What FOSS needs is saner and simpler type-1 hypervisor storage and compute appliances because the existing solutions are too difficult to deploy and maintain.
It comes "batteries included" with backups/vsan/etc for an insanely reasonable "per host" license cost for support.
It's an old tale, but Azure was sort of late to enter the market here in Europe compared to AWS (GCP was never really an option for a lot of sectors due to Google's inability to sell actual products without Big Brother). Anyway, in the early days AWS had terrible support, it was basically like trying to contact Google as a private customer even if you were a major company. Then came Azure and blew it's way into the enterprise sector, partly because Microsoft was already there but also because Microsoft did what they always do, and actually give you people to talk with. 3 months later we had an AWS representative calling us with a similar experience on sale. Google never adopted anything like it, but today AWS is frankly a great experience for enterprise as well.
The last part Microsoft has is that they bundle things. Teams didn't win because it was the best at what it did when it arrived. It won because nobody in non-tech enterprise would want to pay for a Teams alternative when they were already paying for Teams anyway. In Enterprise you don't pay the listing prices that you or I would if we were to buy office365, windows and some Azure services. You instead buy things through a partner program, and then some of the licenses are different than they otherwise would be.
There is no real alternative to it. All of Europe is looking into moving away from USA tech giants now. You can absolutely replace the Office365 platform with something like Open Deks, but you can't do it without having IT operations staff who can do a lot of the things Microsoft would typically do for you. Similarily you can absolutely run things on Hetzner or OVH, but not as easily as you could if you were doing the Azure vendor lock-in.
If it wasn't for the current geo-political situation, Microsoft would continue it's monopoly on non-tech organisations. For a good while anyway. Because ironically one of their strengths was familiarity. It used to be that when you hired someone, they knew Microsoft Office and they knew Windows, but they've lost that edge. Maybe because this blog entry is spot on as far as the private customer experience goes. Today the most frequently asked question from our new employees as far as IT goes is "can I get a mac?".
No matter the cost, regardless of whether the company might fail, the executives and shareholders can always sell their shares early to make a huge profit and just walk away.
Also: minimum age to sign up is 16. But you need to be 18 to verify your account. And if you’re locked out, you need to verify your account and log in to open a ticket saying that you can’t log in…
This is an unsubstantiated claim. Right after he said he prefers to provide references for what he says.
At this point they'd be better off throwing my entire inbox in a RAG workflow written by some junior halfway across the world. It's that bad. I find stuff quicker by remembering when I got an email and then scanning it myself with my own eyeballs and my finger on the scroll wheel.
Outlook used to be amazing. It used to be the hub to my work knowledge base and my memory. Now it's just the tool that does my emails mostly very well.
If you say that it's not a depiction of what someone thinks and does facing something, you just need to improve reading skills.
And basically that wasn't something important in the article; I made it rather clear. Their following catch22 was the most likable thing IMO; that was what I explicitly emphasized.
I wonder why do I write all that, though. If someone just wants to find something irrelevant, and build their criticism on that, there's no way to prevent it.
I agree it's irrelevant. It makes 0 sense to me to include unless it's backed in truth.
I also now realize that you are likely the author of the article that was posted, so I will wish you luck in resolving your account issues.
They're trying hard to make 11 rhyme with the histories of Vista and Bob.
(I only use Windows 11 Enterprise on my oscilloscope control and instrumentation logging lab box, and on a gaming-ish laptop with an eGPU.)
In my opinion, things started going downhill with Windows XP, with the introduction of product activation and the later introduction of forced software updates in Service Pack 2. I also don’t like the UI changes that Microsoft made in the 2000s, notably the Luna theme in Windows XP and the introduction of the ribbon in Office 2007. I still don’t like the ribbon nearly 20 years after its introduction.
My take is that 1990s Microsoft software tended to get out of my way. From the 2000s onward, it seems that Microsoft software often gets in my way. I found a refuge in Mac OS X, but in the past decade macOS has gotten more annoying.
