19 ms·

Cortana is really bad

439 points by johndavidback 9y ago

sebringj 9y ago
This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. You were probably in a terrible mood when you wrote this which makes it much worse than it is. It could try to parse the tracking id for sure and you probably have never dealt with tracking packages before through an API but they give you not that much info most of the time, just like "arrived at shipping location" or "on route to destination" type messages with some times, totally depends on when the tracking is sent out. This is just a very specific use case that isn't so user friendly anyway but sure they could do it better but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary.
- Judgmentality 9y ago
  > This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. https://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/
- notatoad 9y ago
  >but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary. Google can figure it out. I order something, i get cards in Google Now telling me exactly what i ordered and its shipping status, without any interaction on my part. It just happens. If microsoft can't figure out how to do this, fine. But if they're going to pop up notifications saying "hey, i can track packages for you", they should be at least sort of on par with the competition.
  - sebringj 9y ago
    Right, isn't that because they are integrated? If you are buying from the google store that has all the info, makes sense. Were you buying from a microsoft store as well? Just wondering because I agree if that is the case, otherwise, there is no integration there. But cool that google has it. I was under the impression is was just some random feature to track a package, my bad if so.
    - stinky613 9y ago
      No. If I buy a package from Amazon and the tracking information goes to my gmail account, Google Now cards will automatically show my tracking numbers with links to view full tracking information.
      - sebringj 9y ago
        cool
      - fhrow4484 9y ago
        And you wouldn't expect Windows to sneakily read your Gmail account emails. What if you buy a package from Amazon and the tracking info goes to your outlook.com email? That'd be a fair comparison here. (maybe simply forwarding the email from Gmail to the outlook.com email associated with your Windows account would be sufficient?)
        nsp 9y ago
        He says he’s given Microsoft access to his inbox
    - emn13 9y ago
      Google will track packages based on emails in gmail. I works OK for amazon, so, i.e. the vast majority of all packages shipped (mild exaggeration). It works a little less will but not this terribly for less conventional shipping confirmations. I don't think I've ever seen it work as well as just going to the delivery services website, however - so it's critical that it's relatively bug free and low-overhead.
  - fhrow4484 9y ago
    But you get the order's confirmation/shipping email on your Gmail account, do you? Now what tells you this doesn't work with emails received in your outlook.com mailbox? Or do you expect Windows to read all your Gmail's email somehow?
    - notatoad 9y ago
      the article's author says he has given windows permission to access his inbox.
  - contextfree 9y ago
    Cortana does do this, and there's actually nothing in the article that indicates that it wouldn't have worked perfectly well if he'd just hadn't done anything and let the automatic tracking do its thing. The real WTF here is not so much that it has a bad UX for manually entering tracking numbers (that's obviously not ideal, but IMO semi-reasonable given it's a fallback corner case) but that they pushed/spammed a notification that dumps you into the bad manual UX.
nerflad 9y ago
> 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.
- johndavidback 9y ago
  Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.
  - nerflad 9y ago
    I agree with you that it should be implemented better, though I've honestly come to expect this from Windows. It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.
    - 0xCMP 9y ago
      I can see why he did it. These aren't beginners. They're experienced developers and managers. If you work at one of the top 5 tech companies in the world on a product most of the computing world uses then maybe this shouldn't be acceptable. Why is it that this is acceptable for Microsoft to publish? It's not and what makes it worse is that it often gets abandoned. If they had a history going back and finishing this or making it better I'd give them a pass, but I doubt without something bordering vitriolic appearing on HN/Medium no one will care. I think that's the real complaint. Doesn't anyone care about the experience anymore? I feel like it's only Apple who both cares and has executed a strong long term plan for this. I opened my iPhone X and that thing worked. I actually love all the little things they added. It is hard to do that, but it's these little things which make the product special or down-right frustrating when they don't.
      - symfoniq 9y ago
cjsuk 9y ago
This is most user journeys with MSFT products recently.
edgarvaldes 9y ago
So, anyone know how does it work? I mean, the "tracking a package in Cortana". I'm intrigued now.
- partiallypro 9y ago
  It usually just reads your email and shows you the packages based on that. I've never had any problems with it.
  - eightysixfour 9y ago
    Yeah - it is pretty good at finding packages in my email that follow conventional tracking numbers. I have personally experienced the problems mentioned in the link when trying to add them manually though.
- cobalt 9y ago
  just paste the tracking number in
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  It just works for me. It detects it from my email. I don't have to do anything.
eterm 9y ago
The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible. It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events". Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web. Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's the program you want to run" to popping up it's search engine.
- rspeer 9y ago
