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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#131

Post by nerflad »

Pxtl wrote: post #80
ethbro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to generalize a bit here and say that "smart" features have decreased usability, as aside from single-focus products (e.g. Mint) no one seems to priotize deep discoverabity when the "smart" path fails. Example A: MS trying to funnel all system settings through the search box. If that can't find it because I didn't type in the correct "1996 adventure game"-style keywords, I now have Control Panel (legacy), t…

It's basically the command-line probelms all over again, but with english instead of commands. It's only marginally better. So far nothing has been better than AutoCAD's approach, for me - all GUI commands are echo'd into the command-line as you do them, so you can see what commands you're using if you want to key them in later. Negligible hotkeys because the commands work so well and are more memorable than hotkeys.

A GUI with a 1-1 mapping to command line arguments sounds like heaven. Of course this exists for something like GVim, but I had no idea commercial software of any kind was doing it. That makes scriptability possible!

Re: Cortana is really bad

#132

Post by icc97 »

rspeer wrote: post #34
eterm wrote: post #12

The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible. It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events". Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web. Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's th…

I have seen fuzzy search work in a few cases, but they are sparse. Most notably, I never remember what the name of Windows' built-in screenshot application is. It's "Snipping Tool". I often mis-remember it as "Clipping Tool". But anyway, it comes up when I type "screenshot", "clip", or "clipping" into the search bar.

I just installed Greenshot [0] and never really thought about about the internal one. It comes with it's own mini image editor to quickly add annotations and a very nice zoom feature to catch the screenshot correctly first time without having to re-crop.

Greenshot is the one Windows tool I really missed on Linux.

[0]: http://getgreenshot.org/

Re: Cortana is really bad

#133

Post by enraged_camel »

coldtea wrote: post #66
enraged_camel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? Why? People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position? If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.

> People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position? First, because some random idiot on a blog post does not know whether the person "performed poorly at their job" in general. He just has a specific gripe. The other person might have done miracles in other parts of Cortana. There are such things as shipping priorities, and th…

>>That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.

Customer feedback on Cortana has been nearly universally negative. You don't need my post or comment to see this. Google around and see what you find.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#134

Post by icc97 »

The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed up in politics.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#135

Post by cjsuk »

gmueckl wrote: post #87
cjsuk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the answer is because their talent has left and now there are inexperienced comp science grads, UX designers and marketing left and nothing else.

So you think that MS is unwilling to pay enough bribes to talented people to keep this product alive? They could certainly afford it.

Nope not that. I don’t know anyone who would accept the cash to work on products with such a bad reputation.

If MSFT offered me £100k right here, right now I’d turn it down.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#136

Post by nsp »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #81
stinky613 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If I buy a package from Amazon and the tracking information goes to my gmail account, Google Now cards will automatically show my tracking numbers with links to view full tracking information.

And you wouldn't expect Windows to sneakily read your Gmail account emails. What if you buy a package from Amazon and the tracking info goes to your outlook.com email? That'd be a fair comparison here. (maybe simply forwarding the email from Gmail to the outlook.com email associated with your Windows account would be sufficient?)

He says he’s given Microsoft access to his inbox

Re: Cortana is really bad

#137

Post by vocatus_gate »

fpgaminer wrote: post #124
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years.

https://everything.en.softonic.com/

"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#138

Post by vocatus_gate »

CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

https://reddit.com/r/TronScript will kill off Cortana and all the telemetry "features"

Re: Cortana is really bad

#139

Post by leggomylibro »

jessriedel wrote: post #126
majewsky wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of shit is frustratingly common these days. I sometimes use the search box in the Twitter app to navigate to one of the profiles I follow. So I tap on the magnifying glass, enter the first few letters of the account name, see the account in the search results (immediately, because it has my list of followed accounts cached locally, I guess), and I tap on that account ^W^W the completely irrelevant search re…

I've never understood this. You shouldn't be able to activate a control that appeared, or whose meaning changed, an amount of time ago that's smaller than human reaction time (0.2 sec or whatever).

Okay, now try typing on a smartphone keyboard that animates an enlarged bubble for every key the user taps.

The user thinks 'type, "hello"' and the muscle memory flits between 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o' with way less space between each letter than the user's reaction time. If they mistype a letter and want to correct it, they'll probably continue for one or two strokes and either navigate back or tap backspace several times.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#140

Post by sofaofthedamned »

magice wrote: post #35

As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft and Windows (although, let's face it, Windows has been so much better in the last few releases), I personally think Microsoft, its engineers, as well as its PM deserve (some?) empathy rather than anger for this. I mean, I can almost imagine how this thing happens. Someone somewhere sometime said, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if xyz?" Someone else replied with "oh yeah, and it's not…

At a previous contract I built a VM environment based on KVM. Some of the VMs were Windows, some Linux - a mix of Ubuntu and RHEL. It was a secure environment, where part of the job was malware analysis, so obviously part of this was nuking VMs and reinstalling them.

Anybody who has done this knows with Linux it's easy - RHEL/Centos and Kickstart files are the best, because they work. Next best is Ubuntu/Debian as Preseeds work but they're bloody awful. Once you've got one that works you're fine.

I had all the Windows 10 VMs with 'Professional' keys. Now, I imagine like you i'd suspect a 'Professional' key would imply this sort of lifecycle - rinse, reinstall. This worked for the first month.

But...

Part of the install was getting updates from WSUS, which itself is awful. Turns out halfway through our build Microsoft decided after these updates they'd change the rules. So, where I was providing the autounattend.xml (ks / preseed equivalent) this particular update decided my keys were not worthy. Professional wasn't good enough, when it was previously, so I now needed Enterprise. So none of my VM rebuilds would work without intervention. These are headless VMs. This cost us tens of thousands in engineering bucks.

If I started a company tomorrow i'd go nowhere near Microsoft. I'd not let one of my employees get near a place where they decided business logic needed to go into an Excel spreadsheet. They'd have a Chromebook and i'd pay the $6 a month for them to work without any of the extra crap Microsoft decide to do this month. Yes, Google can do the same, but i'll take the chances at $6 per month as opposed to the Windows, RDS and assorted other CALs that Microsoft decide to do tomorrow. I'd even go to O365 if I trusted them after this. Which I don't.

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