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Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

399 points by Aaronn 5y ago

snielson 5y ago
Microsoft has recently been pushing a new centralized web based feedback portal: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ It looks like they have imported feedback from other places such as the feedback hub.
tasogare 5y ago
"We are listening to your feedback" is corporate speech for "we don't give a shit about your opinion" especially when Microsoft is involved.
- userbinator 5y ago
  They are listening --- as in someone will probably read what you wrote --- but they never said they would do anything about it.
- jka 5y ago
  I completely agree - and have similar thoughts about "we look forward to continuing the conversation" as a way to close down a discussion (possible translation: "it's lunch time and it's mac and cheese today! see ya"). However, assuming good intent: how would you determine whether they are listening? (or continuing the conversation, in the latter case)
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Anything which gets responses of empty platitudes usually means they aren’t listening. I am a small developer who makes apps and puts them on the App Store and play store (Hacker news client HACK for example). I often get emails from users on how to add a feature or fix a bug etc. I email them and instead of just saying “thanks for your feedback”, I address the real problem/feature. Example- few days ago someone asked me to integrate the Orion browser support in my app. I wasn’t aware of this browser so I googled it, found it that it’s currently in closed beta and I signed up for a beta. I replied back to the user that currently I can’t add it in because I don’t have access to the beta yet, however I have signed up and when I do get access to it, I will test and add it in unless the user can get me a piece of code from the developers of Orion browser which tells me what identifier to use to launch their browser on iOS. The user contacted the developers of Orion and got me the info I needed. Today I added it in but since I still don’t have access to the beta, I sent the app update and informed the user that for now, I have added the functionality acting blindly and I think it should work but if it doesn’t, then they will have to wait for me to get the beta. User is happy. Another example- someone recently contacted me for a feature in another one of my apps which I have no intention of adding. I replied back that I will be honest with them and inform them that I don’t intend on adding it in and here’s my reasons. I gave them an alternative app which has that feature in case they want to try. User was happy and gave me a 5 star review. Basically, even if you have bad news for the customer, tell them the news and they will be just fine. I try to put myself in the customers shoes and think about what I would think of got the typical cookie cutter response “we are listening to your feedback” with no further details on what they intend on doing with what they are hearing.
    - geraldwhen 5y ago
      This doesn’t scale. If your app reaches any level of success, you don’t get one email per night, you get 100. When my app was small I responded individually, but after I hit a threshold I had to use a template response for feature requests just to stay productive.
      - jka 5y ago
        It can scale, and I'd wager that it will. There is -- or should in future be -- a far larger number of software developers than the number of components that are required to compose the functionality that everyone needs and desires, at high quality and with ever-reducing negative externalities. That's a good thing: it'll provide more time for review, apprenticeship, mentoring and mastery of individual technical areas, and for mobility and communication between communities. That's not to say there can't also be pure-enjoyment and hobby software projects; but those won't have the same support demands (or expectations). Small (or solo) teams maintaining systems with massive inbound demand, significant risk during changes, and limited ability to receive community feedback feels like the less-scalable approach, to me. That said I'm willing to concede that both approaches appear to work under different circumstances (and may be able to learn from each other).
      - busymom0 5y ago
        You have a fair point but I disagree. However I also recognize that I can only be proven right or wrong when I am in those shoes at some very large scale. For now, I do get about 5-10 emails a day for all my apps combined and it’s been easily manageable. However, the article we are talking about here is about Microsoft, a trillion dollar company treating some basic user feedback with zero value. Amazon, another trillion dollar company has been outstanding to me whenever I reach out to their customer support chat (I have done that many times over the years). I get to chat to a human within a minute and they help me either resolve the issue or tell me why they can’t resolve the issue. If Amazon can do it, then there’s no reason why Microsoft can’t do it for basic user feedback. Also are you really being productive if you are sending template response? A robot could do that.
    - freediver 5y ago
  - tasogare 5y ago
    Product release. For instance there is for years issue with C#'s GUI frameworks mainly the lack of a multiplateform one. Microsoft disregarded developer feedback on UWP (it was stupid to propose a Windows 10 only framework at a time Win7 was still dominant and tie it to a mean of delivery - the Windows store). About a decade later Microsoft remembered with dotnet 5 and 6 that WPF and WinForms are the frameworks people are actually using and they got some improvements.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  and in recent years, sadly Dropbox.
- dpark 5y ago
  I sort of agree. Sometimes that is nothing but a polite yet empty response. But people also tend think that they aren’t being listened to when they don’t get what they ask for, which isn’t always the case. I have to deal with this pretty frequently: Someone gives feedback about a thing and requests a change. I listen, understand the request, explain that I can’t do this right now because it lands too low on the priority list and there are a thousand critical and urgent things that I need to get done first. Then the person complains (to me, my manager, their manager, in a different context, whatever) that they aren’t being listened to. Listening doesn’t mean agreeing, nor does it mean solving for a request right now (or possibly ever). Making people feel heard without doing what they ask is a hard thing. It’s extremely hard to do at scale and I don’t envy those trying to satisfy UI change requests from millions of people. Also I work at Microsoft so I’m probably biased here.
- chrischapman 5y ago
  Yep. Kind of like "we value your privacy" means "we don't give a shit about your privacy". I guess the only way to uncover a platitude is to test it. The problem with "We are listening to your feedback" is that "listening" is hard to disprove. It doesn't require any action - they're just "listening". It sounds good but doesn't mean anything useful. If, instead, it was "We will respond to your feedback within 48 hours" - well, that's testable. That sounds like a real, honest, useful commitment. Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business?
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business? It's not about the size of the business, but whether this is a good way for them to spend money or not. Coffee shops will often not get back to you within 48 hours depending on the comment you make and how busy they are. It's really a judgement call, as large number of comments are basically spam, but you can't reply with "this is a silly comment" or "this is an unreasonable request on our time", so it's best to just ignore. For a big business, where individual judgement is replaced with a set of procedures and institutions that try to encode judgement, they most surely will offer some level of support with an SLA that guarantees someone will get back to you in a well-defined period of time. But you usually have to pay extra for that, and that's a pretty sensible system, since leaving comments is free and there is no way to know how serious you are about the comment and how badly you want it responded to. E.g. worth paying, say, $10? $5? $1? There is some intersection of supply and demand for real support at which a certain price results in you getting answers, but in those situations where that price is not zero, it's not the size of the business that matters, but the shape of those supply and demand curves. And the size of the business, in my experience, will tend to shift the supply curve farther away from "free", because that answer will be an official answer of the business and it may take a lot of time for the poor support guy to track someone down and get an official answer, and in some cases it may be a lot of work to get that answer if the bureaucracy is complex and knowledge is stovepiped. This is why you see tiers in support, and the time required to get someone knowledgeable is often much longer as you climb that support chain and escalate your question. All of that ends up costing quite a bit to a big firm.
azalemeth 5y ago