  I have seen fuzzy search work in a few cases, but they are sparse. Most notably, I never remember what the name of Windows' built-in screenshot application is. It's "Snipping Tool". I often mis-remember it as "Clipping Tool". But anyway, it comes up when I type "screenshot", "clip", or "clipping" into the search bar.
  - eterm 9y ago
    Here's the crazy thing: Type out "clipping tool" and watch. It matches all the way to "clipping t". Then it stops matching, then matches again at "clipping tool". So even if you know a phrase which it matches on, you might or might not get a patch from an exact partial of that matching phrase.
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      Nope, for me the exact process works as intended, there's no difference between "clipping t" and "clipping to" and "clipping too".
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      For me it matches perfectly for each letter. Maybe you're on an older build?
  - icc97 9y ago
    I just installed Greenshot [0] and never really thought about about the internal one. It comes with it's own mini image editor to quickly add annotations and a very nice zoom feature to catch the screenshot correctly first time without having to re-crop. Greenshot is the one Windows tool I really missed on Linux. [0]: http://getgreenshot.org/ http://getgreenshot.org/
Theodores 9y ago
The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don't even have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana. Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing. https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/ https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/
- QuercusMax 9y ago
  Looks like this isn't even a proprietary Google thing, they just have better support than lots of providers. The docs you point to mention that the schema is from schema.org.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  This is also present on outlook. I wonder why Cortana can't just use that same logic. I guess they had to justify their existence by coding up the same thing again.
  - contextfree 9y ago
    Cortana does use the same logic for automatically finding the tracking information, that has nothing to do with anything in the article though, which is about the UX for manually entering the tracking information.
cbhl 9y ago
One piece that's missing from this post is -- what did the email containing the tracking number look like? GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends schema.org markup for it. (https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-delivery https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-...)
DoodleBuggy 9y ago
And yet Cortana is still better than Siri.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  But the Google Assistant is a lot smarter than both.
  - DoodleBuggy 9y ago
    By such leaps that it's hard to compare the two.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  Not even close.
  - DoodleBuggy 9y ago
    > Not even close. "Searching the web for 'Knot every clothes'..."
  - dboreham 9y ago
    The only time I enabled Siri was to play that Queen Easter Egg..
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
neves 9y ago
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.
- megaman22 9y ago
  And do such a poor job of it. Bash or Powershell tab completion blows it out of the water, and god knows there hasn't been a fraction of the resources devoted to either of those.
- fencepost 9y ago
  You might want to look at O&O ShutUp10 (https://www.oo-software.com/en/ShutUp10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/ShutUp10), which lets you disable a bunch of Windows 10 features along with tips on what they are and their importance and risks.
- milcron 9y ago
  The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.
  - mcny 9y ago
    > The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana. Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't need to do everything at this very moment. Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this? https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d7e-9dc6-821074570be3/49f58bac6fcc3e9f2d671a739c0f1e00/fedora2220052915.png https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d... https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png Instead what I get (even with Windows 7) is a spinning wheel that says "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes...". Happens every time I want to use Windows (which is more of a reason to stay in the Linux partition tbh)
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      > Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I have 64 GB of RAM, and even tried turning off the swap. Still see that HDD light blinking. I don't know what is going on.
wvenable 9y ago
I really wish Microsoft wouldn't bloat Windows with all these useless features. They're still acting like they are building a mobile OS. Windows 10 would be fantastic OS if it wasn't for all these misguided attempts to act like iOS and Android.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  They made a mistake starting with Windows 8, I'm guessing they were worried about the iPad eating into PC sales. Well it turned out that that didn't really happen but we are stuck with the tabletisation of Windows anyway. I've been trying a Surface but it's going back because it isn't good at being a tablet nor laptop.
magice 9y ago
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 hard!" And the PM is probably like "well, low risk, too, so whatever you wish." Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief "yo, so cool" moment. The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But let's be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: "some nobody-care feature is not easy to use" or "if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times, press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself". The 1st one is vague and, let's be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM would do the 2nd bug first. I mean, seriously, how would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment below actually says, "I did not realize it exist") is "easy to use"? No automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use it and probably come prepared) won't catch it. A/B testing probably won't even get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down) probably have priority between "when I have better work-life balance" and "when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues." -- I will agree that all of these don't justify for a shitty experience. Shitty experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has "I swear I will switch to Eclipse" moments. And Scheme has about 70 different ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case. So, maybe a bit more love/understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the users') blood pressure anyway.
