5 ms·

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft t

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me to set up a sensitivity label. Etc. It mostly tells me about MS doing very bad software architecture for web apps, though apparently the desktop apps are not immune to it either.

Enginerrrd 2y ago
It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.
- chii 2y ago
  The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!
  - mbrumlow 2y ago
    Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.
    - marssaxman 2y ago
      What OS? The one Google wrote, underlying these services?
    - chii 2y ago
      it's very easy to imagine the scenario where this happens. Those photos may have already been uploaded to google's web servers (from my understanding, this happens with google photos by default?), from which a preview has been generated. The permission is at the android app level, and is requested at some point to ensure that the permission model is respected from the POV of the user. I can imagine the permission request being out of sync!
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Google Photos is not a mobile app. Google Photos is a SaaS webapp that happens to have a companion app for Android. Whatever OS-level settings affect the Android app itself, they have no bearing on what Google Photos the SaaS can or cannot do.
  - garbagewoman 2y ago
    The team that wrote the preview portion just accessed the photos with elevated permissions if permission wasn’t granted yet? That doesn’t make any sense
    - marssaxman 2y ago
      Oh, god, no, it makes complete sense. Somebody has to code the permissions in, after all...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      I imagine the preview was generated server-side, where permissions granted to apps don't matter.
  - necovek 2y ago
    Yes! So many times observed that there is a name for it (Conway's law), teams having limited touchpoints obviously leads to such impedance mismatches.
  - xigoi 2y ago
    “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway
    - bandrami 2y ago
      I've heard this was the secret to AWS's taking off twenty years ago: Bezos told the various teams they can only interact with each other as if they were vendors and customers to each other.
      - mzi 2y ago
        It was formulated a little different. But this was the 2002 mandate: 1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. 5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. 6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. 7. Thank you; have a nice day!
        jodrellblank 2y ago
        Source: Steve Yegge’s “Amazon understand platforms and Google doesn’t” rant - copy found at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 among others, since it was originally posted on Google+ and link-rotted. Number 7 is a joke, etc.
  - rob74 2y ago
    Then maybe the default value for "permission to access photos" should be no, so they can only start accessing them after you give them permission. But yeah, with stuff like this it's always "opt-out", never "opt-in", unless someone forces them to...
- kn0where 2y ago
  Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.
  - harrall 2y ago
    I swear 70% of my value at work is pointing out details like this during meetings when no one else will… before we build it.
  - necovek 2y ago
    In this particular issue, MS has an opposite problem: you grab a document link, grant a permission to someone, and they still can't access the document through the original link (you need to fetch a new link just for them).
    - antgiant 2y ago
      Kind of. The default behavior is to create a new link. So when you grant someone access you are actually creating a new link. However, you can find the buried manage access settings and change the permissions on the original link. If you do that then they can use the original link. (Teams makes this Byzantine in the extreme to accomplish as you have to go find the folder it drops all shared files in to gain access to manage access settings. But it does allow you to retro change access even for things shared in Teams)
      - necovek 2y ago
        Yeah, many things are definitely possible but to me it seems like the user experience is driven by the technical implementation and architecture, instead of vice versa. From the outside looking in, it's the age old organizational problem when there are no good synergies between customer experience and development teams.
  - jkaptur 2y ago
    Really? That’s very surprising. You can see what this says? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6XtrzqQi8mODNGKsM-NLZNI4/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6Xtrz...
- dns_snek 2y ago
  That's odd, were you synchronizing your photos to Google Photos[1] in any way, from any device? Presumably they would've had to be synchronized to Google at some point for them to generate an album of said photos. [1] https://photos.google.com/ https://photos.google.com/
- oblio 2y ago
