My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by MereInterest » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:09 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #201

hosteur wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a clear case of selection bias. People with Linux and Mac are probably devs and technical people who will obviously utilize a much broader range of functionality of their machines and thus encounter more edge cases.

Ye clear selection bias. Most users can't describe a problem in enough detail to get to "2nd line" support in the first place. You more or less need to be a dev-ish person to prove IT is at fault. The lusers have to live with the unplug the computer and reboot workarounds.

A few years ago, there was a video game developer who pointed out the disproportionate number of bug reports that came from their Linux players, and how grateful they were for it. The majority of the bugs reported by Linux users were not Linux-specific, and frequently had detailed descriptions of expected via observed behavior, exact steps to reproduce, core dumps, etc. Because the bug reports were coming from a group who is used to making effective bug reports, they could be used more effectively.

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

#252

Post by literalAardvark » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:11 PM UTC

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #208

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.

Or the technical infrastructure doesn’t support them well. Or the support team doesn’t know MacOS or Linux, so it becomes a lot harder to provide support. There could be many reasons.

No, they're just really difficult to support.

MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.

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

#253

Post by Joeri » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:11 PM UTC

Meph504 wrote: post #217

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.

Have you tried the competing software in a business environment, it is pretty easy to see why MS productivity software dominates. For like $12/u/month you get full web and desktop office software, MFA, and AzureAD, which you can use as a SSO indentity provider for free, for one lisc that cost $4/m you can then make use of conditional access policies that give you massive options over how you manage an access all aspe…

Having just been put through the switch from google apps + slack to the full ms365 suite including teams I have to agree and disagree.

On paper microsoft absolutely has the best offering. The ms365 suite has everything anyone could ever need. But, in practice it feels more like a downgrade than an upgrade. Teams does everything, and all of it just as poorly. Office does everything, but the web version and collaboration features are so far behind google they are not comparable. Sharepoint and onedrive seem superior to google drive, but in practice there are many papercuts and people struggle to understand where to put documents and how to properly share them.

What microsoft seems to lack is caring about user experience as they slather feature layer after feature layer on top of their products. What google seems to lack is incentive to actually meaningfully improve their product, because I couldn‘t tell you a single meaningful feature they added to g suite over the last five years.

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

#254

Post by dividedbyzero » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:13 PM UTC

roxgib wrote: post #121

tacker2000 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking at a media center/gaming emulation device and to be honest i dont see the benefit of these android based TV devices or Apple TV anymore. You can buy a good mini-pc for a couple hundred bucks and its much more powerful and flexible. You can run windows or linux etc and hook up any keyboard, controller, remote, and do whatever you like.

The obvious response to this is that the non-techy family members wouldn't be able to use it, but honestly most home entertainment setups are already crazy complicated, whereas everyone knows how to use a PC (for now)

Mash any of the four buttons on the Apple TV remote until the TV turns on, then use the top third of the remote as a touch surface to pick the app logo you want (Netflix, Youtube, etc.). If your iPhone is in the same wifi, a notification will tell you you can use it to type instead of the on-screen keyboard if you get into a free text field like for search. Apple products have their faults, and they are expensive, but that experience is as simple and smooth as it gets.

We also have an old laptop attached to the TV. We set that up in the lockdowns so we could use a webcam on the TV and a wired microphone on the coffee table to "get together" with friends and family, still use it occasionally for Dungeons & Dragons with friends who live too far away to visit often. The Apple TV doesn't support webcams, but wins at everything else, hands down. Even for desktop-y stuff, streaming my Macbook or my girlfriend's iPad to the Apple TV is less hassle.

Desktop ergonomics just don't work on the couch, at least for us, even with a nice-ish wireless keyboard with touchpad. Having a touchpad remote with just four buttons that have very predictable functions and a simple mobile-ish UI is nice, even to me, and I'm a desktop power user otherwise. Desktop OSes are for work, school or uni, most people aren't inclined, encouraged and/or enabled to explore and play in those, so they don't get them the way desktop power users do and tend to expect everyone else to, or the way people get mobile UX.