- gerrard00 9y ago
  I don't think they deserve empathy at all. If they can't implement the feature to the level of being usable they should just cut the feature instead of annoying the user. So much software development today is about getting story points on a velocity chart and claiming that features have been delivered even if the feature is actually useless. A Minimum Viable Product should actually be viable.
CydeWeys 9y ago
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 tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn't find it. I never want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web! Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?
- GolDDranks 9y ago
  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.
  - graeme 9y ago
    Did it happen right after install? It usually takes spotlight a few minutes to index any new program - trial or not.
    - GolDDranks 9y ago
      It persisted for the whole month of the trial period. I rebooted multiple times during that period and also checked the Spotlight settings for a few times that they wouldn't exclude anything - and nope.
  - dpkonofa 9y ago
moonman272 9y ago
This is just old school Microsoft engineering. Add a feature bullet point to the package, don’t worry about how it’s integrated or if it works. It’s the same with most anything from them you dig in to.
api 9y ago
It's got nothing on "Bixby," Samsung's me-too entrant into the world of largely useless voice assistants.
hnnsj 9y ago
"People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my devices." How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!".
cellis 9y ago
Seriously. I refuse to use Cortana on my Xbox One and went back to the native “Xbox” commands. The latency of cortana was atrocious and usually after all that would either reask the question or not do what Xbox would. Microsoft is really good at taking a good thing (Xbox) and making it more bloated and slower.
- Yhippa 9y ago
  My pain point is that I don't know if my command was accepted or not. Also I think that mapping of voice commands to what you can do on the Xbox got reduced and is more confusing. Even on the Xbox One X the latency is still bad.
- jameshart 9y ago
  Wait, you can go back to native 'xbox' commands? Oh wow, you can! https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-and-use-xbox-voice-commands-on-your-xbox-one/ https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-... Thanks, had no idea - assumed that when MS shipped that update the old kinect voice recognition just went away. "Xbox, turn off" and "Xbox, record that" were the two most used voice commands in our house, but "Hey cortana" never seems to respond when you call her.
Yhippa 9y ago
Interesting that elongated micro-whines have now turned into long-form blog posts. To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with "Sorry I don't know how to do that" which is frustrating. Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.
nanodano 9y ago
Jeez, this guy gets really angry and swears for pages and pages over a stupid little feature he doens't like.
drumttocs8 9y ago
I just use Everything to search. It's great.
lousken 9y ago
Removing cortana was the first thing that I did when I installed windows 10. However even the basic search is incredibly bad. It took months before it even considered searching in Downloads folder (patch fixed it I guess?). And portable apps? Yea, gl with that. But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows apps. That's just pure trash. There're no aliases so if you don't know exactly how MS named the functionality you're fucked. And if you know the english word for it, it doesn't show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it used to be called but not the current translation you're also fucked. E.g. in english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be "Spořič obrazovky" but now it's "Šetřič obrazovky". (btw neither of these even show up in the creators update, but in falls they fixed it and "Šetřič obrazovky" will return correct result). Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english keyboard layout. It's increadibly frustrating to use and I've mostly given up on it and use powershell whenever I can. That doesn't fix my problems with diacritics when searching documents though.
2close4comfort 9y ago
It is the bing of personal digital assistants...
camhenlin 9y ago
I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying "Hey Cortana, pause" is really handy if you're in the middle of watching Netflix, and you get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana didn't take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.
franzpeterfolz 9y ago
Well, the Projected Delivery Date is 25th November 2017. How do I know? Took the number and looked it up at ups. I think, I'm not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of November. Just one day before. Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived. BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.
icc97 9y ago
The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed up in politics.
rdtsc 9y ago
Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like a human). That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application, they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated. There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.
Havoc 9y ago
That entire menu makes me serious question whether anyone at MS actually uses Win 10. No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...
downrightmike 9y ago
Funny how MSFT used Cortana, sure she is a popular character, but she falls very far away from good to deadly to us. She ends up going rampant and turns other AIs against us. Not the most forward thinking, given where they are taking the character.
