Far from the title: Microsoft, anybody home?
I think the current title used by OP actually conveys the gist of the article the best.
Perhaps, but HN guidelines request the original title without editorialising.
Microsoft became incompetent in IT
11–20 of 160 posts
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#12Well, that's actually 3 failures: UX designed to create an impossible flow, AI-based user blocking, and a lack of customer service.
By comparison, something similar happened when I was hired by Meta. Visiting the 2FA page caused my account to be insta-locked. It turned out that I had another account under an email address domain I no longer had access to. They were eventually able to fix it with an Oops request.
In conclusion, it doesn't matter so much if tech is imperfect if the support is good. But without good support, any small inconvenience or issue can easily spiral to become a show stopper.
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#13Never mind that ... look at next quarter's profit numbers and dividend. Like all corporations the only cohort they care about are their shareholders and executive suite.
It is really shocking that their revenue keeps going up. I guess Azure makes sense.
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#14Microsoft’s peak was Windows 7. It’s all been downhill after that.
They had multiple peaks. DOS 6.22, Windows 2000, Windows XP/2K3 (kinda), and 7.
They're trying hard to make 11 rhyme with the histories of Vista and Bob.
(I only use Windows 11 Enterprise on my oscilloscope control and instrumentation logging lab box, and on a gaming-ish laptop with an eGPU.)
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#15Never mind that ... look at next quarter's profit numbers and dividend. Like all corporations the only cohort they care about are their shareholders and executive suite.
It is really shocking that their revenue keeps going up. I guess Azure makes sense.
Munching up VMware on-prem and AWS/GCP cloud, especially when they support Linux and Windows, it makes it less risky for megacorps to shift traditional non-webops, on-prem operations to them.
What FOSS needs is saner and simpler type-1 hypervisor storage and compute appliances because the existing solutions are too difficult to deploy and maintain.
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#16And this is one of the (many) reasons that I have self-hosted my email for the last 20 years. Sure, I have had outages, and one or two times I have had to drop everything to fix the server due to a botched upgrade. But each time this happened it was my own fault and I myself was able to fix it. I have NEVER lost access due to some automated system putting me in the wrong category.
By the way, the biggest griefs I have had with self-hosting my email has been due to Microsoft. Their way of categorizing spam can pretty much be summed up to: does it come from an explicitly whitelisted commercial email provider? Probably not spam, otherwise: spam. They are criminally incompetent (also) in this area.
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the current title used by OP actually conveys the gist of the article the best.
Perhaps, but HN guidelines request the original title without editorialising. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Incorrect.
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize
The author’s title is significantly lower signal than the first sentence of their post. When the original title is defective in such a manner, the site accepts alternate titles, with preference given towards those that use the words of the post linked to compose a more informative title. The submitter does so here: “Microsoft, anyone home?” could be generically applied to hundreds of different Microsoft issues over time; the selected quote is much more precise. Plus informative, minus rhetoric is an excellent generalization of what makes a good HN title edit.
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#18Also if you have multiple microsoft 365 accounts, switching between those in the webapp seems to be impossible for years already. There's a switch account option, you can click it and sign in to another account, except you just stay logged in as the previous account.
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#19Also if you have multiple microsoft 365 accounts, switching between those in the webapp seems to be impossible for years already. There's a switch account option, you can click it and sign in to another account, except you just stay logged in as the previous account.
Oh yeah, I can only actually use them via private browsing (or nuking cookies, of course)
Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT
#20This kind of issue is absurdly common. I’ve seen basically the same thing with Microsoft, Amazon and Google—personally and with others.
With Google, it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification… which may not be possible. This hit me once while overseas, I think I managed to get in by tunnelling through my VPS in Australia. And if you can’t do this, you’re stuck, because Google simply doesn’t have support.
With Amazon, I was finally able to find one way of contacting them that didn’t require signing in, and when I finally got to a human, the problem was immediately fixed.