My 2 cents having gotten about 10 bugs in Microsoft products (mostly Windows and Office, some server, some client, some kernel mode, some user mode): You basic

My 2 cents having gotten about 10 bugs in Microsoft products (mostly Windows and Office, some server, some client, some kernel mode, some user mode): You basically have to pay for Premier Support or find a way to get in touch with a developer out-of-band to get anything fixed. Even going through Premier is a brutal process, as a consumer, try to find a human at Microsoft or just give up. Even if you do pay the ransom for fancy support, you're still way better off trying to find an alternate way to contact someone on the team. Write a blog post, tweet at someone, post on HN or Reddit, whatever. If you do go through Premier, hope that your bug repros every time with a procedure that takes no more than 5 numbered steps. Anything beyond that, give up. Never ask for advice or assume common sense or anything with any room for interpretation. Hope that your bug is in something that is about 1 year old. Any newer and support has never touched it and is surprised anyone in the real world uses it. Much older and they won't risk a change. This has gotten better recently, but be prepared to fill out a lot of questionnaires about why some data corruption bug or memory leak is a problem for your business. These will be insane in context. At one point I had to write 8 pages about why Task Scheduler (their cron, more or less) should run tasks on the defined schedule, as opposed to not running them. Hope that your issue is in a core-ish server product. The support teams for AD, Exchange and SQL are significantly better than anything client side. Just as long as it's one of these older established products and not something new, if it's new, support won't know what it is. There are incredibly competent and helpful people in Microsoft's support org. Like fix your bug in a 15 minute phone call after a hundred hour case, cut you a private build and ask you to confirm the fix - competent. I'd estimate there are about 4 of these people in that entire support org, and you don't get to talk to them until you've invested a month or two in escalations and repros. Oh and answers.microsoft.com is an anti-service. It's like experts exchange in the dark times, only worse. There is no useful information there and it serves only to add noise to your search results.