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Microsoft became incompetent in IT

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101–110 of 160 posts

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#101

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…

These businesses are all about scale. Each user makes them a paltry amount of money, but they have an enormous number of users. A single support incident that reaches a paid worker on their side costs them more than the profit you’ve brought them for the year. It probably costs them more than the profit you’ll bring them for your entire life. With less scale-y businesses, it’s worth it for them to put some effort int…

If business are all about scale then you are not fixing one user problem but you are fixing the same problem experienced by thousands or millions of user.

There is no excuse for being lazy.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These businesses are all about scale. Each user makes them a paltry amount of money, but they have an enormous number of users. A single support incident that reaches a paid worker on their side costs them more than the profit you’ve brought them for the year. It probably costs them more than the profit you’ll bring them for your entire life. With less scale-y businesses, it’s worth it for them to put some effort int…

With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. What would be the opposite? With enough blindfolds all bugs are unimportant?

[dead]

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#103
post #94
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 can't speak for Microsoft since I've never dealt with them directly, but descriptions of the level of support offered to consumers in the eighties and early nineties would be beyond belief to those who didn't live through it. You would dial a toll-free number, talk to a real person who would diagnose the problem and fix it. If it was a known fixed bug, they would mail you a software update. If the bug didn't have a…

> How the companies could afford that level of support is beyond me.

They weren’t squeezing everything they can to get bigger profit to the shareholders ?

It’s not like Microsoft is barely surviving atm, they make excellent profit and could very well spend some on support but decided not to at some point.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#104
I once had to go through a very similar process when I wanted to disallow my kid to play Minecraft online. I can't even tell you how much wtf's I've experienced along the way. It literally took me more than 40 minutes and I had to create two accounts, keep in mind I'm a software developer, so I'm a tech savvy person. Then after couple of month we tried to play together on the local lan and after spending another 40 minutes and choosing "allow" on every goddamn option on their settings portal it was still blocked...

I feel like Microsoft has a beta new great portal built just for what you're looking for but then when it becomes just mature enough for version 1.0 it immediately gets overruled by a newer, bigger, better portal that is currently in beta.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#105

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…

And for us schmucks who bought Minecraft licenses long ago, hope you created MS accounts for them all or they’re gone.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#107

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…

Had one of the first 10k Minecraft accounts or so. Never changed the name or anything. When Microsoft bought it they spammed me that I would loose my account if I don't transfer it. So after the 3rd email or so I did. It got hacked a few days after that, took several weeks to resolve for whatever reason. Ive had the account a few months after that until it was "hacked" again.

The very few times I played Minecraft since then I just used a hacked client.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#108
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Peak Microsoft to me was 1999-2000. Office 2000 (though Office 97 was also excellent), Windows 2000, and Visual Basic 6.0 were great. In my opinion, things started going downhill with Windows XP, with the introduction of product activation and the later introduction of forced software updates in Service Pack 2. I also don’t like the UI changes that Microsoft made in the 2000s, notably the Luna theme in Windows XP and…

> I still don’t like the ribbon nearly 20 years after its introduction.

> I found a refuge in Mac OS X, but in the past decade macOS has gotten more annoying.

Agree on both, macOS is still nowhere near windows level of annoyance but it’s getting worst and worst.

Each feature well integrated that made me like macOS was implemented at least 10 years ago, the recent feature are neat but don’t feel right. Like the window snapping, if you drag it to the top it will expand ‘almost’ fully but then if you didn’t stop at the right spot and kept dragging to the top your window goes instead to the virtual desktop screen. It’s extremely counterintuitive, and it keeps repeating with all these new features. Who use stage manager on macOS for instance ? Makes absolutely no sense.

At some point it won’t be worth the premium price they are asking for and I guess I’ll go Linux desktop. It’s broken, counter intuitive, little support but at least it’s getting better with time, not worst.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#109

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…

I have that with all meta products. As soon as I sign up my account gets locked, then I can unlock it normally most of the time. After a few hours or any interaction it gets locked again. When I usually start to see broken UX where there is no way to proceed anymore.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#110

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…

The complete lack of any human customer service that is actually answering is the reason I‘ll never again trust my private eMails to be managed by Google.

https://t3n.de/news/google-e-mails-geld-604458/

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