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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#61

Post by dschuler »

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…

That's a long explanation of how nobody at a large corporation should be expected to make anything work properly.

I just recently was forced to use Windows again for some piece of software that requires it. Windows immediately proceeds to update itself after startup, fails midway to bluescreen. I ended up spending an hour to revert to the latest restore point instead of getting work done.

I don't see how Windows is getting any better than what I used 15 years ago. I think a lot of people using their tech have Stockholm syndrome and fear losing the sunk cost of their investment in that ecosystem. As someone who used to program exclusively in C and C++, I can say it's always worth switching...

Re: Cortana is really bad

#62

Post by GolDDranks »

dpkonofa wrote: post #47
GolDDranks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.

I don't know what the priors are, but Spotlight having missed the app for a 30 full days, and then suddenly finding it after the full registration, sounds very unlikely to me.

However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?

Re: Cortana is really bad

#63

Post by mwambua »

CydeWeys wrote: post #49
GolDDranks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

I've experienced similar. My most pleasant experience with finding and launching applications is, surprisingly, in Linux. I think it's best in breed now. If you'd told me this 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but it's gotten much better over the years and everything else has somehow gotten worse. I spend more time using Linux as a desktop OS than anything else these days, and it "just works".

What DE do you use? Back when I used Unity in Ubuntu I found their search widget really hard to use. It was laggy and mixed in results from the web, their 'appstore', and my files.

Now I use dmenu in i3wm and I couldn't be happier. All I need is something that searches my path for applications... and that's what it does.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#64

Post by aerique »

dpkonofa wrote: post #47
GolDDranks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.

You'd think that installing a new app would add it to the index right away.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#65

Post by milcron »

neves wrote: post #24

How can I disable Cortana? I've tried and failed. I don't know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them quickly.

The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#66

Post by coldtea »

enraged_camel wrote: post #36
nerflad wrote: post #3

> The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately fired. I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.

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 they're not determined by random blog posts or comments.

Second, because people deserve chances for improving. Anybody at any current position has "performed poorly" at this or another project earlier on. Terminating or transferring them only makes sense if they don't get to improve, which a random blog post can't determine.

>If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.

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

Re: Cortana is really bad

#67

Post by toss1 »

castis wrote: post #18
knieveltech wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly does nothing of the sort. There should absolutely be some kind of consequence associated with this kind of flaming dumpster fire making it's way into a production environment.

Well then the entire world should rejoice that people like yourself and OP are not in control of other peoples livelihood.

Really? This is not only a worse-than-useless, waste-of-user-time feature on its own, but it actively interrupts the user to get their attention!

So, this PM decided to put into a production environment a feature that interrupts a customer's workflow for no good benefit. It doesn't even benefit Microsoft, so he's not even being a bandit.

This is the very definition of stupid. Hurt the other guy, hurt yourself, for no benefit to either [1].

So, why would or should any employer continue to pay a person who performs such an obviously stupid action in a production environment to continue in the same position?

We may have a right to jobs if we continue to produce output that benefits the customers and employer, not simply because we continue to exist. Start harming your customers and/or employers, and why should you continue to receive their resources?

[1] http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/serendipia/Stupidity.html

Re: Cortana is really bad

#68

Post by gmueckl »

wslh wrote: post #40
lesiva wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The whole piece was emotional, but just reading that statement took it to irrational. I think the underlying point of the article is that the experience of using Cortana could be improved, and Microsoft should be providing explicit next steps at every phase so that you aren't left wondering what's going on. I'd agree with that. But claiming someone should be fired is ridiculous, especially considering that th…

I am not sure about Cortana but I am sure that other project product managers (e.g. Skype) should be fired. They have historic popular issues. Basic negligence, not bugs.

Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.

It somehow feels like MS is actively trying to destroy this product.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#69

Post by acdha »

GolDDranks wrote: post #41
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…

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

Did you ever open the folder which contains the app? Spotlight at least used to use the Launch Services database which was … idiosyncratic … about updating things. The Finder displaying it would reliably trigger that.

The other thing was, naturally, it has a database behind the scenes which historically was prone to silently breaking with no UI cue. Back when I did Mac system administration one of our scripts ran this periodically to deal with missing or duplicate entries in e.g. the Open with… menu:

    /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r -f -v -domain local -domain user -domain system
The other thing you can try is nuking the Spotlight database:

    mdutil -E -a
That'll be slow for a little while as it reindexes whatever it's configured to index but it fixed a fair number of odd problems, which often turned out to be due to previously-unknown hardware issues.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#70

Post by CydeWeys »

kop316 wrote: post #53
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…

I have similar issues with Edge on Windows. When it auto completes a webpage, it will do a bing search instead and have that as it's top result. Personally, I think it's done on purpose, as every time it searches, it counts as a search in Bing, and that way they can use that to show how many people use Bing to charge more for advertisers.

I believe you might be right about the why. Windows used to be optimized around user experience. The deal was, I pay my $200, and I get a good operating system. Now, I still pay my $200, but what I'm getting is an operating system optimized to generate further revenue from me, at the expense of basic usability. This might be acceptable in a F2P model, but not when I've paid good money for it!

Meanwhile, all this stuff just works on desktop Linux, because its goal is still to optimize user experience rather than some monetization metric at the expense of usability.

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