Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

Yep. Kind of like "we value your privacy" means "we don't give a shit about your privacy". I guess the only way to uncover a platitude is to test it. The problem with "We are listening to your feedback" is that "listening" is hard to disprove. It doesn't require any action - they're just "listening". It sounds good but doesn't mean anything useful. If, instead, it was "We will respond to your feedback within 48 hours" - well, that's testable. That sounds like a real, honest, useful commitment. Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business?

Windows is not accesible even to people without disdabilities. I have to carefully select the background color or else i will end up with a light text colour on light background or dark text colour on dark background. Or to search half of hour for the cursor in a Word document because Microsoft decided that blinking the cursor is so 80s and the cursor is hidden.

From the perspective of someone not at Microsoft, it feels like part of the reason it's such a mess is because it's obviously really badly curated, to the point that the Feedback Hub app encourages it. Older versions of the Feedback Hub had categorization on the left so you would naturally browse into a category, but then they changed it to not very visible drop-downs and auto-suggested categories. The result is feedback goes to random categories and is never moved to the correct ones, nor is there a way to report miscategorized feedback. There is also still old feedback for bugs that were fixed in the Windows 10 pre-RTM previews, and even some that are just complete gibberish random characters.

Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug.

Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.

The Feedback hub... A few things are completely a dog's breakfast in the Windows 10 world - and their beyond hideous XBox with Windows App Store is one of them. I tried to file some feedback about the experience using the Hub but it felt like a wholly inappropriate tool for the job.

How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience.

I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such.

Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out.

I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot?

I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store.

(Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)

Combining same files to taskbar is a productivity killer for both technical and non technical people. In many chats when someone presents something on screen I see people struggling to find the proper document when they have few open. Same for people who do "real" work: eg budget with 10 spreadsheets opened, or few word documents... the system hibders ability yo switch between them fast. It feels as if it was designed by people who dont do a real office job.

Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? Windows is supposed to be the productivity system and it kills productivity now.