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Microsoft became incompetent in IT

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Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#151

Post by drewcoo »

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.

> Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification

Bureaucracy does not cause things to get worse. It's not a bad rash that the system displays when it's about to get worse or the puss discharged when it's irritated.

Bureaucracy is a response to a system that works well. It adds rules and hierarchies and red tape to maintain the system state as it is. It's organizational glue.

Bureaucracy is only a problem when trying to change a system.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#152

Post by burnt-resistor »

lightbritefight wrote: post #31
burnt-resistor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look into XCP-NG. Its an excellent implementation of xenserver with a vsphere style single pain of glass called xen-orchestra. Its all FOSS and buildable from source. It comes "batteries included" with backups/vsan/etc for an insanely reasonable "per host" license cost for support.

I already have. It's close. I did some integration work on a product that supported XenServer, xcp-ng, VMware vSphere, and Hyper-V.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#153

Post by burnt-resistor »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #59
burnt-resistor wrote: post #14

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.)

> They're trying hard to make 11 rhyme with the histories of Vista and Bob. Windows 11 wishes it was half as good as Vista. While much-maligned, Vista was decent enough. And it didn't show you ads, try to shove MS services down your throat, or any of the other user-hostile things 11 does.

Argh, yeah. 11 Enterprise defaults to showing ads before setting GPOs. What a pile of poo IYAM.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#154

Post by burnt-resistor »

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.

That's true. I was and am a nobody. I don't use social media and would have zero clout for any platform to help me with anything.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#155

Post by crocowhile »

phba wrote: post #148
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…

The business incentive is funneling new users into their walled garden. If they could, they would assign a MS account to every newborn. There are still loopholes to protect your children from Minecraft's new "features" (at least for Linux users, ask privately), but it's only a matter of time until they are closed to appease the gods of enshittification.

The problem is that my kids want to play on online servers and for as much as they are learning to hate Microsoft, they still love Minecraft. I don't think loopholes can help with that, can they?

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#156

Post by kalleboo »

jkkola wrote: post #93
kalleboo wrote: post #50

All of the tech giants have really broken account recovery flows. They've all been glomming on recovery options, single sign-on, 2FA, etc features and none of it is coherent, with lots of dead ends where the optional recovery option it suggests isn't actually supported. Amazon has a lot of issues with accounts shared between their national storefronts. I lost a Google account that owns a YouTube channel since it want…

I just wanted to say that's equally impressive and terrifying. Good job though!

Thanks, it was kind of crazy, and played out over a few hours as for some of the steps it took a random idea popping up in my head after first giving up...

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#157

Post by wat10000 »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #101
wat10000 wrote: post #41

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…

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.

That’s the thing, sometimes a user’s problem requires a fix that’s specific for them. Their account gets into a bad state and needs to be unstuck. There’s no fixing that for millions of users, only fixing it for each user, millions of times.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#158

Post by phba »

crocowhile wrote: post #155
phba wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business incentive is funneling new users into their walled garden. If they could, they would assign a MS account to every newborn. There are still loopholes to protect your children from Minecraft's new "features" (at least for Linux users, ask privately), but it's only a matter of time until they are closed to appease the gods of enshittification.

The problem is that my kids want to play on online servers and for as much as they are learning to hate Microsoft, they still love Minecraft. I don't think loopholes can help with that, can they?

Unfortunately not, if you need their service you must play by their rules.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#159

Post by Jotalea »

herbst wrote: post #107
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…

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 sin…

I have a friend who bought Minecraft for the full price of 30 USD, and one day microshit decided "hey you know what? fuck you, we're deleting your account". so he went to a 3rd party site and bought a 2nd hand account, sketchy as fuck but it worked and this time he didn't have to pay full price again; but the fact that he had to pay *again* is simply outrageous.

On the other hand, last time I got actually hacked was in 2015, when I intentionally shared the password for a popular kids game that I used to play back then. And I'm not a cybersecurity expert at all, I don't follow the best security protocols, heck I don't even have good passwords, but I have never been hacked in 9 years.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#160

Post by y42 »

tremon wrote: post #150
y42 wrote: post #133

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. Eemploy…

It's just not feasible to cover millions of individual problems if you grow to a certain size. Then logic dictates it should not be feasible for companies to grow to that size and beyond.

Quite the opposite. It shows that companies must be able to set priorities once they reach a certain size. If they succeed in doing so, they are successful.
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