> I found a refuge in Mac OS X, but in the past decade macOS has gotten more annoying.
Agree on both, macOS is still nowhere near windows level of annoyance but it’s getting worst and worst.
Each feature well integrated that made me like macOS was implemented at least 10 years ago, the recent feature are neat but don’t feel right. Like the window snapping, if you drag it to the top it will expand ‘almost’ fully but then if you didn’t stop at the right spot and kept dragging to the top your window goes instead to the virtual desktop screen. It’s extremely counterintuitive, and it keeps repeating with all these new features. Who use stage manager on macOS for instance ? Makes absolutely no sense.
At some point it won’t be worth the premium price they are asking for and I guess I’ll go Linux desktop. It’s broken, counter intuitive, little support but at least it’s getting better with time, not worst.
Windows 11 wishes it was half as good as Vista. While much-maligned, Vista was decent enough. And it didn't show you ads, try to shove MS services down your throat, or any of the other user-hostile things 11 does.
MFC, although not as good as OWL/VCL/Qt, they never produced anything better in house for C++ developers.
By comparison, something similar happened when I was hired by Meta. Visiting the 2FA page caused my account to be insta-locked. It turned out that I had another account under an email address domain I no longer had access to. They were eventually able to fix it with an Oops request.
In conclusion, it doesn't matter so much if tech is imperfect if the support is good. But without good support, any small inconvenience or issue can easily spiral to become a show stopper.
By the way, the biggest griefs I have had with self-hosting my email has been due to Microsoft. Their way of categorizing spam can pretty much be summed up to: does it come from an explicitly whitelisted commercial email provider? Probably not spam, otherwise: spam. They are criminally incompetent (also) in this area.
I should consider a solution for backing up my email, though.
1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/mu...
With Google, it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification… which may not be possible. This hit me once while overseas, I think I managed to get in by tunnelling through my VPS in Australia. And if you can’t do this, you’re stuck, because Google simply doesn’t have support.
With Amazon, I was finally able to find one way of contacting them that didn’t require signing in, and when I finally got to a human, the problem was immediately fixed.
A single support incident that reaches a paid worker on their side costs them more than the profit you’ve brought them for the year. It probably costs them more than the profit you’ll bring them for your entire life.
With less scale-y businesses, it’s worth it for them to put some effort into fixing problems, as an investment in your future business. Here, the only reason would be to avoid reputational damage. And who’s going to stop using Google or Microsoft because some guy had trouble getting support?
There’s a story (no doubt apocryphal) about Bill Gates telling people working on Windows that a customer calling their support line cost as much as the profit they made selling that copy of Windows. The point was to make it so Windows users didn’t need to call support by making Windows work better. The modern equivalent of this would be to make sure that users can’t reach expensive support in the first place.
What would be the opposite?
With enough blindfolds all bugs are unimportant?
There is no excuse for being lazy.
Presumably the excuse is that it happens because you don't use 2fa and your ip changed, but I heard 2fa might not save you either.
It goes pretty much like this. If your problem needs “reasoning” that entails more than matching a direct solution, you’re getting the default answer that’s the closest match to the solution.
The only difference between live support and support docs is that live support has access to some of your data and controls over some flows (e.g. reset password)
Now the real kick - it’s like this across the board outside of tech. If you go to a hospital with a problem that is not the 95 or 99 or whatever they are “tuned” to deal with, your pretty much fucked, unless you can be resourceful or luck enough to navigate the structure until you find someone that actually knows how to.
Bureaucracies? Same.
It’s effectively the same dumb machinery with dumb human cogs that you’re always dealing with.
I think it’s simply the “limit” of average human intelligence and find it hard to believe AI will end up being dumber than this.
If your point is "it is today's norm, let's accept it and shut up", I feel the opposite. If the "norm" is like that, expressing it aloud is my way of contributing to society.
The problem arises when the bureaucracy becomes, at least for portions of the organization, the end in itself rather than a means to an end (the end being something like better service, efficiency, and accountability). That's when it starts to contribute to frustrations and bad experiences (and, if allowed to continue in this vein, enshittification).
