Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

This is sadly not surprising, and based on how things have gone recently, very easy to believe:

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 but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time 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 know 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.

Conversation 9 comments

  • navarac

    16 January, 2022 - 4:07 pm

    <p>Back when Windows 10 started and the introduction of the Insider Program under Gabe Aul, I was diligent in filing bugs on the weekly builds I installed. For many years, until Gabe was replace by a fashionista, and it all became a Marketing "thing", all was well. Then we got the infamous A/B testing. I always thought that there were those who got test builds with new bits (Insiders) and those who didn’t (non-Insiders). But no. As an insider I invariably wasted my time every week downloading/installing new builds, only to find I was not getting the new bits (aka a Z tester!). In the end it became obvious I was a glutton for punishment, and I withdrew from the Insider Program. Like the article intimates, the feedback was not getting addressed.</p><p><br></p><p>Windows 11 (basically Windows 10 with Windows 10X chromebook style paint job) was the last straw for me. Since October 2021, I’m all-in on Linux (Debian) on daily-driver PCs, including an old Surface Pro 3, which runs surprisingly well. I keep one PC with Windows 10 for gaming. That is all that’s on it – no Office – no other Microsoft Software – no Onedrive – no Microsoft account. After using MS-DOS/Windows since MS-Dos 3, I have broken the Microsoft "habit", and feel better off because of it. No more dog food (or is that dog s**t?) for me!</p>

  • Henry Skoglund

    17 January, 2022 - 1:17 am

    <p>Hi, welcome to the Windows Outsider Program! I’m in the Glacial Ring, recently upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. Lots of stuff still works in Windows 7, for example the new Visual Studio 2022.</p>

    • dftf

      17 January, 2022 - 12:01 pm

      <p>You’ve probably got an easier-ride thesedays on <em>Windows 7</em>, compared to <em>Windows XP</em>, yes.</p><p><br></p><p>I see <em>Google Chrome </em>have recently announced extended "security-only" support until 15 Jan 2023; I’d imagine <em>Edge </em>will follow the same schedule, and <em>Firefox </em>is still fully-supported as of now (which is odd, as towards the end of <em>XP </em>and <em>Vista’s </em>lifecycles, they transitioned users onto the <em>ESR </em>version, but haven’t done this so-far for <em>Windows 7</em>).</p><p><br></p><p>Most AAA games will no-longer run; some might, if you copy certain DLL files, or hack installer files. Though lack of new drivers will also present an issue, as neither <em>Nvidia</em> nor <em>AMD</em> offer any graphic-card driver updates now (and I’m pretty-sure the same is true for Intel).</p><p><br></p><p>App-wise, I can’t think of many that currently won’t run on <em>Windows 7</em> — <em>VMWare Player</em> and <em>Workstation</em>, <em>Microsoft Office 2019 </em>and later, <em>iTunes</em> and <em>Blender </em>are the only ones that come to-mind. <em>Audacity </em>and <em>FileZilla </em>both still run, but are no-longer officially-supported. And the next major-release of <em>Paint.NET</em> (the 4.4.x branch) will drop <em>Windows 7</em> support. (On the enterprise side, many of the current versions of <em>Adobe</em>’s apps, and <em>AutoCAD</em>’s latest, no-longer install on <em>Win7</em>, either).</p>

  • dftf

    17 January, 2022 - 11:42 am

    <p>As someone who regularly used to leave feedback, yeah, the "Feedback Hub" is utterly pointless thesedays.</p><p><br></p><p>They have tons of low-value feedback, like just an error code as the subject then "plz hlp" as the comment. No-one clears them out. And in the reverse, they constantly merge multiple bits of feedback into a "collection", even-though often many of the ones grouped in are not actually related to the same issue. And for popular feedback requests, that you would expect should be fairly-simple to implement, like "can we have a dark-mode in Task Manager", "can this feature be added to the Your Phone app", "can this change be made to the Mail app", nothing ever happens.</p><p><br></p><p>The <em>Edge </em>team used to be good, in contrast: if you would post feedback on their <em>Insider Forum</em> site, or if you did the "Send Feedback" in <em>Edge</em> itself, you’d often get a reply. But in recent-years, even they don’t seem to care anymore either — they just keep adding new features no-one wants. And yet simple requests, like "please can you stop treating every <em>Edge </em>user as a developer and offer an option to hide things like <em>Inspect </em>and <em>View source</em> on the right-click menu", just go ignored.</p><p><br></p><p>The writing has been on-the-wall for some time though: right-now in <em>Windows 10</em>, with all my apps updated, not all of the "ModernUI" apps use my accent-colour. "Microsoft News" uses its own red one; "Weather" uses a blue one. The whole point of decoupling stuff from <em>Windows </em>and shoving it in the <em>Microsoft Store</em> was so they can be updated quicker, outside of major <em>Windows</em> releases. But they can’t even be bothered to do that for the apps which already are!</p>

