6 ms·

Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he cou

Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to give good tech support. It's not as if the support guy has any power to be helpful, they probably give him some copy and paste responses according to what the problem is. The best tech support that I happened to use was Apple's. The guy actually seemed to care about my problem, and bypassed the protocol to help me out when I spilled coffee on my laptop.

plgs 10y ago
"thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team" It's not something they can say. The product is unsupported and the "tech team" won't care.
- LamaOfRuin 10y ago
  It can always be passed on. The 'tech team' may say 'wontfix' because it's unsupported, but it's very clearly a bug that could bite them on 'supported' systems in the future as user-agent sniffing is notoriously unreliable.
- ajford 10y ago
  Doesn't mean they can't file the issue. Then the team just checks the box on their ticket solution that says "WONT FIX" or "NOT SUPPORTED" and moves on with their lives. Customers would feel respected, the workaround would be found and used, and no one would feel ignored. It would leave a customer happier than telling them they don't warrant interest.
  - rwallace 10y ago
    Personally I'd be happier being told honestly I don't warrant interest, unsupported platform, I need to look elsewhere, than being strung along with false impressions.
- chiph 10y ago
  Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Microsoft could tabulate these reports to find what OS their customers want to use with OneDrive. But if they don't get recorded, there's no info to learn that from.
  - iamdave 10y ago
    Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Wait what? Really?? What are they monitoring, seed ratios from trackers? That's an interesting/novel way of researching demand-makes sense given the service Netflix provides.
    - chiph 10y ago
      I don't know if they're still doing it. But they were in 2013. http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/how-netflix-uses-piracy-to-pick-its-programming-1200611539/ http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/how-netflix-uses-piracy...
      - iamdave 10y ago
        Oh goodness the irony on this page "SEE ALSO: Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ Falls Prey to Piracy" Still, that's a very interesting and out of the box method of thinking by the Netflix team. Definitely want to try and find out more about this; thanks for bringing this up!
ht85 10y ago
I very much doubt this was intentional. If this was a small company targeting unsavvy users to try and upsell them something, sure. In this case the payout might be worth the fallout once people inevitably figure it out. In this case, I doubt someone thought "hey, let's mess with Linux users and serve them a bunch of garbage, it'll encourage them to move to Windows".
- milkytron 10y ago
  Any thought that starts with, "hey let's mess with Linux users..." Isn't very likely to be a good thought
- herbst 10y ago
  then how else would such behaviour be explainable? I thought about reasonable explanations but i doubt a little background process that notices a unsupported user agent would act up like this
  - lgessler 10y ago
    I don't know if MS has earned the benefit of my doubt, but it's conceivable that the software could have implemented platform-specific behavior or optimizations that ended up slowing things down for some reason.
    - herbst 10y ago
      Yeah after reading some other comments (also on reddit) the idea that they push fixes platform specific and linux just defaults to a state with many missing fixes sounds like a reasonable option.
      - Twisell 10y ago
        So they supposedly maintain duplicate version of core functions in plateform specific branch and never merge them to master... That would only be slightly less worse than the sabotaging theory.
rorosaurus 10y ago
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
- cname 10y ago
  This lets people get away with playing dumb. Maybe it's not wise to automatically assume malice if incompetence could be a factor, but it's also not correct to rule out malice just because incompetence is a possible explanation.

plgs 10y ago

"thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team" It's not something they can say. The product is unsupported and the "tech team" won't care.

LamaOfRuin 10y ago
It can always be passed on. The 'tech team' may say 'wontfix' because it's unsupported, but it's very clearly a bug that could bite them on 'supported' systems in the future as user-agent sniffing is notoriously unreliable.
ajford 10y ago
Doesn't mean they can't file the issue. Then the team just checks the box on their ticket solution that says "WONT FIX" or "NOT SUPPORTED" and moves on with their lives. Customers would feel respected, the workaround would be found and used, and no one would feel ignored. It would leave a customer happier than telling them they don't warrant interest.
- rwallace 10y ago
  Personally I'd be happier being told honestly I don't warrant interest, unsupported platform, I need to look elsewhere, than being strung along with false impressions.
chiph 10y ago
Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Microsoft could tabulate these reports to find what OS their customers want to use with OneDrive. But if they don't get recorded, there's no info to learn that from.
- iamdave 10y ago
  Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Wait what? Really?? What are they monitoring, seed ratios from trackers? That's an interesting/novel way of researching demand-makes sense given the service Netflix provides.
  - chiph 10y ago
    I don't know if they're still doing it. But they were in 2013. http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/how-netflix-uses-piracy-to-pick-its-programming-1200611539/ http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/how-netflix-uses-piracy...
    - iamdave 10y ago
      Oh goodness the irony on this page "SEE ALSO: Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ Falls Prey to Piracy" Still, that's a very interesting and out of the box method of thinking by the Netflix team. Definitely want to try and find out more about this; thanks for bringing this up!

ht85 10y ago

I very much doubt this was intentional. If this was a small company targeting unsavvy users to try and upsell them something, sure. In this case the payout might be worth the fallout once people inevitably figure it out. In this case, I doubt someone thought "hey, let's mess with Linux users and serve them a bunch of garbage, it'll encourage them to move to Windows".

milkytron 10y ago
Any thought that starts with, "hey let's mess with Linux users..." Isn't very likely to be a good thought
herbst 10y ago
then how else would such behaviour be explainable? I thought about reasonable explanations but i doubt a little background process that notices a unsupported user agent would act up like this
- lgessler 10y ago
  I don't know if MS has earned the benefit of my doubt, but it's conceivable that the software could have implemented platform-specific behavior or optimizations that ended up slowing things down for some reason.
  - herbst 10y ago
    Yeah after reading some other comments (also on reddit) the idea that they push fixes platform specific and linux just defaults to a state with many missing fixes sounds like a reasonable option.
    - Twisell 10y ago
      So they supposedly maintain duplicate version of core functions in plateform specific branch and never merge them to master... That would only be slightly less worse than the sabotaging theory.

rorosaurus 10y ago

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

cname 10y ago
This lets people get away with playing dumb. Maybe it's not wise to automatically assume malice if incompetence could be a factor, but it's also not correct to rule out malice just because incompetence is a possible explanation.