  Google Keep is a note taking app. However when you're inside a note (which BTW, can also be converted into checkboxes, aka very simple TODOs), Google Keep, the note taking app from search giant Google, doesn't have search functionality for that specific note. Besides the many small bugs, sometimes the missing functionality in Google apps is mind boggling.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    On a asimialr vein, Microsoft's OneNote, which is of course part of the famed and expensive Office suite, still doesn't support Find and Replace. But, they do have a meticulously written official support article that suggests you can copy the text you want to replace with, and then do Find, double click the text it finds, ctrl+V, and repeat... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-text-in-notes-34b1f7f8-d327-40c5-8b0c-8419425ed68b https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Wow that is ridiculous. But really, OneNote is the most crusty part of the whole office suite. It's completely unfit for purpose. They don't even bother to make a web version that properly works (you get signed out every day and you can only search in one folder, not even a whole notebook) I moved to obsidian with self hosted livesync and it's such a breath of fresh air. It actually does what it says. There's tons of plugins. The sync never drops a beat. It's a typical example of Microsoft's solutions to be B-quality at best. An AAA level solution is always better.. Microsoft's goal is only to be not bad enough for people to drop the "included with your subscription" product and go for something actually fit for purpose. Unfortunately I'm stuck with OneNote at work. I guess they want me to be ineffective and inefficient. It's just annoying because I don't have any use for "office" applications but a personal knowledgebase is something that's super important to me.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    When I last reinstalled the apps on my phone, the one Google app that ironically I didn’t keep was Keep.
cornholio 2y ago
The most annoying one is that Windows machines have lost the ability for deep sleep. Laptops that slept perfectly 5 years ago are now left as 24/7 zombies, with the CPU, fans and hard disks running non stop. I'm certain that some idiotic change just like the ones suggested in the article destroyed this perfectly working feature, and nobody is bothered to fix it because it would impact the latest harebrained scheme to make my 10 year laptop do AI in its sleep and suggest helpful ads about the things it couldn't help overhear while "sleeping".
- lewantmontreal 2y ago
  They do have some sort of sleep but its very inefficient so Lenovo Thinkpads actually go into hibernation after an hour or so of sleep, to avoid the user waking up to an empty battery.
  - bartread 2y ago
    This has given me flashbacks. I went down this rabbit hole prepandemic with a Dell laptop I had for work at the time. I got tired of getting on the train to find my laptop dead. Back then Windows would default to a crap version of sleep but you could still disable it in the BIOS and by tweaking a couple of other settings, thus forcing it to use proper sleep. I’m pretty sure I wrote a lengthy response on HN about this including the specifics at the time. That worked well until I got a new Dell laptop that removed support for the good sleep mode entirely. So then I’d make sure to always leave the machine plugged in and switched on overnight before any travel… which is how I discovered that the machine had a bug where sometimes it would fail to charge whilst plugged in and switched on but not awake, so occasionally I’d still end up with a dead laptop on the train. So then I’d start up the machine as soon as I got out of bed so it’d get at least 30 - 45 minutes of charging with not much load on it whilst I was getting ready to leave. I absolutely hate Dell. For my own use I’ve been buying Apple laptops since 2011 and, although they went through a grim period meaning I kept a machine from 2015 to 2024, I never had this sort of nonsense with them.
    - skydhash 2y ago
fhd2 2y ago
I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Works very well for the obvious use cases, but then you are bound to run into weird issues as soon as you run into some edge case they haven't covered. Makes me think it must have something to do with their corporate culture and how they work, since their developers, to my knowledge, never had a reputation for being weak. Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. Though I doubt that a bit, as a third party developer, it makes me avoid their products where I can.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Only when they "release" it. And then they start again from 10%. /s
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    The ongoing saga with the migration from control panel to the settings app is as good an example as any. They've been working on that since win8 which released in 2012. Given the time it took to make a new release, it's been 15 years and is still ongoing, it very much seems like MS don't care about that area of the OS. I can understand that there's a lot of old/legacy third party stuff that would rely on the .cpl capabilities so you can't rip it out in one go, but "it's a lot of work" seems like a poor excuse for a company with resources like MS to not at least get all their own moved across with equivalents. They could even leave the old deprecated ones available in the background for anything legacy that needs to interact with them.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  > Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. I was thinking about something similar recently. 80% of features take 20% of the time. For the hobby stuff I program, I want to make the best use of my time, so I skip the last 20% of features to make more room for stuff that matters. I call it PDD: Pareto-Driven Development. Looks like you think Microsoft is similar.