    • bkkcanuck

      17 January, 2022 - 4:29 pm

      <p>That is not good, every submitted item should be reviewed fairly quickly just to make sure that the feedback meets a minimum standard and basically responded to with a standardized template indicating what is needed, how the subject line should be selected, and the submitter given something like 72 hours to correct or it would be deleted. The feedback should have some indication of what type of feedback it is (defect or enhancement request), and the priority classification (causes operating system to abend, functionality defect, annoyance, etc.). Basically, the feedback should be well managed. There should also be some sort of indication on priority from Windows side – indicating when Microsoft will have time to respond (obviously things that are annoyances or less — the expectation should be set that it may not be reviewed for months because of priority). </p>

    • dmitryko

      18 January, 2022 - 12:26 pm

      <p>After Windows division laid off their entire testing department back in 2014, as we learned a few years ago – look up "This is Why Windows 10 is So Unreliable (Premium)" – I don’t know why would anyone expect high-quality bug reports. I guess Microsoft only really cares about the usual telemetry from Insider builds, and&nbsp;the Feedback Hub exists solely to let the steam out.</p><p><br></p><p>It’s also no coincedence Microsoft didn’t even bother to design better bug reporting tools for the Insiders. The Feedback Hub is very fragile like any UWP app – when a serious problem happens, often you cannot even make a snapshot of the system state, or start it at, all until you restart the system. </p><p><br></p><p>I’ve had long-standing isses in Manganese, Iron and Cobalt&nbsp;flights, when opening a lot of Edge tabs consumes too much USER/GUI handles and freezes the File Explorer process, which by design also hosts significant parts of Windows Shell. And because&nbsp;in usual Microsoft wisdom,&nbsp;the Windows Runtime/UWP is built on top of ShellUI and USER32/KERNEL32,&nbsp;and not as a separate OS subsystem independent of the Win32 subsystem – when explorer.exe becomes unresponsive, all UWP apps&nbsp;just freeze and refuse to start again. So of course Feedback Hub also stops responding right when you’ve reproduced the problem and could have filed a detailed bug report…</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>So a limitation of 10 000 handles, introduced in Windows 2000 for USER32/GDI32 components and designed in the era of Windows NT 3.1, is still relevant some 25 years later, and a stupid 64 KByte memory block can bring down a modern PC that has a milti-core 4 GHz CPU and 32 GBytes of RAM, which is like 1000 times faster and has 4000 times more memory than my 8 Mbyte i486SX-33 computer of 1994, yet it chokes as if I’m running Windows 95 beta. But of course nothing is more important than to spend time and resources on dumbed-down touch-only Windows&nbsp;<s>11</s>&nbsp;10X UI and round window corners. </p><p><br></p><p>Looks like all competent staff moved on to Azure and there’s no-one left who understands the architecture of the OS to make much needed changes…</p>

      • dmitryko

        18 January, 2022 - 5:56 pm

        <p>On a more positive note though, at least some developer teams at Microsoft did start to work in the open and employ GitHub for bug tracking, announcement/discussions, and code review. For example, under GitHub’s "microsoft" organization there are: WindowsAppSDK (formely ProjectReunion), microsoft-ui-xaml (WinUI), STL (Visual C++ Standard Template Library), cppwinrt (C++/WinRT), CsWinRT (C#/WinRT), Win2D, etc. </p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">These folks do seem to respond to user feedback at least intermittently, and t</span>hey often do ask to file a bug in the Feedback Hub and send back a link so they could track it. But unfortunately none of these developers seem to be part of the Windows division – they are rather from Dev Tools, so they are only responsible for their specific SDKs, and not the actual OS components or system applications which may use them…</p>

  • jchampeau

    Premium Member
    19 January, 2022 - 9:45 am

    <p>Taken together, all of this begs the question: would desktop Windows be better off if it were split off into its own company? It’s hard to imagine feedback would be ignored wholesale as described if Windows 11 were its own company and only had one job to do. It would also be hugely easier for the CEO of "Windowsoft" to chart a path forward for Windows that is sensible and holds <em>quality</em> as an important factor. Just think if all of the development efforts that went into Windows 8, Paint 3D, Windows-as-a-Service, etc., etc. had instead been channeled into making Windows a more stable, less error-prone, better OS.</p>

  • tfgrain

    19 January, 2022 - 11:46 am

    <p>The big issue which was posted earlier is the elimination of the dev/testing team in 2014. </p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC