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Microsoft became incompetent in IT

mikekaganski.wordpress.com

71–80 of 160 posts

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#71
`Tis ironic he was locked out trying to interact with LibreOffice.

I had a good interaction with the LibreOffice project. I reported something about LibreOffice Writer. Not even a bug, but just a user experience thing in some paragraph cohesion control UI.

My report was taken seriously, discussed and fixed, in a way that was fairly aligned with my suggestions, and it all happened on not a very long time scale, about within a month and a half.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156109

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#72
I remember a time long ago when Microsoft support was great. I had a problem with Windows 3.11 crashing on my computer. Called the free telephone support, and the person went through a rigorous unscripted troubleshooting session with me to finally find the problem. Turned out some dram timing was slightly of in the bios setting which was only tripped by Windows and not by other software.

That was in the 80's.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#73
It gets much worse than this if you think about what they decided to do with Minecraft. They obliged millions of kids - literally, kids - to have a microsoft account to play a game that has nothing to do with any other microsoft products. They apply sub-standard and child-unfriendly security measures and when armies of kids get hacked (mostly phished) every day the only thing they do is to close down their account and FORCE them to buy the game again.

I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#74

This 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…

Google wiped all my codes from their authenticator app

It really drove home that trusting my identity and online presence to these entities that do not care or even know how to be responsible about it is a very bad idea.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#75

Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT in the 1980s. I'm saying this for decades now: If there is one thing that Microsoft is realy bad at then it's software. Almost every piece of software they produce is worse than the alternatives.

I wanted to snarkily ask "became?".

I recall how the very first edition of Win XP needed time to "cool off" after startup for a minute or two, otherwise it would be wildly unstable. Service Pack 2 resolved most of those issues, but the fact it was needed at all is already telling.

Similarly Windows 11 had regressions in the weirdest of places, like for instance volume controls.

Microsoft has a legacy of bad software.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#76
post #52

This 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…

Exactly! The OP’s surprisal is surprising, given that 95% of all support interactions across the board are exactly like this. In fact, the internal support - i.e. the support for employees is just as bad and nonsensical. It goes pretty much like this. If your problem needs “reasoning” that entails more than matching a direct solution, you’re getting the default answer that’s the closest match to the solution. The onl…

[dead]

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#77

This 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…

It is true that google's (lack of) customer support is awful.

>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

However, this isn't quite fair on google - it's not arbitrary "sometimes", it's that accounts get locked if there's been unusual or suspicious activity that may indicate an attempt to compromise the account, such as failed login attempts or logins from a new location. The account is locked from single-factor (password only) authentication for a period of time to prevent compromise (which isn't disclosed but as I understand can vary and is usually a week or two), but will allow login with an MFA challenge.

If the account is locked and there are no MFA methods set up or other means of recovery like backup passwords, how are they meant to verify that it's you recovering the account and not an attacker?

Supposing you did manage to talk to a live google support agent, you'd still have the same problem of not being able to verify ownership of the account.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#78

This 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…

Google wiped all my codes from their authenticator app It really drove home that trusting my identity and online presence to these entities that do not care or even know how to be responsible about it is a very bad idea.

Always use an open source OTP app for something like that.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#79

This 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…

Oh man, I’m pulling my hair right now because Google _decided_ consistently that someone else has my password and locked them out. They’re so proud of themselves about it I can imagine. But in reality, I’m trying to login my Gmail account on my second iPhone which is next to my original Android that has this Gmail account installed. When I logged in on the iPhone they showed a code and asked me to pick the same code on the Android, I did follow but they insisted that it wasn’t enough and still locked me out.
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