TheGRS 9y ago
Alright, I'm glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I just plain don't understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it useful?). Why does it even exist? I can see Microsoft put a lot of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works. I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to do precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit? Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.
- wvenable 9y ago
  Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. At this point I'm more annoyed with the software that come pre-installed on operating systems than what they don't have. I can always download whatever apps I want. But I totally agree that designers don't understand their users. I think there's a sense that Windows has to be "cool" like Android and iOS rather than just "useful".
  - mysterypie 9y ago
    > Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. I can always download whatever apps I want. I'd agree that the OS shouldn't come pre-installed with major applications. Those are things that I've invested time and effort to learn and where I have a definite preference on what I want to download. But to having to research little things like key reassignment apps becomes a real chore. Then you have to download and install it, make sure it's not malware, and if you use multiple machines, repeat those steps. The older versions of the iPhone and the iPad didn't come with a calculator. I don't know if current versions now include a calculator, but having to test a dozen different garbage calculators out of 1000 mind-numbing choices in the app store was a real pain in the neck. Any simple ad-free calculator included in iOS would have been OK.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I have really enjoyed the comments here. I have observed that among my acquaintances Cortana can be either really helpful or really not helpful but I don't see a lot of in between sort of "good for this, but not this" sorts of reviews. From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of 'communication mismatch' and how they detect it. Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and stops, I've seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and subsequent re-framing is completely missing. The other thing I've observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be 'human' in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates to it like a 'user' not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person pitched to Siri "I want pizza" and was frustrated at the response ("This is what I've found on the web about Pizza") And added "I want Dominos Pizza" (additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable to parse an acceptable language target for 'I want'. Changing that to "Call dominos" or "Where is the nearest Dominos" works well because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions). All of this the "level 4" version of autonomous conversations where the computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a response.
gerdesj 9y ago
It will be a while before these digital assistants work properly. None of them work in a way that anyone can possibly call "intelligent". If I was feeling charitable then I'd describe them as merely intrusive. When these things do finally get their act together, we will all live in a world that is different from the one we live in now. I hope it is a better one.
loopdoend 9y ago
Why would you paste in a URL when trying to track a package and not just the tracking number? I mean if you have the URL just go to the URL and track your package. I’m pretty sure Cortana was designed as a human interface and not a web browser...
trynumber9 9y ago
I've been very disappointed with Cortana. On numerous occasions it has been faster to grab my Macbook out of my backpack. Why is Spotlight able to find a file on my Windows desktop's network share that Cortana would not find? And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that's a compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.
- lostgame 9y ago
  Actually, AFAIK, Apple uses the Pages rendering system for that? I know Quick Look and Preview are also able to view, but not edit, .doc and .docx files.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
modzu 9y ago
it's the straw that broke the camel's back for me and windows as a desktop os. hello again fedora :)
popeko 9y ago
OP: Is that your actual tracking number? If so, I'd blur it - it may leak your info
harshbutfair 9y ago
If I type "lync", the default option is to run Skype for Business (Lync's successor). If I type "skype" the default option is to install Skype for Business, even though I already have it installed. It is very unintuitive. It is as bad as the search in Jira/Confluence, and that's saying something.
ndh2 9y ago
The sad thing is that the Windows 7 start menu wasn't any better. This is not a regression, just some sort of following the tradition. I use an old, discontinued app called Executor that I configure manually. It's not a whole lot better in terms of matching, but, because it can be configured, it is much better in terms of getting it to do what I want. It definitely can't track your packages, though. http://www.executor.dk/ http://www.executor.dk/
- skrebbel 9y ago
  The Windows 8 start menu was fantastic however. Just start typing (like you're supposed to do now), but it would search only programs and settings pages, lightning fast. Then Cortana came and it tried to read your mind and search the internet and it all went to shit again.
Lewton 9y ago
Have eclipse neon and eclipse oxygen installed Slowly type out eclipse in search bar Watch it randomly switch between the two at each character Randomly as in, sometimes it suggests oxygen on ecl and sometimes it suggests neon on ecl
tehwebguy 9y ago
If it’s worse than Siri that is bad. I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to “remind me about [an appointment] in two weeks” It kept making an immediate reminder that said “appointment into weeks” - into weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something like “Days turn into weeks”???
xh3n1 9y ago
Really really bad

