13 ms·

This reminds me of finding and trying to report a bug in Internet Explorer 5.5 20+ years ago (not a difficult task). To report a bug, I had to pay. Yes that's

by jwiley 6y ago

This reminds me of finding and trying to report a bug in Internet Explorer 5.5 20+ years ago (not a difficult task). To report a bug, I had to pay. Yes that's right, I had to put in a credit card, and pay $100. If it turned out it was deemed to be a real bug, I would be refunded my $100 money. If it wasn't, well that should teach me for wasting their time. Guess the folks running the bug program got promoted.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I presume you declined to pay?
- jwiley 6y ago
  The company I worked for at the time decided to pay since it was affecting users and we had to do an annoying work around. If I remember correctly we got the $100 back a month or so later, with a one liner reply saying something to the effect of "this will be fixed in a service pack at some point, godspeed."
gregjw 6y ago
Thats ridiculous
oconnor663 6y ago
I'm assuming that policy was designed for general bug reports, rather than specifically for security bugs? Especially if this was 20 years ago.
kasajian 6y ago
I had the same reaction to this when I was told by Microsoft, however this description seems intentionally misleading. Microsoft Support accepts calls for support and bug reports. There's a fee for the support. If it turns out that the issue is a defect, then you won't pay for the support call. Unfortunately, this was the only way to report a bug at the time.
- jwiley 6y ago
  Yeah thats definitely possible, I may be misremembering the specifics. I think for us the end result was the same: it made us a lot less likely to help them improve their product.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    We did the opposite. With premier support, you used to buy a bucket of hours. We had a few folks that learned the lingo and basically was able to attach a product defect to almost any call we made, billable to the product group. We’d end up with a surplus of hours, and leverage the threat of slashing those hours to get the execs on the support side to push for concessions from the other parts of the business. Premier was basically a revenue generator for us :)
    - byecomputer 6y ago
      Something tells me they don't mind if the bucket's overflowing so long as you're paying for the water. "Make 'em feel like _they're_ workin' _you_" is a tried-and-true sales tactic
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    But sadly not enough to break their desktop monopoly.
qz2 6y ago
Oh that's nothing. When they introduced IE7, they broke ClickOnce launchers all around the globe due to the new download prompting. I raised a defect with my MS Partner support dude and normal MS support. All they managed was a registry fix shipped out to turn an old flag on that was removed from the UI but was still in the code inside IE. I did the diagnostic work to get that far. After arguing for months with various support people at Microsoft I managed to get hold of people on both the IE and CLR teams and they both pointed at each other and refused to fix anything blaming the other team. They called me every 6 months to ask me to close the ticket and I denied it because it wasn't fucking fixed. Eventually they stopped calling when Microsoft Connect was shut down. I wonder how many millions of issues they solved at that time! Oh no wait, the issue still exists in IE11. They fixed it in old Edge. This was a manual registry fix we had to deploy to 20,000 users at over 500 companies for 10 years. Eventually we rewrote the software so it didn't use ClickOnce, instead passing context to the application via a shell protocol handler (much like Slack does). Incidentally we're no longer an MS Gold partner and have no certified staff any more. This is not a coincidence. They did a shitty job and like hell we were paying any further. Amazon got our business in the end. The issue? You can't set window.location.href=""; to a clickonce activation link because of a race condition in the download bar in IE.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  > You can't set window.location.href=""; to a clickonce activation link because of a race condition in the download bar in IE. I don't even... shakes head in dismay
  - qz2 6y ago
    It’s even worse when you realise I spent ten years convincing tens of large angry enterprises why they needed to deploy a registry fix to make our web based software work. I put the cost of this bug for us just in the $100k range.
    - arthurcolle 6y ago
      Were these deployed on prem on Windows servers?
antman 6y ago
Last month they broke integration with PowerBI service with directquery, marked it “info” without estimated resolution time, posted a windows server specific solution, and ten days later silently fixed it for the rest of the platforms including Azure SQL.
spoonjim 6y ago
Haha. I couldn't even invent something that stupid. I guess they had a lot of cranks reporting bugs? The $100 would make sense if there was a large reward on the other end. Like, if it was deemed to be a real bug, you'd get $10K or $100K.
- mjcl 6y ago
  It sounds like the normal Microsoft support (aka PSS) when you don't have a support agreement. If the problem you are reporting is solved by a hotfix or update, then MS refunds the support fee.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    They also refund it if it’s a demonstrable but in the product, even if it’s a WONTFIX bug. The only downside is the fee is now $500, not $100
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Microsoft vulnerabilties are now being disclosed on a Microsoft subsidiary website, Github, Inc.
jiveturkey 6y ago
20 years ago you needed that kind of filter.
ryan29 6y ago
I’m pretty sure their App Store has a 5-6 year old bug where kids are prompted to use their (child) PIN to authorize purchases instead of a parent’s PIN. I haven’t tested it in a long time though. I tried to make a video demonstrating it a couple years ago, but VBox video recording mangled it due to a bug. I found it amusing that one bug preventing me from demonstrating another bug. I tried figuring out how to report something like that to MS and gave up. It’s way too much hassle.
johnchristopher 6y ago
I found a nasty XSL rendering bug for some version of IE many solar rounds ago. Took them 2 years to get back to me: "this bug is closed because that browser is not supported anymore" or something like that and "you are not eligible for a free copy of Windows X since there are no bugs". Or something like that, memory is fuzzy. But other people were getting free copy left and right for PEBKAC problems.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
That reminds me of all my efforts reporting bugs in a Certain browser today... Except there is no option to pay $100, you just get ignored and sent to WONTFIX.

