5 ms·

Once upon a time, you could buy various things from MS that came with support incidents. I had an MSDN subscription that came with two per year. Using an incid

by amluto 3y ago

Once upon a time, you could buy various things from MS that came with support incidents. I had an MSDN subscription that came with two per year. Using an incident got you an actual support engineer who would be helpful and escalate issues if necessary. And, if your issue turned out to be a real bug of any significance in an MS product, your support incident would be credited back. This was great for developers (real support was available, and spam was discouraged), and it was great for MS (they found real issues that affected paying customers and they got feedback to improve their documentation). I wonder whether this program still exists. I have the impression the overall quality of MS documentation has declined.

twisteriffic 3y ago
That's Premier support, though now with a bunch of extra layers of contractors who can't do anything other than follow a script, capture traces and wait on the next level. In my experience it's been a time consuming waste of effort. I've had a lot better luck harvesting names and business cards from the teams at conferences and demo days, then going direct to the source.
sebazzz 3y ago
Generally as far as first line support goes, everything is outsourced to India. Cheaper, on paper. Anectodically, I tried to get support for something unrelated: I’m trying to use IMAP sync support in Outlook.com, but it refuses to work properly with iCloud-IMAP but doesn’t give any error message either. As a paying M365 subscriber I expect proper support. I tried over five times to get support, and every time it ended in frustration. Every time I got someone who either doesn’t understand to product, says IMAP support is not available and deprecated (it is not! I was able to set-up a different IMAP provider just fine), or I got redirected to the Windows or Office support team, who then couldn’t help me and closed my ticket.
- Someone1234 3y ago
  Often times it just feels like they try to extend the ticket out as long as possible asking irrelevant questions, then as you said redirect you or close the ticket after wasting an appropriate amount of time. I cannot prove it, but I bet there is an internal number of replies before they can close without penalty.
- rwmj 3y ago
  If it's any consolation, our company pays for 20,000 GMail licenses and we seem unable to escalate any issue at all to Google, even major issues such as their clearly not working spam filtering, emails being lost, incorrect deduplication of emails, or their random IMAP throttling.
  - amluto 3y ago
    Is there any vendor of actually good email-as-a-service? O365/Exchange/Outlook/Hotmail is a mess. Google has a support problem. Fastmail has an offline email problem. iCloud is not obviously suitable for professional use. What’s left?
    - Avamander 3y ago
      There are multiple providers out there that have their own stacks (Google, Microsoft, Tutanota, Protonmail to some extent and others) and there are those that use more common combinations (basically just managed mail-in-a-box). Nothing perfect though, so pick your poison. Some issues are also due to the ecosystem itself. Avoiding POP3 goes a long way for example.
      - amluto 3y ago
        Avoiding POP3 is great. Some people like to say the future is JMAP, but those same people provide such a weak mobile email app that I find it hard to believe. Maybe the protocol can do better than the app by the same vendor?
        account42 3y ago
        IMAP, as horrible as it is on a technical level, does the job just fine.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Many VPS/web hosters provide email services along with their custom-domain support, e.g. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/ https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/. It’s worthwhile to look into that space, because you are getting dedicated and responsive customer support instead of an anonymous black-box mess.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Well, maybe last century. At any point of this century, the response to those support incidents from MS was always to deny a problem, and if it's a known one, to try to gaslight the customer in a direction contrary to solving it. I have seen organizations lose way too many people-hours trying to satisfy the MS support and apply what it recommended. That when the real solution was often reachable in a hour or two of research on 3rd party knowledge bases.
- amluto 3y ago
  ISTR a got an actual useful outcome from a support incident related to a bug in the runtime libraries shipped with Visual Studio 2005. Support gave me a hotfix. Sadly the hotfix had its own little bug: installing it took about 20 hours. Office productivity was rather low for the rest of the day. I don’t know everything that goes on under the hood with Microsoft’s installers, but wow they’re slow. I, blissfully, don’t use Visual Studio on Windows any more :)
kkert 3y ago
I actually remember reporting a crypto bug way back through a similar program in Win98, where certain keys would not work if the highest bit was set in the key material. It got fixed
userbinator 3y ago
You can still pay MS for support. Whether you'll get the answer you want, as the others have noted in sibling comments, is highly variable.
pugz 3y ago
Apple still has this program. I haven't worked as an iOS developer for a few years now, but I remember their paid "technical support incidents" were extremely high quality. It was $50 per incident, but I think that was just to reduce spam. I remember being astounded by the technical depth of a particular answer and looking up the the engineer on LinkedIn. He had 20+ years of experience at Apple - and it showed in his answer.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
  Mullvad had to go public[0] with a security leak before Apple even responded to their reports in the release candidates for MacOS 14 [0]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/bug-in-macos-14-sonoma-prevents-our-app-from-working https://mullvad.net/en/blog/bug-in-macos-14-sonoma-prevents-...