439 points by johndavidback 9y ago

This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. You were probably in a terrible mood when you wrote this which makes it much worse than it is. It could try to parse the tracking id for sure and you probably have never dealt with tracking packages before through an API but they give you not that much info most of the time, just like "arrived at shipping location" or "on route to destination" type messages with some times, totally depends on when the tracking is sent out. This is just a very specific use case that isn't so user friendly anyway but sure they could do it better but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary.

Judgmentality 9y ago
> This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. https://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago/
notatoad 9y ago
>but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary. Google can figure it out. I order something, i get cards in Google Now telling me exactly what i ordered and its shipping status, without any interaction on my part. It just happens. If microsoft can't figure out how to do this, fine. But if they're going to pop up notifications saying "hey, i can track packages for you", they should be at least sort of on par with the competition.
- sebringj 9y ago
  Right, isn't that because they are integrated? If you are buying from the google store that has all the info, makes sense. Were you buying from a microsoft store as well? Just wondering because I agree if that is the case, otherwise, there is no integration there. But cool that google has it. I was under the impression is was just some random feature to track a package, my bad if so.
  - stinky613 9y ago
    No. If I buy a package from Amazon and the tracking information goes to my gmail account, Google Now cards will automatically show my tracking numbers with links to view full tracking information.
    - sebringj 9y ago
      cool
    - fhrow4484 9y ago
      And you wouldn't expect Windows to sneakily read your Gmail account emails. What if you buy a package from Amazon and the tracking info goes to your outlook.com email? That'd be a fair comparison here. (maybe simply forwarding the email from Gmail to the outlook.com email associated with your Windows account would be sufficient?)
      - nsp 9y ago
        He says he’s given Microsoft access to his inbox
  - emn13 9y ago
    Google will track packages based on emails in gmail. I works OK for amazon, so, i.e. the vast majority of all packages shipped (mild exaggeration). It works a little less will but not this terribly for less conventional shipping confirmations. I don't think I've ever seen it work as well as just going to the delivery services website, however - so it's critical that it's relatively bug free and low-overhead.
- fhrow4484 9y ago
  But you get the order's confirmation/shipping email on your Gmail account, do you? Now what tells you this doesn't work with emails received in your outlook.com mailbox? Or do you expect Windows to read all your Gmail's email somehow?
  - notatoad 9y ago
    the article's author says he has given windows permission to access his inbox.
- contextfree 9y ago
  Cortana does do this, and there's actually nothing in the article that indicates that it wouldn't have worked perfectly well if he'd just hadn't done anything and let the automatic tracking do its thing. The real WTF here is not so much that it has a bad UX for manually entering tracking numbers (that's obviously not ideal, but IMO semi-reasonable given it's a fallback corner case) but that they pushed/spammed a notification that dumps you into the bad manual UX.

nerflad 9y ago

> 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.

johndavidback 9y ago
Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.
- nerflad 9y ago
  I agree with you that it should be implemented better, though I've honestly come to expect this from Windows. It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.
  - 0xCMP 9y ago
    I can see why he did it. These aren't beginners. They're experienced developers and managers. If you work at one of the top 5 tech companies in the world on a product most of the computing world uses then maybe this shouldn't be acceptable. Why is it that this is acceptable for Microsoft to publish? It's not and what makes it worse is that it often gets abandoned. If they had a history going back and finishing this or making it better I'd give them a pass, but I doubt without something bordering vitriolic appearing on HN/Medium no one will care. I think that's the real complaint. Doesn't anyone care about the experience anymore? I feel like it's only Apple who both cares and has executed a strong long term plan for this. I opened my iPhone X and that thing worked. I actually love all the little things they added. It is hard to do that, but it's these little things which make the product special or down-right frustrating when they don't.
    - symfoniq 9y ago

cjsuk 9y ago

This is most user journeys with MSFT products recently.

edgarvaldes 9y ago

So, anyone know how does it work? I mean, the "tracking a package in Cortana". I'm intrigued now.

partiallypro 9y ago
It usually just reads your email and shows you the packages based on that. I've never had any problems with it.
- eightysixfour 9y ago
  Yeah - it is pretty good at finding packages in my email that follow conventional tracking numbers. I have personally experienced the problems mentioned in the link when trying to add them manually though.
cobalt 9y ago
just paste the tracking number in
jasonlotito 9y ago
It just works for me. It detects it from my email. I don't have to do anything.

