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How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

schveiguy.com

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Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#51

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #38
mistermann wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean any personal disrespect, but I mostly don't believe you. Well sure, maybe in some divisions a few people (through a personal effort rather than corporate policy) look at these things and try to make good software, but outside of a few teams (PowerBI for example) I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share. As a company, Microsoft's official goal is not to make good soft…

> maybe in some divisions a few people […] try to make good software, but […] I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share. I bet this is even worse: we can have most people at Microsoft trying to make good software (or good customer support, or good whatever they're doing), and still having the company as a whole being about just making money. Because Microsoft, just like any corpor…

In my experience while I worked there (on Visual Studio and Chakra) it felt like all the major bad decisions were being made at the upper-levels of management - things like the original Windows 8 sandboxed XAML "Apps", the Surface RT, killing VB6 without giving users a clear exit strategy, the decision not to market Zune internationally, making Windows XP look like a toddler's Fischer-Price toy, or the Terri Schiavo-like treatment of Windows Phone - but conversely it's also where good decisions come from (Bash on Windows, Docker support, SQL Server for Linux).

Contrary to your point: none of the shareholders had any input on those decisions above (except possibly getting rid of Ballmer post-Nokia...). It's just management playing dice with ideas seemingly without much critical thinking - or at least transparency as to why they decided to press-ahead with a controversial decision.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#52

Post by loup-vaillant »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #51
loup-vaillant wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe in some divisions a few people […] try to make good software, but […] I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share. I bet this is even worse: we can have most people at Microsoft trying to make good software (or good customer support, or good whatever they're doing), and still having the company as a whole being about just making money. Because Microsoft, just like any corpor…

In my experience while I worked there (on Visual Studio and Chakra) it felt like all the major bad decisions were being made at the upper-levels of management - things like the original Windows 8 sandboxed XAML "Apps", the Surface RT, killing VB6 without giving users a clear exit strategy, the decision not to market Zune internationally, making Windows XP look like a toddler's Fischer-Price toy, or the Terri Schiavo-…

My, I guess I wasn't pessimistic enough. I mean, a bunch of evil investors trying to squeeze money out of a company is one thing, but now you're telling me plain incompetence is enough?

I guess we still have a long way to go before we make software right.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#53

Post by colejohnson66 »

DamonHD wrote: post #12

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.)

Is this story available in more detail somewhere?

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#54

Post by cptskippy »

posguy wrote: post #47
cptskippy wrote: post #18

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 X…

I'm trying to think of where I could even drum up an Xbox One, but I think I'd be up a creek without a paddle myself. None of my friends own one (though they own 360's and PS4's) and none of the MS employees I know own a Xbox One. I think I'd just try to hijack one at a Microsoft Store, if they have those available to "demo". Though they may have ripped that out for the Vive areas iirc...

I was half hoping they'd offer to send me one. I've wanted to play with a Kinect and SLAM but the upfront cost is too high for me.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#55

Post by johansch »

johansch wrote: post #16
ElijahLynn wrote: post #3

That was fantastic!!! And to think, all they have to do is have a "report bug" item in the help menu.

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…

> It didn't help that were all Swedes

In the beginning, I mean. Quite soon we also had norwegian team members, and a few years later some polish team members, and so on. Language mis-match still was most certainly an issue though.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#57

Post by namrog84 »

schveiguy wrote: post #29
namrog84 wrote: post #6

Hi schveiguy, I am just a completely random MS employee, acting on my own behalf, who is browsing HN on my day off from work. I work in Xbox and don't work anywhere related to Excel or tech support. I just repro'd your issue in under 30 seconds in Excel 2016, and also submitted an issue internally on this. I hope it helps :) http://i.imgur.com/N6X2Lj4.png Also, I'd highly recommend using the builtin feedback menu, e.…

So you are saying it actually worked. Awesome! And thank you very much! I honestly didn't know about the "frown" thing. I frankly have a hard time finding stuff in the menu on the 2016 products. I spent about 5 minutes looking at another person's PC (who was having the issue originally) to figure out what version of office they had before finally just clicking on the start menu and seeing "Excel 2016". Help->About ju…

>I spent about 5 minutes looking ... to figure out what version of office they had

Just in case anyone is curious about the product version. It is often under File->Account (->About).

e.g. http://i.imgur.com/nIo4d2l.png

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#58

Post by hirsin »

mistermann wrote: post #28
mherdeg wrote: post #7

Ouch, sounds like this author used a long phone tree and talked to about ten front-line phone support technicians, none of whom were able to file a bug report. Bummer. Also sounds like one or more of those people advised him to report his issue in the web support forums at https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... , which in my experience often get really good feedback from employees and expert…

> I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root-cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every week looking for primary-source user feedback. Oh bullshit. Anyone who's landed on answers.microsoft.com before and seen what passes for "dialogue" with customers on there knows what you're sayi…

Answers/Uservoice depend heavily on the team. I know the Windows IoTCore team is pretty heavily invested in their outreach on Answers and Twitter, and any issues reported there are triaged and then brought to the team's attention. I've seen regressions in our product reported on Answers and then brought to our attention within hours.

That said, yes, as a Windows Core PM I do trawl Uservoice (well, I get a push notification of new comments/suggestions) as well as Stack Overflow and Twitter. Seriously - lots of us are on Twitter (just look at @richturn_ms for Bash on Windows) and pretty accessible.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#59

Post by yuhong »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #51
loup-vaillant wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe in some divisions a few people […] try to make good software, but […] I truly believe Microsoft is still primarily just about money and market share. I bet this is even worse: we can have most people at Microsoft trying to make good software (or good customer support, or good whatever they're doing), and still having the company as a whole being about just making money. Because Microsoft, just like any corpor…

In my experience while I worked there (on Visual Studio and Chakra) it felt like all the major bad decisions were being made at the upper-levels of management - things like the original Windows 8 sandboxed XAML "Apps", the Surface RT, killing VB6 without giving users a clear exit strategy, the decision not to market Zune internationally, making Windows XP look like a toddler's Fischer-Price toy, or the Terri Schiavo-…

Notice the good decisions came later than the bad decisions in the list.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#60

Post by mistermann »

hirsin wrote: post #58
mistermann wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember that MVPs and PMs would absolutely trawl those forums looking for user-reported bugs and trying to help get them workarounds & fix the root-cause bug. YMMV of course, but many members of the team spent time every week looking for primary-source user feedback. Oh bullshit. Anyone who's landed on answers.microsoft.com before and seen what passes for "dialogue" with customers on there knows what you're sayi…

Answers/Uservoice depend heavily on the team. I know the Windows IoTCore team is pretty heavily invested in their outreach on Answers and Twitter, and any issues reported there are triaged and then brought to the team's attention. I've seen regressions in our product reported on Answers and then brought to our attention within hours. That said, yes, as a Windows Core PM I do trawl Uservoice (well, I get a push notifi…

Some teams (PowerBI, for one) have embraced the new customer service culture, others seem to still have the old "FU, pay me" culture. Pretending otherwise (not pointing the finger at you, but at MSFT management) to me just adds insult to injury.
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