Companies do this sort of thing all the time. Leave a bad review on the Google play store. It won't be edited immediately but it might become impossible to find or vanish quickly under lots of good ones. Image management is a lot easier when you own the platform it needs to be managed on. Microsoft used to have a User Voice board. I wrote a complaint at length about Teams being a steaming hot pile of <Unicode poo emoji>. Lots of other people did too. They're retiring it now and have "ended their partnership" with user voice
- userbinator 5y ago
  Deleting comments (i.e. censorship) is one thing; but misattribution and effectively "putting words into someone's mouth" by editing their content to say what they did not, goes well beyond what I think even those who are proponents of strong moderation and censorship would deem acceptable. I suspect proponents of copyright and other IP laws would also be against it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
polotics 5y ago
Windows 11 is so obviously a no go, games and office was Microsoft's last redoubt for relevance on personal hardware. Here's a prediction: in ten years this company will be smaller and called "Azure"...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Have to agree. In fact the clusterfuck going on with desktop frameworks seems to be related to WinDev not knowing where to go. Most likely it isn't any accident that many key figures that are still at Microsoft have now moved into Azure division, where I also have to acknowledge, POSIX has won on the cloud space (aka timesharing rebranded).
- pid-1 5y ago
  I distro hop with my home laptops and use Windows at $JOB I've decided to install Windows 11 preview around June 2021 and have been using it ever since, so I could eventually help my coworkers, validate our workflows etc... I am curious on why people in HN dislike Win 11 so much. For me the upgrade was basically about minor UI changes, which I got used to in 1-2 weeks. I am a sysadmin / cloud whatever and it broke none of my stuff, I use the same workflows I used in Win 10. We still haven't migrated our users to Win 11 out of pragmatism , but honestly there is nothing I hate about it. Maybe my expectations for MS are too low already, IDK.
  - alexvoda 5y ago
    The UI changes are very disruptive to other people. As an example, think all the people who for decades placed the taskbar on the side. Also, the bullshit minimum requirements are obviously about pushing DRM.
    - meowkit 5y ago
      Minimum requirements were about pushing TPM (massive boost to chain of trust and security based on internal metrics) and hardware sales. Source: I’m an insider.
suction 5y ago
Feedback Hub indeed seems to be useless - because it is designed to act as a sink hole. Yet the topic the author of this article and apparently hundreds of others are describing as a show-stopping miss of Windows 11: The ability to see open documents ungrouped on the task bar. That's not a "bug" which needs to be addressed directly by developers. And really? That alone is a reason to go through a harrowing downgrade process to an earlier OS version? Not a regular Windows user, but I found that feature to be almost toxic UX - the open documents on the task bar all looked the same, and not different enough from the app icon, to make it a time / click-saving feature. I ended up clicking on each one until the correct window was in front. It surely was worse UX than simply cycling through all open windows by the keyboard shortcut. Which isn't exactly power-user knowledge.
- thombles 5y ago
  (author here) Each "button" on the taskbar shows as a label the name of the document. This is the key differentiator that makes W10- so convenient - they don't look the same because they have text showing exactly what you're getting!
  - suction 5y ago
    Strange, on the PC I sometimes use, there are only icons, no text. I have to hover of each one to see the name, but it already breaks down for long names.
- WolfRazu 5y ago
  When individual windows are ungrouped their application name is displayed, so you can just look for the name of the document or window you're looking for. I miss this feature too.
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  I think Microsoft's preferred window navigation method is the Windows+tab combo, and from there you just click on the app/document you want. That said, it's had that sort of functionality forever, and I personally still never use it.
gigel82 5y ago
I've heard the tool's internal frontend (OCV) is equally frustrating to use by employees; and because of the huge amount of useless replies (that the author mentioned) in most teams it's only used for sentiment analysis on keywords ('people generally hate/love the new FooBar feature'). A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I wonder if they’d get better replies if it didn’t seem like an effort to silo feedback into a tool they control so they can ignore it and keep negative feedback that gains traction out of the spotlight. Based on my experience I call it the “Fuck-Off Hub” because that’s where they send you so you can feel like you’re submitting feedback, but they really just want you to fuck off and stop bugging them. It’s like whispering into the Grand Canyon. No one that matters is ever going to hear your feedback, so why bother?
- ack_complete 5y ago
  From the perspective of someone not at Microsoft, it feels like part of the reason it's such a mess is because it's obviously really badly curated, to the point that the Feedback Hub app encourages it. Older versions of the Feedback Hub had categorization on the left so you would naturally browse into a category, but then they changed it to not very visible drop-downs and auto-suggested categories. The result is feedback goes to random categories and is never moved to the correct ones, nor is there a way to report miscategorized feedback. There is also still old feedback for bugs that were fixed in the Windows 10 pre-RTM previews, and even some that are just complete gibberish random characters. Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug. Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.
usbqk 5y ago
My rule is to never work as a QA for free.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Just want to say how much of a pleasure it is to use any ol' minimal gnu distro compared to this mess. Not as polished as Win95 or 2000, but at least everything is consensual.
- thombles 5y ago
  (author here) IMO KDE is the most authentic expression of Windows XP-era UI productivity that exists today. Their dedication to user-configurable settings is an absolute blessing.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Having recently switched to Fedora KDE, I agree. It is an excellent desktop experience and I think it's a great first stop for anyone interested in switching to Linux. I had a good experience with Mint Cinnamon too, but the system seems overall better-integrated in Fedora KDE.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      KDE is a great first desktop for anyone coming from Windows, but Mac users might be more comfortable with some of the more "Mac-like" desktop offerings available on Linux. But in that there ability you have one of Linux-based operating systems' great strengths. You can easily customize things to fit your preferred workflow. :)
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I generally agree that KDE is pretty decent. Since Microsoft continues to treat Windows and its users like garbage, I'm fairly certain a Linux Desktop will be the lesser of two evils in my near future so I'm spending a lot more time working out how to live with it for my workflows. I discovered I really like Silverblue. Immutable OS with Flatpak focus and Toolbox cover a lot of what I want, even if the implementations are somewhat less than ideal. Unfortuantely, Kinoite (the KDE spin of Silverblue) is hot garbage. Half of the things don't work including Flatpak icons (until a reboot) and running a GTK app in Toolbox causes it to inexplicably pause for several seconds at a time. I can't even report the latter issue (several of the former have 2 month+ open issues already) because the login for the bug tracker is busted. So I'm stuck with GNOME, a 'desktop' that desperately wishes it were running on a phone.
userbinator 5y ago
I once even spotted a Microsoft employee who took the time to raise their concerns on the public tracker: That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible? On the other hand, what I can find in the news about internal protests at MS are all seemingly SJW-ish topics, and absolutely none about the quality of the products themselves. I think that alone says a lot about who's working there and what they actually care about doing --- which is clearly not improving their products. The people who do care about that are being heavily outnumbered, and perhaps a lot of them have already deemed MS to be unsalvageable and left. I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.
- headmelted 5y ago
  I don’t think conflating inclusivity and/or diversity action with specific product issues is helpful or comes off well here.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    A team that ignores product quality will soon run out of money to spend on solving social etc. issues. Effort follows attention, so attention should be weighted appropriately across issues, but it's not uncommon for companies and causes to over-index on just a few issues and sacrifice other aspects of team dynamics and product quality as a result.
    - headmelted 5y ago