eterm 9y ago

The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible. It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events". Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web. Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's the program you want to run" to popping up it's search engine.

rspeer 9y ago
I have seen fuzzy search work in a few cases, but they are sparse. Most notably, I never remember what the name of Windows' built-in screenshot application is. It's "Snipping Tool". I often mis-remember it as "Clipping Tool". But anyway, it comes up when I type "screenshot", "clip", or "clipping" into the search bar.
- eterm 9y ago
  Here's the crazy thing: Type out "clipping tool" and watch. It matches all the way to "clipping t". Then it stops matching, then matches again at "clipping tool". So even if you know a phrase which it matches on, you might or might not get a patch from an exact partial of that matching phrase.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    Nope, for me the exact process works as intended, there's no difference between "clipping t" and "clipping to" and "clipping too".
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    For me it matches perfectly for each letter. Maybe you're on an older build?
- icc97 9y ago
  I just installed Greenshot [0] and never really thought about about the internal one. It comes with it's own mini image editor to quickly add annotations and a very nice zoom feature to catch the screenshot correctly first time without having to re-crop. Greenshot is the one Windows tool I really missed on Linux. [0]: http://getgreenshot.org/ http://getgreenshot.org/

Theodores 9y ago

The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don't even have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana. Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing. https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/ https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/

QuercusMax 9y ago
Looks like this isn't even a proprietary Google thing, they just have better support than lots of providers. The docs you point to mention that the schema is from schema.org.
dingo_bat 9y ago
This is also present on outlook. I wonder why Cortana can't just use that same logic. I guess they had to justify their existence by coding up the same thing again.
- contextfree 9y ago
  Cortana does use the same logic for automatically finding the tracking information, that has nothing to do with anything in the article though, which is about the UX for manually entering the tracking information.

cbhl 9y ago

One piece that's missing from this post is -- what did the email containing the tracking number look like? GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends schema.org markup for it. (https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-delivery https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-...)

DoodleBuggy 9y ago

And yet Cortana is still better than Siri.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
But the Google Assistant is a lot smarter than both.
- DoodleBuggy 9y ago
  By such leaps that it's hard to compare the two.
monochromatic 9y ago
Not even close.
- DoodleBuggy 9y ago
  > Not even close. "Searching the web for 'Knot every clothes'..."
- dboreham 9y ago
  The only time I enabled Siri was to play that Queen Easter Egg..

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

neves 9y ago

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.

megaman22 9y ago
And do such a poor job of it. Bash or Powershell tab completion blows it out of the water, and god knows there hasn't been a fraction of the resources devoted to either of those.
fencepost 9y ago
You might want to look at O&O ShutUp10 (https://www.oo-software.com/en/ShutUp10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/ShutUp10), which lets you disable a bunch of Windows 10 features along with tips on what they are and their importance and risks.
milcron 9y ago
The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.
- mcny 9y ago
  > The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana. Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't need to do everything at this very moment. Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this? https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d7e-9dc6-821074570be3/49f58bac6fcc3e9f2d671a739c0f1e00/fedora2220052915.png https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d... https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png Instead what I get (even with Windows 7) is a spinning wheel that says "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes...". Happens every time I want to use Windows (which is more of a reason to stay in the Linux partition tbh)
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    > Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I have 64 GB of RAM, and even tried turning off the swap. Still see that HDD light blinking. I don't know what is going on.

wvenable 9y ago

I really wish Microsoft wouldn't bloat Windows with all these useless features. They're still acting like they are building a mobile OS. Windows 10 would be fantastic OS if it wasn't for all these misguided attempts to act like iOS and Android.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
They made a mistake starting with Windows 8, I'm guessing they were worried about the iPad eating into PC sales. Well it turned out that that didn't really happen but we are stuck with the tabletisation of Windows anyway. I've been trying a Surface but it's going back because it isn't good at being a tablet nor laptop.

