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How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

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Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#61

Post by chmanie »

badminton1 wrote: post #23

In contrast, Steve Jobs was known for randomly answering customer support calls to better understand the customer. http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/tech/innovation/jobs-excerpt-c...

It still works :)

A couple of months ago I sent an email about a bug in the iBooks iPhone App directly to Tim Cook. A couple of days later, an Apple PM responsible for the iBooks App sent me a mail telling me to describe the problem a bit more precise. I offered to take a video and sent it to him. It went back and forth a bit (but always the same person!) and in the next iOS patch the bug was fixed.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#62

Post by mistermann »

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…

> It is controlled by its shareholders, not by its employees.

It is controlled by management, shareholders don't have any input, especially at this level of detail.

Employees I think NOW (in some divisions) have input, but it is still in pockets.

Ask yourself this: do you think Scott Hanselman happiness level with the "new Microsoft" is better/worse/unchanged?

NOTE: It's really interesting to see how much public perception has changed wrt Microsoft, in that a comment attacking Microsoft is downvoted! So obviously, they are making positive progress.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#63

Post by yuhong »

mistermann wrote: post #62
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…

> It is controlled by its shareholders, not by its employees. It is controlled by management, shareholders don't have any input, especially at this level of detail. Employees I think NOW (in some divisions) have input, but it is still in pockets. Ask yourself this: do you think Scott Hanselman happiness level with the "new Microsoft" is better/worse/unchanged? NOTE: It's really interesting to see how much public perc…

I actually wrote my poorly written wishlist for Satya partly in response to Scott Hanselman's post. The most important of these right now are probably patents. I have this submission on FAT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896891

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#65

Post by 505 »

I report bugs sometimes. I develop and test software for a living, and so my paying clients come first. This includes both software they are using and relevant tools that I am using in order to help the clients.

After or alongside those come the support and development teams of free (speech) software that I use. After that, certain developers of non-free software. As an exercise for the student, guess where Microsoft comes in that list.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#66

Post by gwern »

laktak wrote: post #46

For an example on how it should work look at Bash On Windows. They are really doing a great job there. https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues

That reminds me of the Halloween Memos and Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Commandline". The MS writer dabbles a little in this new 'open source' thing and reports back that he's astonished he can just open a bug! And even submit a patch! Even as a professional Windows user he admits being a little seduced by it. And Stephenson notes the contrast between the Debian bugtracking system and MS Windows's opacity.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#67

Post by i336_ »

SolarNet wrote: post #43
yellow_postit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose filtering tech support from bug reports at scale?

Letting customer support people push a button that says "This person appears to have an actual bug" that reports it to a specialized customer support team with some technical knowledge to be able to report it. These customer support people talk to people like this all day. They can know when an issue is an actual bug.

Hmmm.

Getting the bug report to the right dev and eliciting the ever-important "huh, that's weird" is a really tricky routing problem due to Microsoft (and similar companies') scale.

So... maybe... a team could be created, whose sole purpose is to distill potential issues into tiny testcases that take the fewest number of seconds for someone with domain knowledge to look at and go "okay I doubt this is invalid". Not to actually repro the issue (which might require significant setup), but rather to get an initial go/no-go.

Then teams around the company could be routed batches of testcases to look at every couple of days.

I know I'm describing issue tracking here - the specific point I'm getting at is that the first team I mentioned would handle all the back-and-forth with the customer until the testcase was as small as possible.

The caveat emptor with this idea is that it's inspired by a single datapoint (OP's bug report) and may not scale to more nuanced problems. Hardware failure, for example, would fall right through this approach.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#68

Post by duncan_bayne »

gwern wrote: post #66
laktak wrote: post #46

For an example on how it should work look at Bash On Windows. They are really doing a great job there. https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues

That reminds me of the Halloween Memos and Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Commandline". The MS writer dabbles a little in this new 'open source' thing and reports back that he's astonished he can just open a bug! And even submit a patch! Even as a professional Windows user he admits being a little seduced by it. And Stephenson notes the contrast between the Debian bugtracking system and MS Windows's opacity.

I spent ten years or so as a Windows developer. I've experienced the difference between the MS bug reporting process, and the ability to raise an issue on an open source tool then fix it with a pull request. There's no way I'd ever go back.

Re: How to Report a Bug to Microsoft

#70

Post by alphast0rm »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #64

Still waiting for Microsoft to fix this huge bug in Edge for over a year: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... I wouldn't hold my breath. Microsoft is koolaid city.

Wow--props for your persistence. I thought the original blog post was bad.

Hopefully this gets more visibility so it's escalated correctly.

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