The problems isnt the cogs, its the business owners setting up the incentives. Providing reasoned support is expensive from a time and effort perspective, so they dont invest in it. Service reps are specifically trained and incentivized to just fuzzy match the SOPs
And AI cant reason either, so it wont be able to provide any real reasoned support either. And the pwners dont care because they already provide shit service, people like you will just hype the AI up and then make excuses for it when its just as shit
Business incentive— if you can make an argument on why would a corporation provide shit support to its own employees you win. Also make an argument on why support is actually good at Amazon and others like them. So I don’t buy your argument on incentives either. Although there are other implications related to incentives and AI in general, but those are off topic.
You’re always going to do the bulk of support through L1, and L1 support is going to be limited in terms of training and access.
But! The intended flow is that L1 recognizes when an issue exceeds their ability and escalates it up to L2+. And that’s where your talented (and empowered!) support engineers work.
That escalation just doesn’t seem to happen any more.
My hypothesis is that it’s a consequence of L1 being outsourced, where now they’re heavily incentivized to avoid escalating and impacting their probably-contractual KPIs.
Yet another cost for adding too many parties to something that could be better if it were simpler.
But its not a cost from the perspective of the companies doj the outsourcing: the incentives are the way they are because the result is intended. Its not a cost of adding an extra party, it is part of the reason the party is added.
It’s entirely possible for a whole organization to want a good outcome, but construct an org chart where bad outcomes are guaranteed by the misaligned and incomplete incentives for sub-divisions.
E.g. the IT support org that is only measured on total spend and time to ticket closure
You changed actors mid-sentence. The workers in the organization may want good outcomes but they are near-invariably separate from the people making decisions for the organization.
The organization (including the bulk of employees and executive leadership) may want a good outcome, but sub-divisions’ (aka the org chart) may have have their self-interests set to inevitably produce a bad outcome.
It really drove home that trusting my identity and online presence to these entities that do not care or even know how to be responsible about it is a very bad idea.
Always take the "manual" OTP option, take a backup copy of the code you copy and pasted. I use my password manager
Then, always export the contents of you entire password manager database, encrypt it with the same password you use for you password manager with the pdkf2 rounds set to an absurdly high number and place it in a public place on the internet. Lots of places will host it for free.
>it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification
However, this isn't quite fair on google - it's not arbitrary "sometimes", it's that accounts get locked if there's been unusual or suspicious activity that may indicate an attempt to compromise the account, such as failed login attempts or logins from a new location. The account is locked from single-factor (password only) authentication for a period of time to prevent compromise (which isn't disclosed but as I understand can vary and is usually a week or two), but will allow login with an MFA challenge.
If the account is locked and there are no MFA methods set up or other means of recovery like backup passwords, how are they meant to verify that it's you recovering the account and not an attacker?
Supposing you did manage to talk to a live google support agent, you'd still have the same problem of not being able to verify ownership of the account.
Note that there is no question who owns the account. That's what the password is for!
This should probably be the case - I am not a big fan of passkeys [1] but hopefully this will help make non-SMS, phishing resistant MFA available to the masses.
Still, Google are in a difficult position where on the one hand they have people angry about being locked out, and yet if they didn't they would have people angry about their accounts being compromised.
> If that means my account gets compromised, that's my problem.
It is also the problem of everyone on your contacts list, the operators of other services which use Google OAuth for login, anyone who might recieve spam from your compromised account, and so on.
Reducing harm by temporarily restricting the account when heuristics indicate it may be compromised is not unreasonable IMO.
>Note that there is no question who owns the account. That's what the password is for!
This is unfortunately not as true as we would like it to be.
Have a look at the list of compromised services on Have I Been Pwned [2] - not all of these include passwords, and many that do would be hashed (and hopefully salted) rather than plaintext, but it still happens often enough to be of great concern.
[1] WebAuthN / Passkey technology is fine in the general sense, and I am quite happy to use it with a hardware security key (such a Yubikey or Titan) or emulated in a password manager.