magice 9y ago

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 hard!" And the PM is probably like "well, low risk, too, so whatever you wish." Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief "yo, so cool" moment. The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But let's be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: "some nobody-care feature is not easy to use" or "if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times, press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself". The 1st one is vague and, let's be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM would do the 2nd bug first. I mean, seriously, how would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment below actually says, "I did not realize it exist") is "easy to use"? No automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use it and probably come prepared) won't catch it. A/B testing probably won't even get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down) probably have priority between "when I have better work-life balance" and "when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues." -- I will agree that all of these don't justify for a shitty experience. Shitty experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has "I swear I will switch to Eclipse" moments. And Scheme has about 70 different ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case. So, maybe a bit more love/understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the users') blood pressure anyway.

gerrard00 9y ago
I don't think they deserve empathy at all. If they can't implement the feature to the level of being usable they should just cut the feature instead of annoying the user. So much software development today is about getting story points on a velocity chart and claiming that features have been delivered even if the feature is actually useless. A Minimum Viable Product should actually be viable.

CydeWeys 9y ago

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 tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn't find it. I never want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web! Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?

GolDDranks 9y ago
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.
- graeme 9y ago
  Did it happen right after install? It usually takes spotlight a few minutes to index any new program - trial or not.
  - GolDDranks 9y ago
    It persisted for the whole month of the trial period. I rebooted multiple times during that period and also checked the Spotlight settings for a few times that they wouldn't exclude anything - and nope.
- dpkonofa 9y ago

moonman272 9y ago

This is just old school Microsoft engineering. Add a feature bullet point to the package, don’t worry about how it’s integrated or if it works. It’s the same with most anything from them you dig in to.

api 9y ago

It's got nothing on "Bixby," Samsung's me-too entrant into the world of largely useless voice assistants.

hnnsj 9y ago

"People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my devices." How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!".

cellis 9y ago

Seriously. I refuse to use Cortana on my Xbox One and went back to the native “Xbox” commands. The latency of cortana was atrocious and usually after all that would either reask the question or not do what Xbox would. Microsoft is really good at taking a good thing (Xbox) and making it more bloated and slower.

Yhippa 9y ago
My pain point is that I don't know if my command was accepted or not. Also I think that mapping of voice commands to what you can do on the Xbox got reduced and is more confusing. Even on the Xbox One X the latency is still bad.
jameshart 9y ago
Wait, you can go back to native 'xbox' commands? Oh wow, you can! https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-and-use-xbox-voice-commands-on-your-xbox-one/ https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-... Thanks, had no idea - assumed that when MS shipped that update the old kinect voice recognition just went away. "Xbox, turn off" and "Xbox, record that" were the two most used voice commands in our house, but "Hey cortana" never seems to respond when you call her.

Yhippa 9y ago

Interesting that elongated micro-whines have now turned into long-form blog posts. To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with "Sorry I don't know how to do that" which is frustrating. Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.

nanodano 9y ago

Jeez, this guy gets really angry and swears for pages and pages over a stupid little feature he doens't like.

drumttocs8 9y ago

I just use Everything to search. It's great.

lousken 9y ago

Removing cortana was the first thing that I did when I installed windows 10. However even the basic search is incredibly bad. It took months before it even considered searching in Downloads folder (patch fixed it I guess?). And portable apps? Yea, gl with that. But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows apps. That's just pure trash. There're no aliases so if you don't know exactly how MS named the functionality you're fucked. And if you know the english word for it, it doesn't show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it used to be called but not the current translation you're also fucked. E.g. in english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be "Spořič obrazovky" but now it's "Šetřič obrazovky". (btw neither of these even show up in the creators update, but in falls they fixed it and "Šetřič obrazovky" will return correct result). Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english keyboard layout. It's increadibly frustrating to use and I've mostly given up on it and use powershell whenever I can. That doesn't fix my problems with diacritics when searching documents though.

2close4comfort 9y ago

It is the bing of personal digital assistants...

camhenlin 9y ago

I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying "Hey Cortana, pause" is really handy if you're in the middle of watching Netflix, and you get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana didn't take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.

franzpeterfolz 9y ago

Well, the Projected Delivery Date is 25th November 2017. How do I know? Took the number and looked it up at ups. I think, I'm not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of November. Just one day before. Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived. BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.

icc97 9y ago

The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed up in politics.

rdtsc 9y ago

Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like a human). That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application, they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated. There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.

Havoc 9y ago

That entire menu makes me serious question whether anyone at MS actually uses Win 10. No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...

downrightmike 9y ago

Funny how MSFT used Cortana, sure she is a popular character, but she falls very far away from good to deadly to us. She ends up going rampant and turns other AIs against us. Not the most forward thinking, given where they are taking the character.