      You might as well say that the team that enjoys a beer and meets up to watch the game on a Sunday is ignoring product quality. You’ve no basis to point to social causes or anything else and say “something is causing a stink round here and it’s that!”. Software is built by people. People have viewpoints. There will inevitably be overlap in those viewpoints. There’s no reason to think any of this has anything to do with the thread.
draw_down 5y ago
posnet 5y ago
The fact that the text is 'Hello there'. I wonder if a MSFT employee was typing a response to you, but accidentally clicked edit on your comment and it overwrote your content before they realised what they have done, then panicked and just hit submit.
- usbqk 5y ago
  It smells like the developer is in charge of the component and he didn’t want the report posted there publicly.
  - Closi 5y ago
    I think Hanlon's Razor can be applied here - i.e. never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Particularly considering his comments were just echoing all the other comments in the thread - and the message "hello there" is strange and doesn't really make sense to me (if they have the power to edit a post, they probably have the power to delete it outright, which would have been less suspicious and not generated this post).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Closi 5y ago
  I think this is a logical explanation - that they have a huge team going through answers here and that one of them made a fuck-up.
  - nix23 5y ago
    The logical explanation is: -There are no MS Employees there (but professional Call/Text Centers) -MS gives a *it about your opinion (as every big IT Company) -But MS wants you to feel that your part of the family (inclusive developers developers!!)
    - 5y ago
dEnigma 5y ago
I also spent quite a lot of time during the Windows 10 preview phase, and a while after release, diligently reporting bugs, and voting on well thought-out feature requests. But after noticing that none of these bugs ever got any attention, and how the Feedback Hub was mostly just noise, I started to wonder why I even did free work for a multi-billion dollar company, on my own time. Right around that period I switched to Linux and now only use Windows for some games that absolutely won't work on the former. This way I no longer care how bad the UX of the system is, and how many bugs there are, as long as my games launch.
- gandalfgreybeer 5y ago
  Whenever a game I play is released on the Nintendo Switch, I am a little bit happier (eg Diablo 3, Tetris Effect). There’s honestly nothing keeping me in Windows except for video games (which I have less and less time for each year). I’m sort of looking forward to the day I won’t need to play video games on Windows and just be happy with a MacBook and a Linux workstation.
  - Kudos 5y ago
    You might be interested in a Valve Steamdeck, it's a Switch form factor Linux gaming device. https://www.steamdeck.com/ https://www.steamdeck.com/
    - dormento 5y ago
      Plus you can play on Steam on GNU/Linux so you're not restricted to Windows. It's pretty much the same runtime that's gonna land on the Steam Deck. I play some pretty demanding games and it runs flawless. While technically it does not require discrete graphics hardware, in practice it does, but its been smooth sailing with my somewhat old NVIDIA GTX1060 GPU.
  - Arisaka1 5y ago
    I'm the same. My drive doesn't have enough space so I'm stuck using WSL2 for React/Node development, and I'm waiting for an unreleased game to see how it will perform on Linux before I make my permanent switch. Every other game I play is on Steam and have decent Proton support, or is a retro game where I can use Retroarch and PCSX2 natively.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mongol 5y ago
I work with a specific limited functionality on a big ecommerce site. The site has a review section where you can review products. Often there is feedback there on the site itself. As a development team it is completely impossible to keep up with such feedback. Our backlog is prioritized by other more quantitive metrics, A/B-tests etc
jrootabega 5y ago
I don't like it, and I don't think it's "right" (whatever importance that has here), but it makes sense why they'd want to delete a link to a third party Windows mod. Hell, I think it might be better of them to do it. Hopefully other hypotheses about this being an accidental early submission are right, but it would also be good to get notified if your comments are edited are removed.
perlgeek 5y ago
It seems Feedback Hub is a way to give people the feeling that they have somewhere to be heard, without them actually making any difference. It's a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have done something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don't change anything.
- petee 5y ago
  A big give away is they now mark your feedback as 'we have seen this, thanks' less than a minute after you post. The link "what we do with your feedback" I'm sure is just Rick Astley
valyagolev 5y ago
from the text, it seems that the author mentioned ExplorerPatcher in the comment and got censored
sundvor 5y ago
The Feedback hub... A few things are completely a dog's breakfast in the Windows 10 world - and their beyond hideous XBox with Windows App Store is one of them. I tried to file some feedback about the experience using the Hub but it felt like a wholly inappropriate tool for the job. How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience. I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such. Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out. I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot? I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store. (Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)
- shmde 5y ago
  Install Windows 10 LTSC. Minimal bloatware, no MS edge, no xbox game store, no windows store, no bullshit. Its the version everyone deserved but only hospitals etc got.
- beart 5y ago
  Agreed. I've run into more issues trying to get Minecraft running due to the disaster that is the windows store and related services. if you look at the gaming service, it's nothing but 1 star reviews with similar issues. I'm a technician person and I have no idea how non technical people manage to use Windows today.
rvba 5y ago
Combining same files to taskbar is a productivity killer for both technical and non technical people. In many chats when someone presents something on screen I see people struggling to find the proper document when they have few open. Same for people who do "real" work: eg budget with 10 spreadsheets opened, or few word documents... the system hibders ability yo switch between them fast. It feels as if it was designed by people who dont do a real office job. Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? Windows is supposed to be the productivity system and it kills productivity now.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? This is the question that is burning a hole through my brain. At a certain point, Microsoft is going have to admit they are fucking over their internal operations, unless they have some secret copy of non-shit windows that is exclusively used internally...
- deburo 5y ago
  To me, ever since Windows introduced virtual desktops, that’s basically my main way to switch between documents. That and having multiple screens to show most of my windows all the time. The taskbar mainly becomes an app launcher. I’m surprised so many people here complaint about using the taskbar like in Windows XP.
XCabbage 5y ago
> somebody at Microsoft edited a critical comment that I made earlier this week to simply read “hello there”, still under my name Moderators on web forums everywhere need to learn that this kind of editing, when done without a publicly visible indication that the post was edited against the nominal author's will, is unacceptable. I've gotten into this argument on Stack Exchange in the past (although fortunately on Stack Overflow at least the mods already have a policy against this - they can delete a comment or leave it standing but may not put words into someone's mouth). It's especially bad when, as is the case here, the edited comment reflects poorly on the author. It's not just discourteous, it's a tort in at least the UK where I live (namely a violation of the "moral right" against "false attribution") and likely many other jurisdictions too. Do this enough and eventually somebody sufficiently litigious will sue you, and you'll deserve it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- luckman212 5y ago
  Is that StackOverflow policy officially in writing somewhere? I had one of my answers edited by a mod not too long ago without any warning. Wasn't too happy about it.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    Stackoverflow.com -> help -> search "editing" -> top hit: https://stackoverflow.com/help/editing https://stackoverflow.com/help/editing See the itemization of reasons to edit a post for. It also explicitly mentions that the meaning of the post may not be changed. You can, as the owner, also always roll back edits. Another option is to take it to the meta site and voice your complaint. One of the reject reasons in the review queue (note that moderator's edits don't go through the review queue) is if the edit changes the meaning of the post; the edit system is really meant (as the page says) for fixing typos and on occasion updating/adding information like if the post became outdated or to consolidate info from comments. Everyone can also see the revisions of any (non-deleted) answers and questions, so if someone changed the meaning, it clearly says "person x edited this post" (right next to the original author's name) and you can click that link and see who actually said what.
