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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#61

Post by zamnos »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #35
greggsy wrote: post #12

Despite the implication of malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft, this just seems like a bit of an oversight (i.e. inexperience) on behalf of the school’s IT team. Nonetheless, I would have expected MS to ensure that the process includes clearer guidance for the account owner, and for deliberate decisions to be made by the school to enable this type of action. They did a very good job of provid…

Microsoft caring so little about what they do to their users IS malice.

How does that work? Is there some evil villian at Microsoft, twirling his mustache maniacally laughing himself to sleep because Mr Jeff here can't create an Azure app? This is a case for Hanlon's razor.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#62

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

LeonB wrote: post #5

The way Microsoft accounts work is almost completely opaque to users. I’ve been in similar scenarios — the switch directory or switch organisation technique usually worked for me - but wasn’t enough for this person. They never really give you enough information to tell what’s going on… maybe it’s a security risk to have consumers who are anything other than bewildered Kafkerian characters struggling against a faceles…

Arghhh... I swear I only have one Microsoft account, but it randomly seems to use either one password or an older one. I've been round loops several times resetting the password and all seems well, until it seems to want an older one again.

I didn't bother porting my Mojang account to Microsoft, it was too stressful to use.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#63

Post by thih9 »

I may have jinxed it; the other day i was thinking how impressive it is that Microsoft handles their decades old AD/azure/live/xbox/etc auth systems and that they all work together well.

In this case, is there another company with a similarly old and complex auth system that does exemplary work?

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#64

Post by jandrese »

zamnos wrote: post #11
jackjeff wrote: post #7

My rule of thumb is to NEVER use a Microsoft account for anything unless I’m forced to. And then I’ll create a brand new account for each use case. I so regret converting my Minecraft account. The old Mojang stuff was so much more reliable.

> The old Mojang stuff was so much more reliable. In what way? Does the microsoft.com login system go down often?

Reliability is probably about the same, but the Microsoft account signup process is a nightmare compared to the old Mojang system. There's like 4 different X-Box or Game like websites with slightly different usernames and they don't talk with one another and various features are scattered across all of them. Even flipping the switch that lets you join an online game is buried half a dozen menus deep in the bowels of the system and is labeled in a way that you'll never find it if you didn't Google for the instructions first. It's so unnecessarily complex and confusing.

The worst part is that some bot years ago signed up for the X-Box account using the same email I used for the Mojang account so converting the account first required me to take over the bot account with a password reset. But the bot set the account in up German and it's apparently impossible to switch the language settings for everything. I got most of it switched over (across four completely different configuration pages), but stuff like the emails are still sent in German. I'm pretty sure my account is going to be locked sometime in the future once they figure out that it was originally a bot account and there is no chance I'm going to be able to get my alpha Minecraft account back when that happens.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#65

Post by visarga »

amatecha wrote: post #55
capybara_2020 wrote: post #24

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do. Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines. Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also. We really need to separate authentication from services and devic…

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the produ…

> and finally found a singular customer support page that happens to mention it

That's the kind of results Google should be surfacing, but it lost the game, it is so useless now for precision searching.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#66

Post by b800h »

lultimouomo wrote: post #29
LeoPanthera wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate comments like this. What exactly do you expect to achieve by saying "Well of COURSE this thing is awful. You should have known that." Just accepting every horrible thing in the world must be so sad.

You don't need to accept it. Just don't use Microsoft. (If your school forces you to, create a throwaway account for that, and let the principal know that you are not a happy customer)

And then your child has a Mojang account, and then you can't use Minecraft because the throwaway account is associated with your phone number, and it's tied into the Active Directory of .....

This sort of scenario. Or a million others.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#68

Post by helsinkiandrew »

zamnos wrote: post #38
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #15

I'm realizing more and more that relying on a large organization for a service where you are 1 of hundreds of millions of customers is a bad idea. First customer service will be automated or even non existant, and very poor. Secondly the product will have been 'tweaked' so many times for new markets and product extensions that it will be very fragile when you do something at the edges of its functionality (not what t…

A father with a daughter that goes to a school, and the father has a Microsoft account, is nowhere near an "edge of functionality". Sounds more like Microsoft has a too-complex login system on their hands, one that needs a ton of backend rework to happen in order to simplify the system for the user (and the developer)'s sanity. Also, a software engineering product run by a large organization is going to have tons mor…

> is nowhere near an "edge of functionality"

No, but something unusual went wrong and getting it fixed will be harder at MS than a smaller company. There probably isn't a single person who understands why without a fair amount of research. Without the publicity, MS would be inclined not to spend the effort to fix.

> Also, a software engineering product run by a large organization is going to have tons more functionality

This was exactly my point - the large product with tons more functionality will likely be more brittle, harder to use, and get support for if something breaks. If you aren't using that functionality, you often won't be well served by the company. I had this experience with EverNote. I'm also a very happy AWS customer, but I think that is because their products are a set of (fairly) independent products, rather than one huge system.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#69

Post by rejectfinite »

dustedcodes wrote: post #52
theK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Because on your work computer you just login with your work office 365 and not your personal one and then the above is not a problem whatsoever?
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