TheGRS 9y ago

Alright, I'm glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I just plain don't understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it useful?). Why does it even exist? I can see Microsoft put a lot of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works. I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to do precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit? Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.

wvenable 9y ago
Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. At this point I'm more annoyed with the software that come pre-installed on operating systems than what they don't have. I can always download whatever apps I want. But I totally agree that designers don't understand their users. I think there's a sense that Windows has to be "cool" like Android and iOS rather than just "useful".
- mysterypie 9y ago
  > Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. I can always download whatever apps I want. I'd agree that the OS shouldn't come pre-installed with major applications. Those are things that I've invested time and effort to learn and where I have a definite preference on what I want to download. But to having to research little things like key reassignment apps becomes a real chore. Then you have to download and install it, make sure it's not malware, and if you use multiple machines, repeat those steps. The older versions of the iPhone and the iPad didn't come with a calculator. I don't know if current versions now include a calculator, but having to test a dozen different garbage calculators out of 1000 mind-numbing choices in the app store was a real pain in the neck. Any simple ad-free calculator included in iOS would have been OK.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I have really enjoyed the comments here. I have observed that among my acquaintances Cortana can be either really helpful or really not helpful but I don't see a lot of in between sort of "good for this, but not this" sorts of reviews. From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of 'communication mismatch' and how they detect it. Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and stops, I've seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and subsequent re-framing is completely missing. The other thing I've observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be 'human' in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates to it like a 'user' not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person pitched to Siri "I want pizza" and was frustrated at the response ("This is what I've found on the web about Pizza") And added "I want Dominos Pizza" (additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable to parse an acceptable language target for 'I want'. Changing that to "Call dominos" or "Where is the nearest Dominos" works well because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions). All of this the "level 4" version of autonomous conversations where the computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a response.

gerdesj 9y ago

It will be a while before these digital assistants work properly. None of them work in a way that anyone can possibly call "intelligent". If I was feeling charitable then I'd describe them as merely intrusive. When these things do finally get their act together, we will all live in a world that is different from the one we live in now. I hope it is a better one.

loopdoend 9y ago

Why would you paste in a URL when trying to track a package and not just the tracking number? I mean if you have the URL just go to the URL and track your package. I’m pretty sure Cortana was designed as a human interface and not a web browser...

trynumber9 9y ago

I've been very disappointed with Cortana. On numerous occasions it has been faster to grab my Macbook out of my backpack. Why is Spotlight able to find a file on my Windows desktop's network share that Cortana would not find? And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that's a compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.

lostgame 9y ago
Actually, AFAIK, Apple uses the Pages rendering system for that? I know Quick Look and Preview are also able to view, but not edit, .doc and .docx files.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

modzu 9y ago

it's the straw that broke the camel's back for me and windows as a desktop os. hello again fedora :)

popeko 9y ago

OP: Is that your actual tracking number? If so, I'd blur it - it may leak your info

harshbutfair 9y ago

If I type "lync", the default option is to run Skype for Business (Lync's successor). If I type "skype" the default option is to install Skype for Business, even though I already have it installed. It is very unintuitive. It is as bad as the search in Jira/Confluence, and that's saying something.

ndh2 9y ago

The sad thing is that the Windows 7 start menu wasn't any better. This is not a regression, just some sort of following the tradition. I use an old, discontinued app called Executor that I configure manually. It's not a whole lot better in terms of matching, but, because it can be configured, it is much better in terms of getting it to do what I want. It definitely can't track your packages, though. http://www.executor.dk/ http://www.executor.dk/

skrebbel 9y ago
The Windows 8 start menu was fantastic however. Just start typing (like you're supposed to do now), but it would search only programs and settings pages, lightning fast. Then Cortana came and it tried to read your mind and search the internet and it all went to shit again.

Lewton 9y ago

Have eclipse neon and eclipse oxygen installed Slowly type out eclipse in search bar Watch it randomly switch between the two at each character Randomly as in, sometimes it suggests oxygen on ecl and sometimes it suggests neon on ecl

tehwebguy 9y ago

If it’s worse than Siri that is bad. I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to “remind me about [an appointment] in two weeks” It kept making an immediate reminder that said “appointment into weeks” - into weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something like “Days turn into weeks”???

xh3n1 9y ago

Really really bad