matsemann 5y ago
> W11 taskbar is missing several key pieces of functionality which have incentivised new users to get into Feedback Hub and cast votes. By far the biggest and most controversial submission is about having multiple documents open in the same app. Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me roll back to Win10 last week. "Just give it time", even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).
- oblio 5y ago
  Wait, that doesn't sound right. You can't have multiple Word documents open at the same time in Windows 11?
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    You can in "applications" you cannot in "apps." For example there's no way of opening multiple Settings windows and Teams is still extremely limited.
  - iamevn 5y ago
    Probably referring to this behavior from TFA: > Previously you could choose to “never combine” apps so you had one-click access to each document. Now you are required to use two mouse actions to open each. If you have "foo.txt" and "bar.txt" open in, say, notepad, you get one notepad icon on your taskbar that you click on once to open the list of windows and then once more to actually switch. Previously you could tell windows to never combine the taskbar icons so you'd have two separate icons you could change to in one click.
    - TowerTall 5y ago
      In windows 10, in a multimonitor setup with "never combined" enabled. If foo.txt is on the left monitor and bar.txt is on the right, the two icons in the taskbar almost always has opposite sort order compared to the the monitor layout. Clicking the left icon bring up the document on the right monitor and clicking the icon to the right brings up the document on the left. You very often end up picking the wrong document and must do over. That pretty annoying.
Yizahi 5y ago
(offtopic) Since Win10 is a pretty much perfectly working and a very functional OS, we might as well stay on it till the EOS,and then upgrade to this 10S kadaver-renamed-11.
dathinab 5y ago
Wait how can they even edit comments? No sane system should allow that. Censoring (umm moderating) a comment, sure. Visible blacking out part of an comment, jikes but maybe ok. But editing a comment? Absolutely no go. The Microsoft employee basically committed identity theft!
cloudengineer94 5y ago
I'm really really tired of the Windows issue with their Xbox aka Game Pass App and Microsoft Teams. I can't wait for the day I'll never have to use a Microsoft service again in my life
moffkalast 5y ago
> to simply read “hello there” General.. Kenobi.
bradwood 5y ago
Why do people, especially developers, give Microsoft the time of day with this? Life is to short to give a shit about them, their crappy software, and their bad moderation policies? Vote with your wallet and get the fuck off Windows and all the attendant bullshit that comes with it as soon as possible.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  My $JOB (>10,000 employees) mandates use of MS Office. I can't just vote with my wallet ... I never gave them money in the first place.
pndy 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this is all about ExplorerPatch - this 3rd-party solution allows user to revert the "experience" of newest W11 taskbar and it's most likely an offence to Microsoft. Some devoted mod noticed comment done by Thomas and decided to act fast so no other people had a chance to test out valinet's workaround. I expect that at some point in future, perhaps included within some W11 build that changes users workflow once again, the "never combine" taskbar feature will be added back and presented as a breakthrough.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Thanks for letting me know Windows 11 removed the option of removing grouping of documents under one app. Its one of these basic things I do on a fresh copy of Windows. I work with many documents on a daily basis and grouping makes zero sense for me and would only slow me down. Just another reason not to downgrade to Windows 11. And so far I haven't seen a single reason ta make me switch.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive aggressive between departments. For a brief while I would diligently prepare bugs for the dog food software. I would even walk over to visit people responsible for it and chat about it. Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero bug bounce by exhausting the very people trying to help them. Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at. Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only. Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  I would rather have a bug report basically ignored than actually modified. There is a big difference between ignored and modified because it speaks to not only we are going to ignore this but no one will respect the content of the forum. I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    Totally agree, beyond the pale. My experience predates the Feedback Hub, but I’ve only heard it has gotten worse after my tenure. I assume bugs would still get copied into a separate internal bug tracking which has an edit history. I assume it was an overzealous contractor with a cultural misunderstanding.
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  VS Code and GitHub will hard carry Azure if need be
phkahler 5y ago
You know why browsers sprouted tabs? Because the DEs never handled multiple instances nicely. Great to see MS is regressing in this area.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  A DE is what, now?
  - __float 5y ago
    "desktop environment" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment
tekstar 5y ago
Nice to see the super dimensional fortress is still chugging along <3
xkbarkar 5y ago
I’ve done contract work for Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Microsoft is remarkably terrible. Riddled with the hierarchies and politics of IBM or Oracle, but the lack the self awareness that they are slow and terrible. And Azure solutions are not good at all. They have truly bizarre backwards apis and SDK. Imagine you do not have admin access to the company DC. Now, your Azure k8s cluster pods need rw access to an azure keyvault that you created. It is entirely possible to do this, but enjoy the hell ride there. My hats off to you if you manage to figure it out in 1 workday.
olvy0 5y ago
You would think that suggestions for the Azure site would at least get a better treatment. It's not Windows, it's supposed to be Microsoft's cash cow, right? But no. During the last year, a Microsoft PM called Gloridel Morales has thoroughly gone through hundreds of Developer Community suggestion for Azure Devops, and closed each and every one of them. Quite rudely. Just check out each and every link in [0] Some were suggestion from fellow Microsoft people. She did it using the following eyebrow-raising text, quoted below, suggesting either that Gloridel Morales and her team have no idea how to manage themselves by prioritizing a backlog of requests, or that her paycheck/review depends on having a clean backlog. Thank you for taking the time to share your feature suggestion. Due to the high volume of suggestions in our queue, we are not able to respond personally to every suggestion. As a result, we depend on the community to validate the request via votes and comments. Suggestions that the community doesn't prioritize, we close out in order to maintain a manageable list of suggestions. It is our policy to close suggestions that are inactive in the community based on no change to customer comments or votes in the last 90+ days. We love your enthusiasm for our product and hope you will continue submitting ideas for the community to validate. [1] That's just one example, it's the same for almost all requests in [0]. The bit about "suggestions that are inactive for 90 days" might have looked good on Github with its somewhat primitive but sensible community around issue discussions, but the developercommunity site is inundated with garbage issues, making it almost impossible to search for proper issues. That's just for Azure though. I must say that a couple of bugs I opened there for the Microsoft C++ compiler actually got prioritized and fixed in the last couple of years. Others were ignored. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D++site%3Adevelopercommunity.visualstudio.com https://www.google.com/search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D... [1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-previous-build-time-stats-mediamean-in-build-s/1034987 https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-previous-b...
freediver 5y ago
My experience was bit different. I find there are caring Microsoft employees who would address the feedback/request in the best way they possibly can. I always got a reasonable reply and willingness to help. Having worked in a large organization I know that the more hops this information has to go through to get processed, the more likely it will end in limbo. Granted, so far limbo happened in 100% of my opened cases but I could clearly see an employee willing to help and probably being limited by the internal org structure which is not optimized for reacting to user feedback (sadly same goes for most other big tech companies).