by amluto 3y ago

twisteriffic 3y ago

That's Premier support, though now with a bunch of extra layers of contractors who can't do anything other than follow a script, capture traces and wait on the next level. In my experience it's been a time consuming waste of effort. I've had a lot better luck harvesting names and business cards from the teams at conferences and demo days, then going direct to the source.

sebazzz 3y ago

Generally as far as first line support goes, everything is outsourced to India. Cheaper, on paper. Anectodically, I tried to get support for something unrelated: I’m trying to use IMAP sync support in Outlook.com, but it refuses to work properly with iCloud-IMAP but doesn’t give any error message either. As a paying M365 subscriber I expect proper support. I tried over five times to get support, and every time it ended in frustration. Every time I got someone who either doesn’t understand to product, says IMAP support is not available and deprecated (it is not! I was able to set-up a different IMAP provider just fine), or I got redirected to the Windows or Office support team, who then couldn’t help me and closed my ticket.

Someone1234 3y ago
Often times it just feels like they try to extend the ticket out as long as possible asking irrelevant questions, then as you said redirect you or close the ticket after wasting an appropriate amount of time. I cannot prove it, but I bet there is an internal number of replies before they can close without penalty.
rwmj 3y ago
If it's any consolation, our company pays for 20,000 GMail licenses and we seem unable to escalate any issue at all to Google, even major issues such as their clearly not working spam filtering, emails being lost, incorrect deduplication of emails, or their random IMAP throttling.
- amluto 3y ago
  Is there any vendor of actually good email-as-a-service? O365/Exchange/Outlook/Hotmail is a mess. Google has a support problem. Fastmail has an offline email problem. iCloud is not obviously suitable for professional use. What’s left?
  - Avamander 3y ago
    There are multiple providers out there that have their own stacks (Google, Microsoft, Tutanota, Protonmail to some extent and others) and there are those that use more common combinations (basically just managed mail-in-a-box). Nothing perfect though, so pick your poison. Some issues are also due to the ecosystem itself. Avoiding POP3 goes a long way for example.
    - amluto 3y ago
      Avoiding POP3 is great. Some people like to say the future is JMAP, but those same people provide such a weak mobile email app that I find it hard to believe. Maybe the protocol can do better than the app by the same vendor?
      - account42 3y ago
        IMAP, as horrible as it is on a technical level, does the job just fine.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Many VPS/web hosters provide email services along with their custom-domain support, e.g. https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/ https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/. It’s worthwhile to look into that space, because you are getting dedicated and responsive customer support instead of an anonymous black-box mess.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Well, maybe last century. At any point of this century, the response to those support incidents from MS was always to deny a problem, and if it's a known one, to try to gaslight the customer in a direction contrary to solving it. I have seen organizations lose way too many people-hours trying to satisfy the MS support and apply what it recommended. That when the real solution was often reachable in a hour or two of research on 3rd party knowledge bases.

amluto 3y ago
ISTR a got an actual useful outcome from a support incident related to a bug in the runtime libraries shipped with Visual Studio 2005. Support gave me a hotfix. Sadly the hotfix had its own little bug: installing it took about 20 hours. Office productivity was rather low for the rest of the day. I don’t know everything that goes on under the hood with Microsoft’s installers, but wow they’re slow. I, blissfully, don’t use Visual Studio on Windows any more :)

kkert 3y ago

I actually remember reporting a crypto bug way back through a similar program in Win98, where certain keys would not work if the highest bit was set in the key material. It got fixed

userbinator 3y ago

You can still pay MS for support. Whether you'll get the answer you want, as the others have noted in sibling comments, is highly variable.

pugz 3y ago

Apple still has this program. I haven't worked as an iOS developer for a few years now, but I remember their paid "technical support incidents" were extremely high quality. It was $50 per incident, but I think that was just to reduce spam. I remember being astounded by the technical depth of a particular answer and looking up the the engineer on LinkedIn. He had 20+ years of experience at Apple - and it showed in his answer.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
Mullvad had to go public[0] with a security leak before Apple even responded to their reports in the release candidates for MacOS 14 [0]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/bug-in-macos-14-sonoma-prevents-our-app-from-working https://mullvad.net/en/blog/bug-in-macos-14-sonoma-prevents-...