However I think the recent push towards having it tied to a TPM on a device such as a phone is a bit short-sighted, simply because these devices are prone to being lost or damaged. If you set up passkey MFA on the phone and don't enrol a backup method, then lose your phone, you have also lost the account. Probably these services should require 2+ MFA methods configured.
I'd be surprised if that was true. They don't just consult me about MFA, they downright pester me about it.
Besides if you wait long enough Google unlock the account anyway (if it's due to suspicious logins). I know, because it happened to me. I don't know how long it took, all I know is when I happen to check a few months after I thought I had lost access to the account, I could login again.
Finally, it's not like they have a choice. They have to protect the reputation of their domains and servers. It may seem unfair that you cop it if there are security issues, but you got the account for free and you refused to use the numerous MFA options the provide. If someone nerfarious takes over an accout to distribute spam or malware there is a mess that costs time and money to clean up.
There is a real point to be made about how Google / Microsoft and friends message accounts. But it's hard to sympathise with complaints about free ones. Paid for ones, where they promised a certain level of service and then withdraw service without warning and without the ability to recover your data (as I think happened to to the ICC) is a different matter.
While you are consuming product and paying, you are basically identical to everyone else doing that (except for your varying personal info). That can be scaled in straightforward ways.
If you have some problem that requires attention to your account, that doesn't scale well. Even if it could, it's not worth it to them; it's off the happy, revenue-generating path.
Getting locked out of your own data is a far more serious issue.
It's genuinely disappointing that using the Microsoft Authenticator app is a mandatory requirement for work, especially since they introduced the tap the correct number thing.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Outlook/comments/1m4wp7h/microsoft_...
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4376965/...
Cases were the software developer is not being directly paid for their services will be dismissed to make way in the docket for such enshittification cases
But this is not new, they were already like this a long time ago.
The rose tint is strong in these glasses. When was their support great? Or is the author simply confused about what tech they were a lead in?
All that said - do you have a better example of support for a company with similar to MS needs?
So I can confirm they did at least at one point have good support, and more broadly, I think it's not unfair to describe them as having had a great handle on what people wanted in user experiences and support, with how much they bent over backwards to fix compatibility issues for many years. I've also been told their support if you had a support contract was great, but I never was in a position to explore that firsthand.
Those days are, of course, gone, but they were known for that for a while.
They weren’t squeezing everything they can to get bigger profit to the shareholders ?
It’s not like Microsoft is barely surviving atm, they make excellent profit and could very well spend some on support but decided not to at some point.
Networking was simpler, if any.
And in general, pushing updates was not near zero-cost like today. So there was a bit of QA.
I also have to deal with ScarePoint, MS Defender quarantining obviously safe messages, Outlook syncing problems, Windows 11 Account issues, many more...
Amazon has a lot of issues with accounts shared between their national storefronts. I lost a Google account that owns a YouTube channel since it wants to 2FA to a long-gone phone number. Apple has a lot of oddities when you used different emails for your Apple ID, iTunes Connect, and iTunes before they unified everything.
One great example though is Facebook
My wife's Facebook account recently got hacked, and I managed to recover it though this crazy workflow:
The hacker had removed her email address and phone number from the account, changed her password, and added their controlled Meta account as a connected account. This connected account had an email but no password, so it could not be removed without adding a password to it, which required verifying the attackers email address.
None of the account recovery tools worked (including the “this wasn’t me” link in the Facebook “did you just delete your phone number” email - what is the point of that link) - they couldn’t find her account by email or phone number, and even though the Facebook app itself was still logged in, none of the account center tools allowed us to do anything without the new password. It also did not allow us to remove the connection to the hackers Meta account or log it out from their devices because it had no password and it would become orphaned with no login.
What seems to have worked for us:
1. Open the still-logged-in FB Messenger app on her phone. It now asks to add a phone number to enhance security. We did this.