399 points by Aaronn 5y ago

Microsoft has recently been pushing a new centralized web based feedback portal: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ It looks like they have imported feedback from other places such as the feedback hub.

tasogare 5y ago

"We are listening to your feedback" is corporate speech for "we don't give a shit about your opinion" especially when Microsoft is involved.

userbinator 5y ago
They are listening --- as in someone will probably read what you wrote --- but they never said they would do anything about it.
jka 5y ago
I completely agree - and have similar thoughts about "we look forward to continuing the conversation" as a way to close down a discussion (possible translation: "it's lunch time and it's mac and cheese today! see ya"). However, assuming good intent: how would you determine whether they are listening? (or continuing the conversation, in the latter case)
- busymom0 5y ago
  Anything which gets responses of empty platitudes usually means they aren’t listening. I am a small developer who makes apps and puts them on the App Store and play store (Hacker news client HACK for example). I often get emails from users on how to add a feature or fix a bug etc. I email them and instead of just saying “thanks for your feedback”, I address the real problem/feature. Example- few days ago someone asked me to integrate the Orion browser support in my app. I wasn’t aware of this browser so I googled it, found it that it’s currently in closed beta and I signed up for a beta. I replied back to the user that currently I can’t add it in because I don’t have access to the beta yet, however I have signed up and when I do get access to it, I will test and add it in unless the user can get me a piece of code from the developers of Orion browser which tells me what identifier to use to launch their browser on iOS. The user contacted the developers of Orion and got me the info I needed. Today I added it in but since I still don’t have access to the beta, I sent the app update and informed the user that for now, I have added the functionality acting blindly and I think it should work but if it doesn’t, then they will have to wait for me to get the beta. User is happy. Another example- someone recently contacted me for a feature in another one of my apps which I have no intention of adding. I replied back that I will be honest with them and inform them that I don’t intend on adding it in and here’s my reasons. I gave them an alternative app which has that feature in case they want to try. User was happy and gave me a 5 star review. Basically, even if you have bad news for the customer, tell them the news and they will be just fine. I try to put myself in the customers shoes and think about what I would think of got the typical cookie cutter response “we are listening to your feedback” with no further details on what they intend on doing with what they are hearing.
  - geraldwhen 5y ago
    This doesn’t scale. If your app reaches any level of success, you don’t get one email per night, you get 100. When my app was small I responded individually, but after I hit a threshold I had to use a template response for feature requests just to stay productive.
    - jka 5y ago
      It can scale, and I'd wager that it will. There is -- or should in future be -- a far larger number of software developers than the number of components that are required to compose the functionality that everyone needs and desires, at high quality and with ever-reducing negative externalities. That's a good thing: it'll provide more time for review, apprenticeship, mentoring and mastery of individual technical areas, and for mobility and communication between communities. That's not to say there can't also be pure-enjoyment and hobby software projects; but those won't have the same support demands (or expectations). Small (or solo) teams maintaining systems with massive inbound demand, significant risk during changes, and limited ability to receive community feedback feels like the less-scalable approach, to me. That said I'm willing to concede that both approaches appear to work under different circumstances (and may be able to learn from each other).
    - busymom0 5y ago
      You have a fair point but I disagree. However I also recognize that I can only be proven right or wrong when I am in those shoes at some very large scale. For now, I do get about 5-10 emails a day for all my apps combined and it’s been easily manageable. However, the article we are talking about here is about Microsoft, a trillion dollar company treating some basic user feedback with zero value. Amazon, another trillion dollar company has been outstanding to me whenever I reach out to their customer support chat (I have done that many times over the years). I get to chat to a human within a minute and they help me either resolve the issue or tell me why they can’t resolve the issue. If Amazon can do it, then there’s no reason why Microsoft can’t do it for basic user feedback. Also are you really being productive if you are sending template response? A robot could do that.
  - freediver 5y ago
- tasogare 5y ago
  Product release. For instance there is for years issue with C#'s GUI frameworks mainly the lack of a multiplateform one. Microsoft disregarded developer feedback on UWP (it was stupid to propose a Windows 10 only framework at a time Win7 was still dominant and tie it to a mean of delivery - the Windows store). About a decade later Microsoft remembered with dotnet 5 and 6 that WPF and WinForms are the frameworks people are actually using and they got some improvements.
bayindirh 5y ago
and in recent years, sadly Dropbox.
dpark 5y ago
I sort of agree. Sometimes that is nothing but a polite yet empty response. But people also tend think that they aren’t being listened to when they don’t get what they ask for, which isn’t always the case. I have to deal with this pretty frequently: Someone gives feedback about a thing and requests a change. I listen, understand the request, explain that I can’t do this right now because it lands too low on the priority list and there are a thousand critical and urgent things that I need to get done first. Then the person complains (to me, my manager, their manager, in a different context, whatever) that they aren’t being listened to. Listening doesn’t mean agreeing, nor does it mean solving for a request right now (or possibly ever). Making people feel heard without doing what they ask is a hard thing. It’s extremely hard to do at scale and I don’t envy those trying to satisfy UI change requests from millions of people. Also I work at Microsoft so I’m probably biased here.
chrischapman 5y ago
Yep. Kind of like "we value your privacy" means "we don't give a shit about your privacy". I guess the only way to uncover a platitude is to test it. The problem with "We are listening to your feedback" is that "listening" is hard to disprove. It doesn't require any action - they're just "listening". It sounds good but doesn't mean anything useful. If, instead, it was "We will respond to your feedback within 48 hours" - well, that's testable. That sounds like a real, honest, useful commitment. Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business? It's not about the size of the business, but whether this is a good way for them to spend money or not. Coffee shops will often not get back to you within 48 hours depending on the comment you make and how busy they are. It's really a judgement call, as large number of comments are basically spam, but you can't reply with "this is a silly comment" or "this is an unreasonable request on our time", so it's best to just ignore. For a big business, where individual judgement is replaced with a set of procedures and institutions that try to encode judgement, they most surely will offer some level of support with an SLA that guarantees someone will get back to you in a well-defined period of time. But you usually have to pay extra for that, and that's a pretty sensible system, since leaving comments is free and there is no way to know how serious you are about the comment and how badly you want it responded to. E.g. worth paying, say, $10? $5? $1? There is some intersection of supply and demand for real support at which a certain price results in you getting answers, but in those situations where that price is not zero, it's not the size of the business that matters, but the shape of those supply and demand curves. And the size of the business, in my experience, will tend to shift the supply curve farther away from "free", because that answer will be an official answer of the business and it may take a lot of time for the poor support guy to track someone down and get an official answer, and in some cases it may be a lot of work to get that answer if the bureaucracy is complex and knowledge is stovepiped. This is why you see tiers in support, and the time required to get someone knowledgeable is often much longer as you climb that support chain and escalate your question. All of that ends up costing quite a bit to a big firm.

azalemeth 5y ago

Companies do this sort of thing all the time. Leave a bad review on the Google play store. It won't be edited immediately but it might become impossible to find or vanish quickly under lots of good ones. Image management is a lot easier when you own the platform it needs to be managed on. Microsoft used to have a User Voice board. I wrote a complaint at length about Teams being a steaming hot pile of <Unicode poo emoji>. Lots of other people did too. They're retiring it now and have "ended their partnership" with user voice

userbinator 5y ago
Deleting comments (i.e. censorship) is one thing; but misattribution and effectively "putting words into someone's mouth" by editing their content to say what they did not, goes well beyond what I think even those who are proponents of strong moderation and censorship would deem acceptable. I suspect proponents of copyright and other IP laws would also be against it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

polotics 5y ago

Windows 11 is so obviously a no go, games and office was Microsoft's last redoubt for relevance on personal hardware. Here's a prediction: in ten years this company will be smaller and called "Azure"...