Enginerrrd 2y ago

It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.

chii 2y ago
The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!
- mbrumlow 2y ago
  Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    What OS? The one Google wrote, underlying these services?
  - chii 2y ago
    it's very easy to imagine the scenario where this happens. Those photos may have already been uploaded to google's web servers (from my understanding, this happens with google photos by default?), from which a preview has been generated. The permission is at the android app level, and is requested at some point to ensure that the permission model is respected from the POV of the user. I can imagine the permission request being out of sync!
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Google Photos is not a mobile app. Google Photos is a SaaS webapp that happens to have a companion app for Android. Whatever OS-level settings affect the Android app itself, they have no bearing on what Google Photos the SaaS can or cannot do.
- garbagewoman 2y ago
  The team that wrote the preview portion just accessed the photos with elevated permissions if permission wasn’t granted yet? That doesn’t make any sense
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    Oh, god, no, it makes complete sense. Somebody has to code the permissions in, after all...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I imagine the preview was generated server-side, where permissions granted to apps don't matter.
- necovek 2y ago
  Yes! So many times observed that there is a name for it (Conway's law), teams having limited touchpoints obviously leads to such impedance mismatches.
- xigoi 2y ago
  “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway
  - bandrami 2y ago
    I've heard this was the secret to AWS's taking off twenty years ago: Bezos told the various teams they can only interact with each other as if they were vendors and customers to each other.
    - mzi 2y ago
      It was formulated a little different. But this was the 2002 mandate: 1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. 5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. 6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. 7. Thank you; have a nice day!
      - jodrellblank 2y ago
        Source: Steve Yegge’s “Amazon understand platforms and Google doesn’t” rant - copy found at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 among others, since it was originally posted on Google+ and link-rotted. Number 7 is a joke, etc.
- rob74 2y ago
  Then maybe the default value for "permission to access photos" should be no, so they can only start accessing them after you give them permission. But yeah, with stuff like this it's always "opt-out", never "opt-in", unless someone forces them to...
kn0where 2y ago
Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.
- harrall 2y ago
  I swear 70% of my value at work is pointing out details like this during meetings when no one else will… before we build it.
- necovek 2y ago
  In this particular issue, MS has an opposite problem: you grab a document link, grant a permission to someone, and they still can't access the document through the original link (you need to fetch a new link just for them).
  - antgiant 2y ago
    Kind of. The default behavior is to create a new link. So when you grant someone access you are actually creating a new link. However, you can find the buried manage access settings and change the permissions on the original link. If you do that then they can use the original link. (Teams makes this Byzantine in the extreme to accomplish as you have to go find the folder it drops all shared files in to gain access to manage access settings. But it does allow you to retro change access even for things shared in Teams)
    - necovek 2y ago
      Yeah, many things are definitely possible but to me it seems like the user experience is driven by the technical implementation and architecture, instead of vice versa. From the outside looking in, it's the age old organizational problem when there are no good synergies between customer experience and development teams.
- jkaptur 2y ago
  Really? That’s very surprising. You can see what this says? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6XtrzqQi8mODNGKsM-NLZNI4/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6Xtrz...
dns_snek 2y ago
That's odd, were you synchronizing your photos to Google Photos[1] in any way, from any device? Presumably they would've had to be synchronized to Google at some point for them to generate an album of said photos. [1] https://photos.google.com/ https://photos.google.com/
oblio 2y ago
Google Keep is a note taking app. However when you're inside a note (which BTW, can also be converted into checkboxes, aka very simple TODOs), Google Keep, the note taking app from search giant Google, doesn't have search functionality for that specific note. Besides the many small bugs, sometimes the missing functionality in Google apps is mind boggling.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  On a asimialr vein, Microsoft's OneNote, which is of course part of the famed and expensive Office suite, still doesn't support Find and Replace. But, they do have a meticulously written official support article that suggests you can copy the text you want to replace with, and then do Find, double click the text it finds, ctrl+V, and repeat... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-text-in-notes-34b1f7f8-d327-40c5-8b0c-8419425ed68b https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Wow that is ridiculous. But really, OneNote is the most crusty part of the whole office suite. It's completely unfit for purpose. They don't even bother to make a web version that properly works (you get signed out every day and you can only search in one folder, not even a whole notebook) I moved to obsidian with self hosted livesync and it's such a breath of fresh air. It actually does what it says. There's tons of plugins. The sync never drops a beat. It's a typical example of Microsoft's solutions to be B-quality at best. An AAA level solution is always better.. Microsoft's goal is only to be not bad enough for people to drop the "included with your subscription" product and go for something actually fit for purpose. Unfortunately I'm stuck with OneNote at work. I guess they want me to be ineffective and inefficient. It's just annoying because I don't have any use for "office" applications but a personal knowledgebase is something that's super important to me.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  When I last reinstalled the apps on my phone, the one Google app that ironically I didn’t keep was Keep.