2. Now install WhatsApp and sign up using the phone number.
3. Now go into the Facebook app, change password, I forgot my password, and use WhatsApp as 2-factor authentication.
4. Now we have control of the password again! We also added a app (TOTP) 2-factor authentication and iOS passkey to her account at this point to add more options for control.
5. Go to Meta Quest website (meta dot com), and log in via Facebook. This logs us into the attackers account!
6. We could now add a 2-factor authentication to the hackers account, after which it also now let us change the password of the attackers account without knowing the old one.
7. With a password on the account, we can now log them out of all other devices (the attackers phone).
8. We could also now change the permissions so the attackers Meta account could not be used to log in to her Facebook account, but it’s still listed as a related account since it requires email confirmation to remove.
9. Managed to use the 2-factor code to reset the email address on the attackers meta account, so now we own it completely!
I have a Gmail account lost because they unilaterally activated 2FA on it with a fake phone number (something like 111111111).
And for Apple, moving abroad made the appleid system crash in an loop and nobody in the support system has any idea how appleid works.
Do not use any of the tech giants for any important data.
If they don't want us to use a free account, they can simply tell us.
I recall how the very first edition of Win XP needed time to "cool off" after startup for a minute or two, otherwise it would be wildly unstable. Service Pack 2 resolved most of those issues, but the fact it was needed at all is already telling.
Similarly Windows 11 had regressions in the weirdest of places, like for instance volume controls.
Microsoft has a legacy of bad software.
IT is not flawless. Because it's operated by people. I don't know any software company that offers bugfree software with a superb support and an innovative development roadmap.
Every company is, to a certain level, incompetent in IT. Because there is no perfect competency. The bigger the company, the more prominent this incompetency grows. Which misleads to a confirmation or selection biassed opinion, that this specific company is incompetent.
Take that small startup team that just developed a proof-of-concept, minor bugs as usual, small code-base, collecting 100 Mio. venture capital. Next year they grow to 10.000 employees and 100 Mio. customers. What also grows, inevitable, the code base and amount of bugs. At what state and why would you call them "incompetent in IT"?
It seems impossible to fix this.
I have never worked in any place where someone being unable to login to their MS account wasn't a weekly occurrence.
I had a good interaction with the LibreOffice project. I reported something about LibreOffice Writer. Not even a bug, but just a user experience thing in some paragraph cohesion control UI.
My report was taken seriously, discussed and fixed, in a way that was fairly aligned with my suggestions, and it all happened on not a very long time scale, about within a month and a half.
Open source support vary a lot, you can’t compare it to a business that is actually receiving money for service and take things seriously.
With a closed source business you are at the mercy of them to decide if they really want to fix your issue, even if you are a paid customer.
That was in the 80's.
Don't mess with the timeline, Marty!
I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.
Google has not scaled it's services, it has ignored hard problems of scaling in favour of solving (relatively) easy technical problems. It has not been punished in any meaningful way for this unbalanced approach, and so "the norm" shall it become.
To the detriment of us all.
But I should've never attempted anything that complicated with MS. They can barely manage simple cases, groups of users is way too hard.
I guess they still suffer from monopoly syndrome. The EU should get them again.
The very few times I played Minecraft since then I just used a hacked client.
Tech alas so often is the hammer in this bad relationhip, acts as such a horrible tool against humankind broadly. Doing so much to shield and protect the guilty, to make situations illegible & confounded. There's so many domain of concerns that overlap in so many complex ways, and so so so few people within companies and usually vastly less still outside who can see & view these domains & overlap.
It's only getting vastly worse. It feels like the fix so very nearly was in for the Feds to outlaw any regulation at all against AI in the US! AI is so much harder, so much worse than the bad systems work here, vastly more impervious to understanding than what has come before.
We are falling from god's light, into the deepest shadows of our own making. The machines keep getting more infernal.
I feel like Microsoft has a beta new great portal built just for what you're looking for but then when it becomes just mature enough for version 1.0 it immediately gets overruled by a newer, bigger, better portal that is currently in beta.
More often than not did a proper crack that was a custom launcher basically fix "the whole game" for me.