pjmlp 5y ago
Have to agree. In fact the clusterfuck going on with desktop frameworks seems to be related to WinDev not knowing where to go. Most likely it isn't any accident that many key figures that are still at Microsoft have now moved into Azure division, where I also have to acknowledge, POSIX has won on the cloud space (aka timesharing rebranded).
pid-1 5y ago
I distro hop with my home laptops and use Windows at $JOB I've decided to install Windows 11 preview around June 2021 and have been using it ever since, so I could eventually help my coworkers, validate our workflows etc... I am curious on why people in HN dislike Win 11 so much. For me the upgrade was basically about minor UI changes, which I got used to in 1-2 weeks. I am a sysadmin / cloud whatever and it broke none of my stuff, I use the same workflows I used in Win 10. We still haven't migrated our users to Win 11 out of pragmatism , but honestly there is nothing I hate about it. Maybe my expectations for MS are too low already, IDK.
- alexvoda 5y ago
  The UI changes are very disruptive to other people. As an example, think all the people who for decades placed the taskbar on the side. Also, the bullshit minimum requirements are obviously about pushing DRM.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Minimum requirements were about pushing TPM (massive boost to chain of trust and security based on internal metrics) and hardware sales. Source: I’m an insider.

suction 5y ago

Feedback Hub indeed seems to be useless - because it is designed to act as a sink hole. Yet the topic the author of this article and apparently hundreds of others are describing as a show-stopping miss of Windows 11: The ability to see open documents ungrouped on the task bar. That's not a "bug" which needs to be addressed directly by developers. And really? That alone is a reason to go through a harrowing downgrade process to an earlier OS version? Not a regular Windows user, but I found that feature to be almost toxic UX - the open documents on the task bar all looked the same, and not different enough from the app icon, to make it a time / click-saving feature. I ended up clicking on each one until the correct window was in front. It surely was worse UX than simply cycling through all open windows by the keyboard shortcut. Which isn't exactly power-user knowledge.

thombles 5y ago
(author here) Each "button" on the taskbar shows as a label the name of the document. This is the key differentiator that makes W10- so convenient - they don't look the same because they have text showing exactly what you're getting!
- suction 5y ago
  Strange, on the PC I sometimes use, there are only icons, no text. I have to hover of each one to see the name, but it already breaks down for long names.
WolfRazu 5y ago
When individual windows are ungrouped their application name is displayed, so you can just look for the name of the document or window you're looking for. I miss this feature too.
Jaruzel 5y ago
I think Microsoft's preferred window navigation method is the Windows+tab combo, and from there you just click on the app/document you want. That said, it's had that sort of functionality forever, and I personally still never use it.

gigel82 5y ago

I've heard the tool's internal frontend (OCV) is equally frustrating to use by employees; and because of the huge amount of useless replies (that the author mentioned) in most teams it's only used for sentiment analysis on keywords ('people generally hate/love the new FooBar feature'). A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.

donmcronald 5y ago
I wonder if they’d get better replies if it didn’t seem like an effort to silo feedback into a tool they control so they can ignore it and keep negative feedback that gains traction out of the spotlight. Based on my experience I call it the “Fuck-Off Hub” because that’s where they send you so you can feel like you’re submitting feedback, but they really just want you to fuck off and stop bugging them. It’s like whispering into the Grand Canyon. No one that matters is ever going to hear your feedback, so why bother?
ack_complete 5y ago
From the perspective of someone not at Microsoft, it feels like part of the reason it's such a mess is because it's obviously really badly curated, to the point that the Feedback Hub app encourages it. Older versions of the Feedback Hub had categorization on the left so you would naturally browse into a category, but then they changed it to not very visible drop-downs and auto-suggested categories. The result is feedback goes to random categories and is never moved to the correct ones, nor is there a way to report miscategorized feedback. There is also still old feedback for bugs that were fixed in the Windows 10 pre-RTM previews, and even some that are just complete gibberish random characters. Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug. Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.

usbqk 5y ago

My rule is to never work as a QA for free.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

Just want to say how much of a pleasure it is to use any ol' minimal gnu distro compared to this mess. Not as polished as Win95 or 2000, but at least everything is consensual.

thombles 5y ago
(author here) IMO KDE is the most authentic expression of Windows XP-era UI productivity that exists today. Their dedication to user-configurable settings is an absolute blessing.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Having recently switched to Fedora KDE, I agree. It is an excellent desktop experience and I think it's a great first stop for anyone interested in switching to Linux. I had a good experience with Mint Cinnamon too, but the system seems overall better-integrated in Fedora KDE.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    KDE is a great first desktop for anyone coming from Windows, but Mac users might be more comfortable with some of the more "Mac-like" desktop offerings available on Linux. But in that there ability you have one of Linux-based operating systems' great strengths. You can easily customize things to fit your preferred workflow. :)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I generally agree that KDE is pretty decent. Since Microsoft continues to treat Windows and its users like garbage, I'm fairly certain a Linux Desktop will be the lesser of two evils in my near future so I'm spending a lot more time working out how to live with it for my workflows. I discovered I really like Silverblue. Immutable OS with Flatpak focus and Toolbox cover a lot of what I want, even if the implementations are somewhat less than ideal. Unfortuantely, Kinoite (the KDE spin of Silverblue) is hot garbage. Half of the things don't work including Flatpak icons (until a reboot) and running a GTK app in Toolbox causes it to inexplicably pause for several seconds at a time. I can't even report the latter issue (several of the former have 2 month+ open issues already) because the login for the bug tracker is busted. So I'm stuck with GNOME, a 'desktop' that desperately wishes it were running on a phone.

userbinator 5y ago

I once even spotted a Microsoft employee who took the time to raise their concerns on the public tracker: That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" protest. That one employee he noticed seemed to have concluded his comment with a rather sarcastic thanks directed toward someone who might be one of the responsible? On the other hand, what I can find in the news about internal protests at MS are all seemingly SJW-ish topics, and absolutely none about the quality of the products themselves. I think that alone says a lot about who's working there and what they actually care about doing --- which is clearly not improving their products. The people who do care about that are being heavily outnumbered, and perhaps a lot of them have already deemed MS to be unsalvageable and left. I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.

headmelted 5y ago
I don’t think conflating inclusivity and/or diversity action with specific product issues is helpful or comes off well here.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  A team that ignores product quality will soon run out of money to spend on solving social etc. issues. Effort follows attention, so attention should be weighted appropriately across issues, but it's not uncommon for companies and causes to over-index on just a few issues and sacrifice other aspects of team dynamics and product quality as a result.
  - headmelted 5y ago
    You might as well say that the team that enjoys a beer and meets up to watch the game on a Sunday is ignoring product quality. You’ve no basis to point to social causes or anything else and say “something is causing a stink round here and it’s that!”. Software is built by people. People have viewpoints. There will inevitably be overlap in those viewpoints. There’s no reason to think any of this has anything to do with the thread.

draw_down 5y ago

posnet 5y ago

The fact that the text is 'Hello there'. I wonder if a MSFT employee was typing a response to you, but accidentally clicked edit on your comment and it overwrote your content before they realised what they have done, then panicked and just hit submit.

