4 ms·

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely

by TillE 10y ago

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.

0942v8653 10y ago
But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.
- ethbro 10y ago
  This seems like a valid bug per the Reddit thread [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_onedrive_looks_at_useragent_to/df7wnk1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...
- nathantotten 10y ago
  That doesn't sound right at all. It's been a number of years since I have been at MS, but any engineering team I worked on would have wanted this feedback and fixed the problem. Not supported officially doesn't mean a dev can't spend an hour on a likely simple fix to help a customer - depending on who saw this feedback there are certainly many devs at MS who would fix this without even being asked. I'm willing to bet that's happening right now and this will be resolved in a few days.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I was fortunate to participate in a bug fix driven by MS (for the Tedious sql adapter for node), and it was impressive. The issue was noticed by someone who worked on Azure (not Azure SQL), who upstreamed the report to appropriate people in the SQL teams who then dug in and found that there was something that wasn't being set right in the tedious adapter. It wasn't an MS product, or supported, and they still took the time to help. I'd be surprised if one didn't find similar responsiveness from at least some of the o365 developers. More often than not, something is "unsupported" not because it doesn't or shouldn't work, but because it doesn't have the dedicated testing resources and in case there is an edge case bug that would be excessively costly to fix (ex: dealing with stupid flexbox issues with the current version of Safari on mac). In any case, it doesn't matter, the response was a bad, canned response that doesn't take into account the troubleshooting the person reporting it already did.
- rorosaurus 10y ago
  Feedback from support teams is pretty much the only way the engineering team learns what we need to improve.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Why does a web app care about my OS? "Supported" in this context is clearly "we want more money from your despite you already having paid the agreed amount for this product".
  - krylon 10y ago
    I was wondering, too. Firefox is Firefox, no matter what OS it runs on. If OneDrive works well with Firefox on Windows, why wouldn't it on Linux or any other operating system?
EpicEng 10y ago
So... Just lie? This isn't going anywhere, the platform isn't supported. I'm pretty sure the powers that be remembered that Linux was a thing when they made that decision.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  You don't have to lie. Under these circumstances, I often say to the people reporting it very directly "That's not a supported use-case, but I will make sure the relevant people know anyway". I then go and let the person who owns that product know. Half the time, they say "that's not a supported usecase and it's a pain to change, so it's not happening". The other half of the time, they shrug and say "Put a ticket in, if I can fix it easily I will, I'll take a look when I have time". Unsupported doesn't mean "no", it means "we're not going to invest noticeable effort into it, and it's lowest priority". Easy fixes may happen, but results are not guaranteed.
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    Sure... But we're talking platform support here, not some corner case no one thought about during design.
    - Sir_Substance 10y ago
      No, we're not. Read the statement again. If you fuck with the headers, you get a totally different and much higher performance result _on linux_. The charitable hypothesis someone else raised is that there's a bug in how onedrive handles unknown user agents. Neither you nor I have any idea how much effort that will take to fix. You'd hope not a lot but you should never make assumptions about another man's stack. But if it is low effort to fix, Microsoft could get a small land-slide of partial compatibility with one change, which is good PR even if they don't officially support the platforms. It's definitely worth asking nicely rather than giving up and moping about it.
dhimes 10y ago
But they are deliberately throttling this, in an effort to get people to have to use Windows.
- sixothree 10y ago
  That's an assumption. There exist other explanations that are just as valid.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    I agree that other things might be possible, but looking a the history, assuming malice is a reasonable starting point with microsoft. It has been right many times in the past.

by TillE 10y ago

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.

0942v8653 10y ago

But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.

ethbro 10y ago
This seems like a valid bug per the Reddit thread [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_onedrive_looks_at_useragent_to/df7wnk1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...
nathantotten 10y ago
That doesn't sound right at all. It's been a number of years since I have been at MS, but any engineering team I worked on would have wanted this feedback and fixed the problem. Not supported officially doesn't mean a dev can't spend an hour on a likely simple fix to help a customer - depending on who saw this feedback there are certainly many devs at MS who would fix this without even being asked. I'm willing to bet that's happening right now and this will be resolved in a few days.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I was fortunate to participate in a bug fix driven by MS (for the Tedious sql adapter for node), and it was impressive. The issue was noticed by someone who worked on Azure (not Azure SQL), who upstreamed the report to appropriate people in the SQL teams who then dug in and found that there was something that wasn't being set right in the tedious adapter. It wasn't an MS product, or supported, and they still took the time to help. I'd be surprised if one didn't find similar responsiveness from at least some of the o365 developers. More often than not, something is "unsupported" not because it doesn't or shouldn't work, but because it doesn't have the dedicated testing resources and in case there is an edge case bug that would be excessively costly to fix (ex: dealing with stupid flexbox issues with the current version of Safari on mac). In any case, it doesn't matter, the response was a bad, canned response that doesn't take into account the troubleshooting the person reporting it already did.
rorosaurus 10y ago
Feedback from support teams is pretty much the only way the engineering team learns what we need to improve.
sqeaky 10y ago
Why does a web app care about my OS? "Supported" in this context is clearly "we want more money from your despite you already having paid the agreed amount for this product".
- krylon 10y ago
  I was wondering, too. Firefox is Firefox, no matter what OS it runs on. If OneDrive works well with Firefox on Windows, why wouldn't it on Linux or any other operating system?

EpicEng 10y ago

So... Just lie? This isn't going anywhere, the platform isn't supported. I'm pretty sure the powers that be remembered that Linux was a thing when they made that decision.

Sir_Substance 10y ago
You don't have to lie. Under these circumstances, I often say to the people reporting it very directly "That's not a supported use-case, but I will make sure the relevant people know anyway". I then go and let the person who owns that product know. Half the time, they say "that's not a supported usecase and it's a pain to change, so it's not happening". The other half of the time, they shrug and say "Put a ticket in, if I can fix it easily I will, I'll take a look when I have time". Unsupported doesn't mean "no", it means "we're not going to invest noticeable effort into it, and it's lowest priority". Easy fixes may happen, but results are not guaranteed.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  Sure... But we're talking platform support here, not some corner case no one thought about during design.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
    No, we're not. Read the statement again. If you fuck with the headers, you get a totally different and much higher performance result _on linux_. The charitable hypothesis someone else raised is that there's a bug in how onedrive handles unknown user agents. Neither you nor I have any idea how much effort that will take to fix. You'd hope not a lot but you should never make assumptions about another man's stack. But if it is low effort to fix, Microsoft could get a small land-slide of partial compatibility with one change, which is good PR even if they don't officially support the platforms. It's definitely worth asking nicely rather than giving up and moping about it.

dhimes 10y ago

But they are deliberately throttling this, in an effort to get people to have to use Windows.

sixothree 10y ago
That's an assumption. There exist other explanations that are just as valid.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  I agree that other things might be possible, but looking a the history, assuming malice is a reasonable starting point with microsoft. It has been right many times in the past.