If you want something nearly everyone can pick up quickly, even older children and some seniors, make it touch-based, responsive, give it proper apps and the same core animations mobile phones have and you're 80% there.

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

#255

Post by motoboi » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:14 PM UTC

kl343 wrote: post #106

Firmly agree with other posters that Microsoft's identity services leave a lot to be desired... but Jeff is being a bit sensationalist here. The school did not "take over" his MS account. At some point (likely amidst a mountain of other onboarding tasks for his daughter's enrollment) he would have received an invitation to join the school's Azure AD tenant as a guest/external user. In this case, he chose to join usin…

That posture is exactly why it could become so messy.

People learn how to navigate a shit system and them become complacent with it, blaming the less experienced with their "errors", when the system itself is wrong for being shitty.

This is just a convoluted why of me saying: don't blame the user

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

#256

Post by stbenjam » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:16 PM UTC

YPPH wrote: post #235

Google and Microsoft couldn't be further apart in their login architecture, and their distinguishing of personal and work accounts. Google does an excellent job, everything is unified and sensible. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a mess. It looks like everything is mishmashed together. Sometimes logins will fail completely and you get weird error messages which look out of place in a production environment. Take but…

Google’s handing of multiple accounts is still terrible though since everything is based off an index in order of sign in. Share or bookmark a work link? /u/2 is embedded in it. If later the personal account was the second login, you’d get access denied.

They’re better at offering a switch account ui in some places but definitely not most.

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

#257

Post by smashah » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:18 PM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #193

gchadwick wrote: post #26

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a s…

> Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. It is indeed a giant mess. If you go to live.com and click on the hamburger icon at the top, then under 'Apps' click on the "To-Do" app, you will be asked to enter the password for your work account, even though you are on live.com, not on office.com, and you are currently logged in with your personal account. The only way to get past this is to click "use another account" the…

This is partly because loginHint is broken on microsoft/azure sign in

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

#258

Post by nextlevelwizard » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:22 PM UTC

Some what related just last week someone from my company's IT department contacted me about adding my work MacBook to some Microsoft spyware scheme so they could start administering it and he was very stricken when I didn’t want to do it. At start he tried go get me on board with carrots like being able to print - an activity I haven’t performed in over five years. And it ended with “this is our policy”

I told him that good luck coming all the way from India to wrestle my laptop from my hands. Don’t know if this will end with me looking for a new job, but what I know is that I won’t be installing whatever rap they are pushing. I am an adult and know how to admin my own computer

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

#259

Post by denton-scratch » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:23 PM UTC

j_mo wrote: post #199

lostlogin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m blown away by this. I’ve come back to a full MS stack after years away and it’s grim. Machine shave to be restarted once or more times per day. My personal MacBook is restarted every month or two. I used to moan about Apple’s software quality, but maybe we are actually in Isaac Asimov’s accelerating decline to a dark age.

Not to support Windows, but what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day? I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time so I don't have to reopen 5 different windows and arrange them across three screens for uni work every evening. It works fine. Mind you, if it was a Mac I'd not even have to reopen or arrange them after restarting the machine - they'd still be there.…

> I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time

My Win10 Home desktop downloads updates when I'm not looking - and sometimes when I'm actually using the thing - and then reboots all on its own. I have no control over this; there have been occasions when the reboot has happened while I was working.

It happens roughly once a week.

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

#260

Post by WastingMyTime89 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 12:25 PM UTC

ccouzens wrote: post #87

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.

Or run apps like Teams in a web browser. Web browsers have good isolation techniques like Chrome's profiles and Firefox's containers. Teams is written using web technologies so you're getting the same experience as the app.

As someone who has to do that (one work account with my company, one with our customer) the UX is miserable. Notifications work sometimes, delay can be significant and I don’t trust the auto-away feature when Teams run in a browser.

Multi-accounts are really painful with most chat clients I have encountered. It sometimes makes me miss e-mail where the inside/outside distinction doesn’t exist.