usbqk 5y ago
It smells like the developer is in charge of the component and he didn’t want the report posted there publicly.
- Closi 5y ago
  I think Hanlon's Razor can be applied here - i.e. never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Particularly considering his comments were just echoing all the other comments in the thread - and the message "hello there" is strange and doesn't really make sense to me (if they have the power to edit a post, they probably have the power to delete it outright, which would have been less suspicious and not generated this post).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Closi 5y ago
I think this is a logical explanation - that they have a huge team going through answers here and that one of them made a fuck-up.
- nix23 5y ago
  The logical explanation is: -There are no MS Employees there (but professional Call/Text Centers) -MS gives a *it about your opinion (as every big IT Company) -But MS wants you to feel that your part of the family (inclusive developers developers!!)
  - 5y ago

dEnigma 5y ago

I also spent quite a lot of time during the Windows 10 preview phase, and a while after release, diligently reporting bugs, and voting on well thought-out feature requests. But after noticing that none of these bugs ever got any attention, and how the Feedback Hub was mostly just noise, I started to wonder why I even did free work for a multi-billion dollar company, on my own time. Right around that period I switched to Linux and now only use Windows for some games that absolutely won't work on the former. This way I no longer care how bad the UX of the system is, and how many bugs there are, as long as my games launch.

gandalfgreybeer 5y ago
Whenever a game I play is released on the Nintendo Switch, I am a little bit happier (eg Diablo 3, Tetris Effect). There’s honestly nothing keeping me in Windows except for video games (which I have less and less time for each year). I’m sort of looking forward to the day I won’t need to play video games on Windows and just be happy with a MacBook and a Linux workstation.
- Kudos 5y ago
  You might be interested in a Valve Steamdeck, it's a Switch form factor Linux gaming device. https://www.steamdeck.com/ https://www.steamdeck.com/
  - dormento 5y ago
    Plus you can play on Steam on GNU/Linux so you're not restricted to Windows. It's pretty much the same runtime that's gonna land on the Steam Deck. I play some pretty demanding games and it runs flawless. While technically it does not require discrete graphics hardware, in practice it does, but its been smooth sailing with my somewhat old NVIDIA GTX1060 GPU.
- Arisaka1 5y ago
  I'm the same. My drive doesn't have enough space so I'm stuck using WSL2 for React/Node development, and I'm waiting for an unreleased game to see how it will perform on Linux before I make my permanent switch. Every other game I play is on Steam and have decent Proton support, or is a retro game where I can use Retroarch and PCSX2 natively.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mongol 5y ago

I work with a specific limited functionality on a big ecommerce site. The site has a review section where you can review products. Often there is feedback there on the site itself. As a development team it is completely impossible to keep up with such feedback. Our backlog is prioritized by other more quantitive metrics, A/B-tests etc

jrootabega 5y ago

I don't like it, and I don't think it's "right" (whatever importance that has here), but it makes sense why they'd want to delete a link to a third party Windows mod. Hell, I think it might be better of them to do it. Hopefully other hypotheses about this being an accidental early submission are right, but it would also be good to get notified if your comments are edited are removed.

perlgeek 5y ago

It seems Feedback Hub is a way to give people the feeling that they have somewhere to be heard, without them actually making any difference. It's a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have done something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don't change anything.

petee 5y ago
A big give away is they now mark your feedback as 'we have seen this, thanks' less than a minute after you post. The link "what we do with your feedback" I'm sure is just Rick Astley

valyagolev 5y ago

from the text, it seems that the author mentioned ExplorerPatcher in the comment and got censored

sundvor 5y ago

The Feedback hub... A few things are completely a dog's breakfast in the Windows 10 world - and their beyond hideous XBox with Windows App Store is one of them. I tried to file some feedback about the experience using the Hub but it felt like a wholly inappropriate tool for the job. How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they've done and start afresh? Because that's the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience. I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I've lost count on how many times it gets into a broken state, a never ending rabbit hole of repairing the Windows store installers and such. Simply put, the games - or "Experience" service - get stuck in one invalid update state or another, and you just have to try over and over again, until you either give up, or you somehow get it back. This involves both the XBox App, as well as Windows Store - the difference of responsibility between the two not quite clear to me, but both are involved, and absolutely _Windows 10_ services that have no business being coupled to game delivery. And by the time you might have figured it out, your play time budget will be solidly wiped out. I absolutely hate it. It's in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they've got to resources to make it right. Why can't they just do what Steam, Epic, Ubisoft or even Blizzard can do - make their installers simply work, without a dependence on a scaffold of playing cards held together by children's snot? I'm saying this as someone who loves the WSL2/Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store. (Now that I've voiced this, I'll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)

shmde 5y ago
Install Windows 10 LTSC. Minimal bloatware, no MS edge, no xbox game store, no windows store, no bullshit. Its the version everyone deserved but only hospitals etc got.
beart 5y ago
Agreed. I've run into more issues trying to get Minecraft running due to the disaster that is the windows store and related services. if you look at the gaming service, it's nothing but 1 star reviews with similar issues. I'm a technician person and I have no idea how non technical people manage to use Windows today.

rvba 5y ago

Combining same files to taskbar is a productivity killer for both technical and non technical people. In many chats when someone presents something on screen I see people struggling to find the proper document when they have few open. Same for people who do "real" work: eg budget with 10 spreadsheets opened, or few word documents... the system hibders ability yo switch between them fast. It feels as if it was designed by people who dont do a real office job. Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? Windows is supposed to be the productivity system and it kills productivity now.

bob1029 5y ago
> Why do the program managers even allow to remove such basic functionality? This is the question that is burning a hole through my brain. At a certain point, Microsoft is going have to admit they are fucking over their internal operations, unless they have some secret copy of non-shit windows that is exclusively used internally...
deburo 5y ago
To me, ever since Windows introduced virtual desktops, that’s basically my main way to switch between documents. That and having multiple screens to show most of my windows all the time. The taskbar mainly becomes an app launcher. I’m surprised so many people here complaint about using the taskbar like in Windows XP.

XCabbage 5y ago

> somebody at Microsoft edited a critical comment that I made earlier this week to simply read “hello there”, still under my name Moderators on web forums everywhere need to learn that this kind of editing, when done without a publicly visible indication that the post was edited against the nominal author's will, is unacceptable. I've gotten into this argument on Stack Exchange in the past (although fortunately on Stack Overflow at least the mods already have a policy against this - they can delete a comment or leave it standing but may not put words into someone's mouth). It's especially bad when, as is the case here, the edited comment reflects poorly on the author. It's not just discourteous, it's a tort in at least the UK where I live (namely a violation of the "moral right" against "false attribution") and likely many other jurisdictions too. Do this enough and eventually somebody sufficiently litigious will sue you, and you'll deserve it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
luckman212 5y ago
Is that StackOverflow policy officially in writing somewhere? I had one of my answers edited by a mod not too long ago without any warning. Wasn't too happy about it.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  Stackoverflow.com -> help -> search "editing" -> top hit: https://stackoverflow.com/help/editing https://stackoverflow.com/help/editing See the itemization of reasons to edit a post for. It also explicitly mentions that the meaning of the post may not be changed. You can, as the owner, also always roll back edits. Another option is to take it to the meta site and voice your complaint. One of the reject reasons in the review queue (note that moderator's edits don't go through the review queue) is if the edit changes the meaning of the post; the edit system is really meant (as the page says) for fixing typos and on occasion updating/adding information like if the post became outdated or to consolidate info from comments. Everyone can also see the revisions of any (non-deleted) answers and questions, so if someone changed the meaning, it clearly says "person x edited this post" (right next to the original author's name) and you can click that link and see who actually said what.