cornholio 2y ago

The most annoying one is that Windows machines have lost the ability for deep sleep. Laptops that slept perfectly 5 years ago are now left as 24/7 zombies, with the CPU, fans and hard disks running non stop. I'm certain that some idiotic change just like the ones suggested in the article destroyed this perfectly working feature, and nobody is bothered to fix it because it would impact the latest harebrained scheme to make my 10 year laptop do AI in its sleep and suggest helpful ads about the things it couldn't help overhear while "sleeping".

lewantmontreal 2y ago
They do have some sort of sleep but its very inefficient so Lenovo Thinkpads actually go into hibernation after an hour or so of sleep, to avoid the user waking up to an empty battery.
- bartread 2y ago
  This has given me flashbacks. I went down this rabbit hole prepandemic with a Dell laptop I had for work at the time. I got tired of getting on the train to find my laptop dead. Back then Windows would default to a crap version of sleep but you could still disable it in the BIOS and by tweaking a couple of other settings, thus forcing it to use proper sleep. I’m pretty sure I wrote a lengthy response on HN about this including the specifics at the time. That worked well until I got a new Dell laptop that removed support for the good sleep mode entirely. So then I’d make sure to always leave the machine plugged in and switched on overnight before any travel… which is how I discovered that the machine had a bug where sometimes it would fail to charge whilst plugged in and switched on but not awake, so occasionally I’d still end up with a dead laptop on the train. So then I’d start up the machine as soon as I got out of bed so it’d get at least 30 - 45 minutes of charging with not much load on it whilst I was getting ready to leave. I absolutely hate Dell. For my own use I’ve been buying Apple laptops since 2011 and, although they went through a grim period meaning I kept a machine from 2015 to 2024, I never had this sort of nonsense with them.
  - skydhash 2y ago

fhd2 2y ago

I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Works very well for the obvious use cases, but then you are bound to run into weird issues as soon as you run into some edge case they haven't covered. Makes me think it must have something to do with their corporate culture and how they work, since their developers, to my knowledge, never had a reputation for being weak. Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. Though I doubt that a bit, as a third party developer, it makes me avoid their products where I can.

hulitu 2y ago
> I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Only when they "release" it. And then they start again from 10%. /s
- keyringlight 2y ago
  The ongoing saga with the migration from control panel to the settings app is as good an example as any. They've been working on that since win8 which released in 2012. Given the time it took to make a new release, it's been 15 years and is still ongoing, it very much seems like MS don't care about that area of the OS. I can understand that there's a lot of old/legacy third party stuff that would rely on the .cpl capabilities so you can't rip it out in one go, but "it's a lot of work" seems like a poor excuse for a company with resources like MS to not at least get all their own moved across with equivalents. They could even leave the old deprecated ones available in the background for anything legacy that needs to interact with them.
theandrewbailey 2y ago
> Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. I was thinking about something similar recently. 80% of features take 20% of the time. For the hobby stuff I program, I want to make the best use of my time, so I skip the last 20% of features to make more room for stuff that matters. I call it PDD: Pareto-Driven Development. Looks like you think Microsoft is similar.