd have two separate icons you could change to in one click.
Of course some would say that not being able to use UWP apps is an enhancement, not a bug.
I wonder if a MSFT employee was typing a response to you, but accidentally clicked edit on your comment and it overwrote your content before they realised what they have done, then panicked and just hit submit.
Particularly considering his comments were just echoing all the other comments in the thread - and the message "hello there" is strange and doesn't really make sense to me (if they have the power to edit a post, they probably have the power to delete it outright, which would have been less suspicious and not generated this post).
-There are no MS Employees there (but professional Call/Text Centers)
-MS gives a *it about your opinion (as every big IT Company)
-But MS wants you to feel that your part of the family (inclusive developers developers!!)
How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience.
I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such.
Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out.
I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot?
I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store.
(Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)