matsemann 5y ago

> W11 taskbar is missing several key pieces of functionality which have incentivised new users to get into Feedback Hub and cast votes. By far the biggest and most controversial submission is about having multiple documents open in the same app. Actually the same reason for me to give feedback during W11 beta. Liked the beta as it gave me access to WSLg, but the productivity loss of the taskbar being useless made me roll back to Win10 last week. "Just give it time", even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).

oblio 5y ago
Wait, that doesn't sound right. You can't have multiple Word documents open at the same time in Windows 11?
- Someone1234 5y ago
  You can in "applications" you cannot in "apps." For example there's no way of opening multiple Settings windows and Teams is still extremely limited.
- iamevn 5y ago
  Probably referring to this behavior from TFA: > Previously you could choose to “never combine” apps so you had one-click access to each document. Now you are required to use two mouse actions to open each. If you have "foo.txt" and "bar.txt" open in, say, notepad, you get one notepad icon on your taskbar that you click on once to open the list of windows and then once more to actually switch. Previously you could tell windows to never combine the taskbar icons so you'd have two separate icons you could change to in one click.
  - TowerTall 5y ago
    In windows 10, in a multimonitor setup with "never combined" enabled. If foo.txt is on the left monitor and bar.txt is on the right, the two icons in the taskbar almost always has opposite sort order compared to the the monitor layout. Clicking the left icon bring up the document on the right monitor and clicking the icon to the right brings up the document on the left. You very often end up picking the wrong document and must do over. That pretty annoying.

Yizahi 5y ago

(offtopic) Since Win10 is a pretty much perfectly working and a very functional OS, we might as well stay on it till the EOS,and then upgrade to this 10S kadaver-renamed-11.

dathinab 5y ago

Wait how can they even edit comments? No sane system should allow that. Censoring (umm moderating) a comment, sure. Visible blacking out part of an comment, jikes but maybe ok. But editing a comment? Absolutely no go. The Microsoft employee basically committed identity theft!

cloudengineer94 5y ago

I'm really really tired of the Windows issue with their Xbox aka Game Pass App and Microsoft Teams. I can't wait for the day I'll never have to use a Microsoft service again in my life

moffkalast 5y ago

> to simply read “hello there” General.. Kenobi.

bradwood 5y ago

Why do people, especially developers, give Microsoft the time of day with this? Life is to short to give a shit about them, their crappy software, and their bad moderation policies? Vote with your wallet and get the fuck off Windows and all the attendant bullshit that comes with it as soon as possible.

arbitrage 5y ago
My $JOB (>10,000 employees) mandates use of MS Office. I can't just vote with my wallet ... I never gave them money in the first place.

pndy 5y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this is all about ExplorerPatch - this 3rd-party solution allows user to revert the "experience" of newest W11 taskbar and it's most likely an offence to Microsoft. Some devoted mod noticed comment done by Thomas and decided to act fast so no other people had a chance to test out valinet's workaround. I expect that at some point in future, perhaps included within some W11 build that changes users workflow once again, the "never combine" taskbar feature will be added back and presented as a breakthrough.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Thanks for letting me know Windows 11 removed the option of removing grouping of documents under one app. Its one of these basic things I do on a fresh copy of Windows. I work with many documents on a daily basis and grouping makes zero sense for me and would only slow me down. Just another reason not to downgrade to Windows 11. And so far I haven't seen a single reason ta make me switch.

cjbgkagh 5y ago

Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive aggressive between departments. For a brief while I would diligently prepare bugs for the dog food software. I would even walk over to visit people responsible for it and chat about it. Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero bug bounce by exhausting the very people trying to help them. Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at. Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only. Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.

zitterbewegung 5y ago
I would rather have a bug report basically ignored than actually modified. There is a big difference between ignored and modified because it speaks to not only we are going to ignore this but no one will respect the content of the forum. I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Totally agree, beyond the pale. My experience predates the Feedback Hub, but I’ve only heard it has gotten worse after my tenure. I assume bugs would still get copied into a separate internal bug tracking which has an edit history. I assume it was an overzealous contractor with a cultural misunderstanding.
theturtletalks 5y ago
VS Code and GitHub will hard carry Azure if need be

phkahler 5y ago

You know why browsers sprouted tabs? Because the DEs never handled multiple instances nicely. Great to see MS is regressing in this area.

michaelcampbell 5y ago
A DE is what, now?
- __float 5y ago
  "desktop environment" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment

tekstar 5y ago

Nice to see the super dimensional fortress is still chugging along <3

xkbarkar 5y ago

I’ve done contract work for Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Microsoft is remarkably terrible. Riddled with the hierarchies and politics of IBM or Oracle, but the lack the self awareness that they are slow and terrible. And Azure solutions are not good at all. They have truly bizarre backwards apis and SDK. Imagine you do not have admin access to the company DC. Now, your Azure k8s cluster pods need rw access to an azure keyvault that you created. It is entirely possible to do this, but enjoy the hell ride there. My hats off to you if you manage to figure it out in 1 workday.

olvy0 5y ago

You would think that suggestions for the Azure site would at least get a better treatment. It's not Windows, it's supposed to be Microsoft's cash cow, right? But no. During the last year, a Microsoft PM called Gloridel Morales has thoroughly gone through hundreds of Developer Community suggestion for Azure Devops, and closed each and every one of them. Quite rudely. Just check out each and every link in [0] Some were suggestion from fellow Microsoft people. She did it using the following eyebrow-raising text, quoted below, suggesting either that Gloridel Morales and her team have no idea how to manage themselves by prioritizing a backlog of requests, or that her paycheck/review depends on having a clean backlog. Thank you for taking the time to share your feature suggestion. Due to the high volume of suggestions in our queue, we are not able to respond personally to every suggestion. As a result, we depend on the community to validate the request via votes and comments. Suggestions that the community doesn't prioritize, we close out in order to maintain a manageable list of suggestions. It is our policy to close suggestions that are inactive in the community based on no change to customer comments or votes in the last 90+ days. We love your enthusiasm for our product and hope you will continue submitting ideas for the community to validate. [1] That's just one example, it's the same for almost all requests in [0]. The bit about "suggestions that are inactive for 90 days" might have looked good on Github with its somewhat primitive but sensible community around issue discussions, but the developercommunity site is inundated with garbage issues, making it almost impossible to search for proper issues. That's just for Azure though. I must say that a couple of bugs I opened there for the Microsoft C++ compiler actually got prioritized and fixed in the last couple of years. Others were ignored. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D++site%3Adevelopercommunity.visualstudio.com https://www.google.com/search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D... [1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-previous-build-time-stats-mediamean-in-build-s/1034987 https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-previous-b...

freediver 5y ago

My experience was bit different. I find there are caring Microsoft employees who would address the feedback/request in the best way they possibly can. I always got a reasonable reply and willingness to help. Having worked in a large organization I know that the more hops this information has to go through to get processed, the more likely it will end in limbo. Granted, so far limbo happened in 100% of my opened cases but I could clearly see an employee willing to help and probably being limited by the internal org structure which is not optimized for reacting to user feedback (sadly same goes for most other big tech companies).