by jwiley 6y ago

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

I presume you declined to pay?

jwiley 6y ago
The company I worked for at the time decided to pay since it was affecting users and we had to do an annoying work around. If I remember correctly we got the $100 back a month or so later, with a one liner reply saying something to the effect of "this will be fixed in a service pack at some point, godspeed."

gregjw 6y ago

Thats ridiculous

oconnor663 6y ago

I'm assuming that policy was designed for general bug reports, rather than specifically for security bugs? Especially if this was 20 years ago.

kasajian 6y ago

I had the same reaction to this when I was told by Microsoft, however this description seems intentionally misleading. Microsoft Support accepts calls for support and bug reports. There's a fee for the support. If it turns out that the issue is a defect, then you won't pay for the support call. Unfortunately, this was the only way to report a bug at the time.

jwiley 6y ago
Yeah thats definitely possible, I may be misremembering the specifics. I think for us the end result was the same: it made us a lot less likely to help them improve their product.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  We did the opposite. With premier support, you used to buy a bucket of hours. We had a few folks that learned the lingo and basically was able to attach a product defect to almost any call we made, billable to the product group. We’d end up with a surplus of hours, and leverage the threat of slashing those hours to get the execs on the support side to push for concessions from the other parts of the business. Premier was basically a revenue generator for us :)
  - byecomputer 6y ago
    Something tells me they don't mind if the bucket's overflowing so long as you're paying for the water. "Make 'em feel like _they're_ workin' _you_" is a tried-and-true sales tactic
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  But sadly not enough to break their desktop monopoly.

qz2 6y ago

Oh that's nothing. When they introduced IE7, they broke ClickOnce launchers all around the globe due to the new download prompting. I raised a defect with my MS Partner support dude and normal MS support. All they managed was a registry fix shipped out to turn an old flag on that was removed from the UI but was still in the code inside IE. I did the diagnostic work to get that far. After arguing for months with various support people at Microsoft I managed to get hold of people on both the IE and CLR teams and they both pointed at each other and refused to fix anything blaming the other team. They called me every 6 months to ask me to close the ticket and I denied it because it wasn't fucking fixed. Eventually they stopped calling when Microsoft Connect was shut down. I wonder how many millions of issues they solved at that time! Oh no wait, the issue still exists in IE11. They fixed it in old Edge. This was a manual registry fix we had to deploy to 20,000 users at over 500 companies for 10 years. Eventually we rewrote the software so it didn't use ClickOnce, instead passing context to the application via a shell protocol handler (much like Slack does). Incidentally we're no longer an MS Gold partner and have no certified staff any more. This is not a coincidence. They did a shitty job and like hell we were paying any further. Amazon got our business in the end. The issue? You can't set window.location.href=""; to a clickonce activation link because of a race condition in the download bar in IE.

arthurcolle 6y ago
> You can't set window.location.href=""; to a clickonce activation link because of a race condition in the download bar in IE. I don't even... shakes head in dismay
- qz2 6y ago
  It’s even worse when you realise I spent ten years convincing tens of large angry enterprises why they needed to deploy a registry fix to make our web based software work. I put the cost of this bug for us just in the $100k range.
  - arthurcolle 6y ago
    Were these deployed on prem on Windows servers?

antman 6y ago

Last month they broke integration with PowerBI service with directquery, marked it “info” without estimated resolution time, posted a windows server specific solution, and ten days later silently fixed it for the rest of the platforms including Azure SQL.

spoonjim 6y ago

Haha. I couldn't even invent something that stupid. I guess they had a lot of cranks reporting bugs? The $100 would make sense if there was a large reward on the other end. Like, if it was deemed to be a real bug, you'd get $10K or $100K.

mjcl 6y ago
It sounds like the normal Microsoft support (aka PSS) when you don't have a support agreement. If the problem you are reporting is solved by a hotfix or update, then MS refunds the support fee.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  They also refund it if it’s a demonstrable but in the product, even if it’s a WONTFIX bug. The only downside is the fee is now $500, not $100

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Microsoft vulnerabilties are now being disclosed on a Microsoft subsidiary website, Github, Inc.

jiveturkey 6y ago

20 years ago you needed that kind of filter.

ryan29 6y ago

I’m pretty sure their App Store has a 5-6 year old bug where kids are prompted to use their (child) PIN to authorize purchases instead of a parent’s PIN. I haven’t tested it in a long time though. I tried to make a video demonstrating it a couple years ago, but VBox video recording mangled it due to a bug. I found it amusing that one bug preventing me from demonstrating another bug. I tried figuring out how to report something like that to MS and gave up. It’s way too much hassle.

johnchristopher 6y ago

I found a nasty XSL rendering bug for some version of IE many solar rounds ago. Took them 2 years to get back to me: "this bug is closed because that browser is not supported anymore" or something like that and "you are not eligible for a free copy of Windows X since there are no bugs". Or something like that, memory is fuzzy. But other people were getting free copy left and right for PEBKAC problems.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

That reminds me of all my efforts reporting bugs in a Certain browser today... Except there is no option to pay $100, you just get ignored and sent to WONTFIX.