I have a feeling that they know how to write good software, and when pressed, they do. Every now and then they produce something good.
But they also know that they can get away with releasing mediocre, cheaply-made software that works fine for 60% of people, 35% of users hate it but use it anyway, and 5% get locked out/run away to OSX and Linux.
I'm not splitting hairs here. There is a difference between "I can't" and "I can't be bothered".
My aunt died unexpectedly a number of years ago. Within weeks some man from Nigeria took over her facebook profile. Changed her profile picture from a middle aged white woman to that of a Nigerian man, added a bunch of Nigerian friends. Otherwise the account is seemingly largely untouched. We, the family, have all contacted Facebook support multiple times. We have attempted to memorialize the account submitting proof of death. Nothing. It's beyond infuriating to see a cherished loved ones page vandalized like this regularly every time Facebook has its flashbacks.
Alternatively, a number of years ago I started a Twitter account for a side project that never got very far. Forgot about it.
Years later I make a little update to the side project and think "I could update the Twitter surely no one cares about" and discover to my annoyance that the account got hacked, posted crypto spam for a couple months and got shut down.
I try to contact support, explain the situation. Got into a loop of absolutely infuriating responses of "Your account has been banned. This ticket had been closed. You cannot reply to this message. There is no recourse to this action." No chance for literally any discussion.
I keep attaching longer and longer explanations until I eventually get a "Hmm, let me look into that" from someone that at least smelled minutely human. After a couple messages back and forth suddenly I get the "Your account had been banned. This ticket has been closed..." I throw my arms up and give up. One of the most infuriating experiences of my life. I'd spent over a week fighting to get a largely unused account back. It frankly instilled quite a bit of fear for if I ever lost access to my primary account.
Yes, the process described is nuts. But it's not an IT process, it's a business process. And there it is about cost saving, trying to automate things and keep them secure at the same time. The reason is: They have to take care of hundreds of millions of customers. Eemploying what, 10.000 support personell? Doing simple math here: One support employee covers 10k customers. Impossible.
This happens everywhere in big tech. Accounts get banned, deleted, people loose data and whatever can go wrong. And all you have is - if at all - some anonymous e-mail address, automated answers and generic online documentation.
Problem is not that FAANG is incompetent in IT. It's just not feasible to cover Millions of individual problems if you grow to a certain size.
So I dug into packet captures and found that the switches were using all-zeros gratuitous arps to populate the forwarding table more quickly, which is a fairly common practice. The SQL servers saw this as in indication of a duplicate IP address (the garps were for 0.0.0.0).
Technically this did trigger the duplicate IP address detection RFC, but was never a problem for other server builds or any other server operational capacities. Cisco was the other vendor involved and came out with an update to allow for a timing delay for the all-zeros GARP. However given the timeline runway and the need to do a bug scrub for just one access area in a large data center with other much more lucrative capacity builds the only fiscally responsible thing was to look to the vendor at the heart of the problem.
However it was not possible to get any response from microsoft on it in spite of having the most expensive support contract they offered. The monthly late fees for the project were in the 8 figure range, so microsoft was dumped since they were not answering the phone. It was not for a lack of trying either. Our so-called "high touch" liaisons were equally frustrated.
It was weird since we were not a small customer - we were one of their largest. If a fortune 10 can't get microsoft to answer the phone, what hope does anyone else have?
gnabgib•18h ago
WarOnPrivacy•15h ago
And most importantly, the rightest title for an article about the user-hating, CoPervy, chaos-hydra that is Microsoft.
avazhi•14h ago
gnabgib•14h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
altairprime•14h ago
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize
The author’s title is significantly lower signal than the first sentence of their post. When the original title is defective in such a manner, the site accepts alternate titles, with preference given towards those that use the words of the post linked to compose a more informative title. The submitter does so here: “Microsoft, anyone home?” could be generically applied to hundreds of different Microsoft issues over time; the selected quote is much more precise. Plus informative, minus rhetoric is an excellent generalization of what makes a good HN title edit.
minebreaker•14h ago