How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

Ah! Many many moons ago when MS refused to even answer the phone I ended up in frustration telexing (yep!) a guy in MS HQ who turned out to be called Bill Gates, and dramatic things happened quite quickly. That's what we used to do before blog posts...

(It also resulted in my first start-up getting funded.)

Heh, the Web Query feature in Excel hasn't been significantly touched since it was introduced in Office 97 (or was it 2000?) - I know because when I was at MS a few years ago I reported a bad bug in the Web Query feature - it wasn't a regression, just something inherent in the fact they're stuck using the old Trident MSHTML engine and so the Web Query feature was broken for newer websites - they closed my bug as a WONTFIX because it wasn't a regression - even though the state of that tool in Excel gets worse each year Chrome's usage figures go up... I contacted one of the devs on the team seeking an explanation, he summarized it as stale code no-one wanted to touch without risking breaking anything.

It's telling that most of Excel's major new features in the past few releases (e.g. PowerQuery, integration with PowerBI, etc) are all implemented as pop-up "child applications" with their own UI instead of being baked into Excel itself - I wonder how long they'll keep this up before rewriting it entirely.

We did this with Opera Mini. I think it could have worked, sorta, if we had staffed this properly (meaning 50/50 on tech support/development. we weren't in a position to do that). But only early on. The early users were kinda techie (beta users were great! smart people who could speak english!), so it worked decently well until we reached like 1M MAUs. At 250M MAUs it was just random noise to a human. And the volume was insane.

It didn't help that were all Swedes and the vast majority of the users were Russian/Indonesian/Nigerian/Indian. Language-specific ML could definitely have helped nowadays, but this was 2005.

Another aspect:

The content was so "inappropriate" that we felt that we coulnd't really recruit young/cheap people with the proper language skills to watch these feedback channels. It just felt.. well, wrong.

Here's a lesson: if you build a browser and target it to people who have not been exposed to the Internet before, most users will use it to access porn. Not wikipedia.org, un.org etc. Very, very hard-core porn.

(We did notice that they actually started looking for things besides porn after a couple of years, though! I guess it's something people have to go through...)

I had a similar experience recently. My kid was trying to play Minecraft on her iPhone with her friends and it required her to login with her Xbox Account (which is another name for her Microsoft Account) but she didn't have permissions to play online because her account was a child member of a family and I hadn't granted her permission to play with friends.

The Bug was that she wasn't showing up as my child on the Xbox website, only on the Microsoft Account website. So I had no way of granting her permissions.

Unfortunately I tried the Chat support feature first. I was bounced around between Microsoft Support, Microsoft Account Support, Xbox Account Support, and Xbox Support numerous times. Eventually I was told to go fill out a form with a provided support number and that someone would email me.

When I finally received an email it contained links to the knowledge base article I'd found myself and had walked through with support numerous times already. I was even told a different points that I needed to Contact Apple and Mojang about the issue.

After an evening of this I decided to call. I was on the phone for about 2 hours with a guy while we went through all the same gyrations I had done before with Chat support. Thankfully he didn't try to pawn me off on anyone or transfer me to another department.

After eventually conceding that it wasn't user error and in fact a bug, he said he would submit it as a bug and sent me a link to a page where I could view the status of my support case.

The linked page is mostly useless as it is just a log of the emails I exchanged with Microsoft Support however it does have an obscure Status field. I never followed back up on the issue until a week ago when my kid asked about Minecraft again. I checked the Xbox Account website and miraculously I could change her permissions!

For shits and giggles I just opened up the support link I was emailed and the Status is now showing as "New -> TroubleShoot -> Closed". So yay!

I still haven't gotten a response from Microsoft Support about who I should contact at Apple about my issue though...

* I almost forgot! At one point the Xbox team wanted me to log into an Xbox One to try and adjust the privacy settings there. Only problem was that I don't own an Xbox One so they suggested that I some how come upon one on my own because they were confident it would solve my issue.

First, I think it's good that Microsoft and others separate tech support from bug reporting. Obviously some support requests will be due to bugs - but I'd never ever try to enter a bug via tech support (and this article shows why).

That said, the Microsoft way of bug reporting is utterly infuriating. If a bug like this is reported you want a human response from a developer familiar with the code in question, within at most a few days. This isn't support - I'm not buying a service from Microsoft I'm providing a service. For free.

Uservoice isn't working. It's a site where you vote on silly feature requests, not a proper bug reporting system where you can actually follow the issue being resolved. The bug report menu item in some products seem to take me to different places each time and differnt products do it differently. (and don't get me started on the people that respond on answers.ms... what is their correctness rate? 5%?)

I'm very happy to see that for a lot of the dev related projects you can now usually get a response on a github issue very quickly.