Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft became incompetent in IT

mikekaganski.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 160 posts

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#81

Post by carlosjobim »

mikekaganski wrote: post #68
random3 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The OP’s surprisal is surprising, given that 95% of all support interactions across the board are exactly like this If your point is "it is today's norm, let's accept it and shut up", I feel the opposite. If the "norm" is like that, expressing it aloud is my way of contributing to society.

That is clearly not his point.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#82

Post by realusername »

DANmode wrote: post #69
realusername wrote: post #53

I had the same thing with both Google and Apple. I have a Gmail account lost because they unilaterally activated 2FA on it with a fake phone number (something like 111111111). And for Apple, moving abroad made the appleid system crash in an loop and nobody in the support system has any idea how appleid works. Do not use any of the tech giants for any important data.

Were either of these paid accounts?

Only the Apple one was but anyways, that doesn't excuse borking up the login, even if it's free.

If they don't want us to use a free account, they can simply tell us.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#83

Post by jauntywundrkind »

There was a post I enjoyed recently saying that basically Capitalism lost the plot & became a negative force as it became ever more the purpose of a company to diffuse responsibility, to not suffer greatly for doing a so so or even bad job of the thing.

Tech alas so often is the hammer in this bad relationhip, acts as such a horrible tool against humankind broadly. Doing so much to shield and protect the guilty, to make situations illegible & confounded. There's so many domain of concerns that overlap in so many complex ways, and so so so few people within companies and usually vastly less still outside who can see & view these domains & overlap.

It's only getting vastly worse. It feels like the fix so very nearly was in for the Feds to outlaw any regulation at all against AI in the US! AI is so much harder, so much worse than the bad systems work here, vastly more impervious to understanding than what has come before.

We are falling from god's light, into the deepest shadows of our own making. The machines keep getting more infernal.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#84

Post by BLKNSLVR »

crocowhile wrote: post #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 an…

If one company becomes massively profitable despite offering literally zero consumer level support, then why would any other company, that covets the same scalability, make any attempt at consumer level support at all?

Google has not scaled it's services, it has ignored hard problems of scaling in favour of solving (relatively) easy technical problems. It has not been punished in any meaningful way for this unbalanced approach, and so "the norm" shall it become.

To the detriment of us all.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#85

Post by rincebrain »

eviks wrote: post #40

> But this, once an IT tech leader, became utterly incompetent in IT. And for me, it’s a pity. The rose tint is strong in these glasses. When was their support great? Or is the author simply confused about what tech they were a lead in?

I have a lot of strong opinions about Microsoft, but at least during the Vista era, I once called their support without a support contract because someone's machine was very weirdly fucked after trying to upgrade to Vista, and I spoke to someone who spent an hour on the phone digging through weird registry crap and known issues to figure out how to successfully get the machine upgraded and working again. I was pleasantly surprised, having expected crappy support.

So I can confirm they did at least at one point have good support, and more broadly, I think it's not unfair to describe them as having had a great handle on what people wanted in user experiences and support, with how much they bent over backwards to fix compatibility issues for many years. I've also been told their support if you had a support contract was great, but I never was in a position to explore that firsthand.

Those days are, of course, gone, but they were known for that for a while.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#86

Post by charcircuit »

mikekaganski wrote: post #63
charcircuit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not presented as a thought. This is an article criticizing Microsoft, and criticizes their antispam measures saying they are bad due to an anecdotal false positive without considering that the overall effectiveness may be better than older approaches.

No you obviously didn't read it. It writes exactly "OK, they have a stupid AI that is worse than good old filters. OK, they made it react immediately, as an undoubted authority. But that’s not a big problem, right? They provide a way to appeal! Let me do that." If you say that it's not a depiction of what someone thinks and does facing something, you just need to improve reading skills. And basically that wasn't some…

It was an unnecessary comment to include in the article in my opinion. It doesn't affect the overall story, is potentially libelous, and trivializes the complexity of fighting abuse at scale.

I agree it's irrelevant. It makes 0 sense to me to include unless it's backed in truth.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#87

Post by pjmlp »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #14
supportengineer wrote: post #10

Microsoft’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.)

VB 6, nothing in .NET or the multiple C++ frameworks, has been as easy to use for COM.

MFC, although not as good as OWL/VCL/Qt, they never produced anything better in house for C++ developers.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#88

Post by danlitt »

waste_monk wrote: post #77
chrismorgan wrote: post #20

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 atte…

I think this is quite fair criticism of google. The idea of the account being locked and requiring MFA to verify is something they made up without consulting the user. If they're going to do this "suspicious account" locking, they must make MFA mandatory beforehand. If they haven't got MFA from the user, they must trust the password. If that means my account gets compromised, that's my problem.

Note that there is no question who owns the account. That's what the password is for!

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#89

Post by DANmode »

realusername wrote: post #82
DANmode wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were either of these paid accounts?

Only the Apple one was but anyways, that doesn't excuse borking up the login, even if it's free. If they don't want us to use a free account, they can simply tell us.

Agreed!

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#90

Post by danlitt »

guappa wrote: post #57
burnt-resistor wrote: post #12

Well, 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 c…

Support at meta was only good because you worked there.

Seconded. I got banned by Facebook back in 2015, for no reason. I say no reason because they never told me a reason, even after following up to ask. And when I immediately created the same account all over again, same name, same photo, it stayed up & has for 10 years. Shrug.
Post reply on HN