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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

#71

Post by larsrc »

cornholio wrote: post #4

Large corporations with a captive market inevitably reach the digital bureaucracy stage, where the exaggerated mass of their workforce breaks under its own weight, and they become inept at doing basic things. This is a great thing for small startups, else we would only have a single huge corporate conglomerate doing everything with cutthroat efficiency.

It's not just the company bureaucracy, it's also laws and regulations. It's great to be a startup in the US where you have a large and fairly rich customer base. But when you go international and have to deal with all the myriad laws there, often contradictory or poorly defined, your code will be messy. Very messy. Plus these laws keep changing and your customers keep moving to different jurisdictions or giving you wrong information.

Add to that various attempts at fixing problems, adding features, partially removing unsuccessful features, supporting old systems, framework/library migrations in various states of completeness, different developer's ideas of how to do things, and that rockstar developer who wrote really obscure code and then left to grow pomelos, and you have an incredible mess without even having to bring in company bureaucracy.

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

#72

Post by ta1243 »

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.

Windows is only $5m a year and legal threats if your time is free

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

#73

Post by ta1243 »

visarga wrote: post #65
amatecha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google should be surfacing things which paint google in a bad light?

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

#74

Post by skowalak »

asddubs wrote: post #44
Liquix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. If you didn't mind having a Mojang account (small, indie, Swedish company; respectable privacy policy) but would prefer not to create a Microsoft account, your money is as good as gone and there is no way to play the game officially.

if you just want to play offline, the prism launcher still lets you authenticate using the old mojang accounts. (which is not to contradict your claim, as it's not an official launcher). I held out for a really long time, but a friend wanted to play minecraft with me so I finally caved. If they ask me to add a phone number I'll probably just abandon the account though, and look into piracy of the game I purchased.

After converting, my brand new MS account got locked for 'suspicious activity' within minutes. To get back access to the game I had paid money for, I had to... you guessed it: add my phone number.

Really makes me consider just not playing anymore.

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

#75

Post by philliphaydon »

pmontra wrote: post #60
dustedcodes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 they think that they must use Windows no matter how bad it is.

Windows is no more bad than macOS or any distro of linux.

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

#76

Post by exikyut »

ta1243 wrote: post #72
dustedcodes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows is only $5m a year and legal threats if your time is free

Wow, that's only $416k/mo.

Which is like, wow, half a mil a month, but... also alarmingly little!~

Apparently the backward compatibility monster is not the size it used to be?

Now I understand why Win11's designers used Macs... wow the moat got small

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

#77

Post by tragomaskhalos »

zwilliamson wrote: post #57

Let’s see if Bing Search AI can fix this for Jeff?

Since most of the relevant training data is likely to be punters kvetching about Microsoft, it'd be amusing to see if this would propel it into an angry rant about its boss.

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

#79

Post by simion314 »

Alphaeus wrote: post #28
zamnos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Mojang accounts weren't great for security. No 2FA or anything (just security questions), and if you lost your account / it was stolen, you were pretty stuffed. The only way to recover it was to present the transaction ID of your purchase of the game to support, which most people don't have and you were never told to keep. I saw lots of people get permanently locked out of their accounts. I guess it also doesn't…

>The Mojang accounts weren't great for security. No 2FA or anything (just security questions), and if you lost your account / it was stolen, you were pretty stuffed. The only way to recover it was to present the transaction ID of your purchase of the game to support, which most people don't have and you were never told to keep. I saw lots of people get permanently locked out of their accounts.

It was in fact super easy to just search my email Inbox for emails from Mojand and find the proof or purchase.

With MS I have 3 fucking accounts and not by choice, they bought Skype and Mojand and forced me into their super shitty system, I spent 30 minutes 1 year ago to migrate the Minecrtaft accoutn and more then 30 minutes a few weeks back to login back into Minecraft because I needed to detective my way to figureout what Microsoft account they connected to my Mojang purchase.

I hope in a few years someone leaks what greedy motives were behind this forced migrations, probably to sell more shit.

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

#80

Post by bboygravity »

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.

The lost hours are totally invisible (most companies wouldn't even allow you to report them. they don't WANT to see them) and the alternative world without lost hours with more productivity can also not be imagined by those in charge.

For all it's terrible bugs and login issues, is there even alterative with similar functionality that would be as "user friendly" (as in: non-tech people would know how to use it as well as they use Microsoft garbage?).

I literally can't think of any alternatives that comes close in functionality OR has the same ease of use for non tech people and wouldn't waste even more time.

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