Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

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.

<i>I once even spotted a Microsoft employee who took the time to raise their concerns on the public tracker:</i><p>That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to &quot;bend over and take it&quot;, you&#x27;d think there would be some sort of &quot;find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it&quot; 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?<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I can&#x27;t believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28753528" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28753528</a> with a straight face.

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.<p>Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like with online petitions: most people feel they have <i>done</i> something after signing a petition, but the vast majority of petitions don&#x27;t change anything.

I&#x27;ve heard the tool&#x27;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&#x27;s only used for sentiment analysis on keywords (&#x27;people generally hate&#x2F;love the new FooBar feature&#x27;).<p>A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they&#x27;re actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>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. &quot;Just give it time&quot;, even 6 months and I still missed the taskbar actually functioning. Same reason I gave up my Mac (or, one of them).

The fact that the text is &#x27;Hello there&#x27;.<p>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.

The Feedback hub... A few things are completely a dog&#x27;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.<p>How do you tell someone they just need to delete everything they&#x27;ve done and start afresh? Because that&#x27;s the only thing that could fix their Xbox game delivery experience.<p>I got their Ultimate sub to play FS2020, and also Forza with my son, but I&#x27;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.<p>Simply put, the games - or &quot;Experience&quot; 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.<p>I absolutely hate it. It&#x27;s in shambles, the dev managers - and engineers - should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves given the access they&#x27;ve got to resources to make it right. Why can&#x27;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&#x27;s snot?<p>I&#x27;m saying this as someone who loves the WSL2&#x2F;Win10 desktop Dev experience equally as much as I detest their Xbox gaming store.<p>(Now that I&#x27;ve voiced this, I&#x27;ll unsubscribe my Ultimate sub, just stick to DCS, and find other games to play with son.)

Companies do this sort of thing all the time. Leave a bad review on the Google play store. It won&#x27;t be edited immediately but it might become impossible to find or vanish quickly under lots of good ones.<p>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 &lt;Unicode poo emoji&gt;. Lots of other people did too. They&#x27;re retiring it now and have &quot;ended their partnership&quot; with user voice

&gt; somebody at Microsoft edited a critical comment that I made earlier this week to simply read “hello there”, still under my name<p>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&#x27;s will, is unacceptable. I&#x27;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&#x27;s mouth). It&#x27;s especially bad when, as is the case here, the edited comment reflects poorly on the author.<p>It&#x27;s not just discourteous, it&#x27;s a tort in at least the UK where I live (namely a violation of the &quot;moral right&quot; against &quot;false attribution&quot;) and likely many other jurisdictions too. Do this enough and eventually somebody sufficiently litigious will sue you, and you&#x27;ll deserve it.

You would think that suggestions for the Azure site would at least get a better treatment. It&#x27;s not Windows, it&#x27;s supposed to be Microsoft&#x27;s cash cow, right?<p>But no.<p>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]<p>Some were suggestion from fellow Microsoft people.<p>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&#x2F;review depends on having a clean backlog.<p><pre><code> 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&#x27;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] </code></pre> That&#x27;s just one example, it&#x27;s the same for almost all requests in [0].<p>The bit about &quot;suggestions that are inactive for 90 days&quot; 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.<p>That&#x27;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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D++site%3Adevelopercommunity.visualstudio.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=+Gloridel+Morales+%5BMSFT%5D...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developercommunity.visualstudio.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;add-previous-build-time-stats-mediamean-in-build-s&#x2F;1034987" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developercommunity.visualstudio.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;add-previous-b...</a>

Windows 11 is so obviously a no go, games and office was Microsoft&#x27;s last redoubt for relevance on personal hardware. Here&#x27;s a prediction: in ten years this company will be smaller and called &quot;Azure&quot;...

Just want to say how much of a pleasure it is to use any ol&#x27; minimal gnu distro compared to this mess.<p>Not as polished as Win95 or 2000, but at least everything is consensual.

I’ve done contract work for Microsoft, Amazon and Google.<p>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.<p>It is entirely possible to do this, but enjoy the hell ride there.<p>My hats off to you if you manage to figure it out in 1 workday.

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 &quot;real&quot; 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.<p>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.

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

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&#x27;t seen a single reason ta make me switch.

Microsoft has recently been pushing a new centralized web based feedback portal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedbackportal.microsoft.com&#x2F;feedback&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedbackportal.microsoft.com&#x2F;feedback&#x2F;</a><p>It looks like they have imported feedback from other places such as the feedback hub.

(offtopic)<p>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.

I don&#x27;t like it, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s &quot;right&quot; (whatever importance that has here), but it makes sense why they&#x27;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.

My experience was bit different. I find there are caring Microsoft employees who would address the feedback&#x2F;request in the best way they possibly can. I always got a reasonable reply and willingness to help.<p>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).

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this is all about ExplorerPatch - this 3rd-party solution allows user to revert the &quot;<i>experience</i>&quot; of newest W11 taskbar and it&#x27;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&#x27;s workaround.<p>I expect that at some point in future, perhaps included within some W11 build that changes users workflow once again, the &quot;never combine&quot; taskbar feature will be added back and presented as a breakthrough.

I&#x27;m really really tired of the Windows issue with their Xbox aka Game Pass App and Microsoft Teams.<p>I can&#x27;t wait for the day I&#x27;ll never have to use a Microsoft service again in my life

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

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&#x2F;B-tests etc

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

Nice to see the super dimensional fortress is still chugging along &lt;3

&gt; to simply read “hello there”<p>General.. Kenobi.

Feedback Hub indeed seems to be useless - because it is designed to act as a sink hole.<p>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&#x27;s not a &quot;bug&quot; which needs to be addressed directly by developers.<p>And really? That alone is a reason to go through a harrowing downgrade process to an earlier OS version?<p>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 &#x2F; click-saving feature. I ended up clicking on each one until the correct window was in front.<p>It surely was worse UX than simply cycling through all open windows by the keyboard shortcut. Which isn&#x27;t exactly power-user knowledge.

&quot;We are listening to your feedback&quot; is corporate speech for &quot;we don&#x27;t give a shit about your opinion&quot; especially when Microsoft is involved.

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

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?<p>Vote with your wallet and get the fuck off Windows and all the attendant bullshit that comes with it as soon as possible.