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

131–140 of 160 posts

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#131

Post by ethbr1 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #129
ethbr1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that seems to be missing these days, that was historically present in support orgs, is escalation . You’re always going to do the bulk of support through L1, and L1 support is going to be limited in terms of training and access. But ! The intended flow is that L1 recognizes when an issue exceeds their ability and escalates it up to L2+. And that’s where your talented (and empowered!) support engineers work.…

> Yet another cost for adding too many parties to something that could be better if it were simpler. But its not a cost from the perspective of the companies doj the outsourcing: the incentives are the way they are because the result is intended. Its not a cost of adding an extra party, it is part of the reason the party is added.

I think you’re overestimating intentionality in bad outcomes.

It’s entirely possible for a whole organization to want a good outcome, but construct an org chart where bad outcomes are guaranteed by the misaligned and incomplete incentives for sub-divisions.

E.g. the IT support org that is only measured on total spend and time to ticket closure

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#132

Post by grammarxcore »

laurent_du wrote: post #43
jiggawatts wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox "Containers" are great for this. I have color-coded tabs for various customer work accounts / tenants.

Yes, they are a life-saver. I use them all the time for various AWS accounts. The guy who told me about it years ago has saved me countless hours.

AWS finally added the ability to swap between a few accounts [1]. There’s an arbitrary limit of 5 so it’s really bad if, say, you work for an enterprise and have lots of accounts or, say, you work for a smaller business following the AWS Well-Architected Framework and isolate things. Containers still win.

1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/mu...

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#133

Post by y42 »

The problem is not that they are incompetent in IT, the problem is, IMHO, that they not scale their support with their product. Because they can't.

Yes, the process described is nuts. But it's not an IT process, it's a business process. And there it is about cost saving, trying to automate things and keep them secure at the same time. The reason is: They have to take care of hundreds of millions of customers. Eemploying what, 10.000 support personell? Doing simple math here: One support employee covers 10k customers. Impossible.

This happens everywhere in big tech. Accounts get banned, deleted, people loose data and whatever can go wrong. And all you have is - if at all - some anonymous e-mail address, automated answers and generic online documentation.

Problem is not that FAANG is incompetent in IT. It's just not feasible to cover Millions of individual problems if you grow to a certain size.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#134

Post by y42 »

tomesch1982 wrote: post #58

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.

What company is not incompetent in IT?

IT is not flawless. Because it's operated by people. I don't know any software company that offers bugfree software with a superb support and an innovative development roadmap.

Every company is, to a certain level, incompetent in IT. Because there is no perfect competency. The bigger the company, the more prominent this incompetency grows. Which misleads to a confirmation or selection biassed opinion, that this specific company is incompetent.

Take that small startup team that just developed a proof-of-concept, minor bugs as usual, small code-base, collecting 100 Mio. venture capital. Next year they grow to 10.000 employees and 100 Mio. customers. What also grows, inevitable, the code base and amount of bugs. At what state and why would you call them "incompetent in IT"?

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#135

Post by danaris »

tarsinge wrote: post #118
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…

Bureaucracy didn’t emerge in the 21th, contrary to lack of customer support for big companies. Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification, the root cause is Monopoly (direct or through organized shareholders across an industry). You don’t need support or good service when customers don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.

I would even go a step further, and say that bureaucracy, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of a large organization: you need more measures in place to keep track of things when there are too many for people to keep track of in their heads.

The problem arises when the bureaucracy becomes, at least for portions of the organization, the end in itself rather than a means to an end (the end being something like better service, efficiency, and accountability). That's when it starts to contribute to frustrations and bad experiences (and, if allowed to continue in this vein, enshittification).

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#136

Post by pityJuke »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #16

And 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 hav…

Owning your own domain is good enough for me - I use Apple to host my mail, but should they suspend me I’d at least be able to move the domain to another provider.

I should consider a solution for backing up my email, though.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#137

Post by SSLy »

pityJuke wrote: post #136
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #16

And 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 hav…

Owning your own domain is good enough for me - I use Apple to host my mail, but should they suspend me I’d at least be able to move the domain to another provider. I should consider a solution for backing up my email, though.

imapsync

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#138

Post by mcosta »

tarsinge wrote: post #118
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…

Bureaucracy didn’t emerge in the 21th, contrary to lack of customer support for big companies. Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification, the root cause is Monopoly (direct or through organized shareholders across an industry). You don’t need support or good service when customers don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.

They can go elsewhere , but then they would have to pay. And users hate to pay when there is a free offer.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#139

Post by random3 »

danaris wrote: post #135
tarsinge wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bureaucracy didn’t emerge in the 21th, contrary to lack of customer support for big companies. Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification, the root cause is Monopoly (direct or through organized shareholders across an industry). You don’t need support or good service when customers don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.

I would even go a step further, and say that bureaucracy, in and of itself , is not a bad thing. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of a large organization: you need more measures in place to keep track of things when there are too many for people to keep track of in their heads. The problem arises when the bureaucracy becomes, at least for portions of the organization, the end in itself rather than a means t…

Yes. In fact I was referring to bureaucracies in general as a state’s “support” organization.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#140

Post by sexy_seedbox »

GMoromisato wrote: post #42

I am disappointed that none of you are hating on Microsoft Teams. Maybe that's just too easy.

I deal with Microsoft Teams' embarrassing bugs on a weekly basis. Just yesterday discovered a bug with cropped / chopped off sentences on mobile version. But that's just one piece of M$ software.

I also have to deal with ScarePoint, MS Defender quarantining obviously safe messages, Outlook syncing problems, Windows 11 Account issues, many more...

Post reply on HN