[johndavidback]

Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.

[contextfree]

(used to work at Microsoft, not on Cortana but have friends that did/do)

Broken UX flows like this are usually distributed among a bunch of different teams (each with their own PMs) so that no "the product manager" actually exists, and it's organizational seams you're running into. In many cases the individual PMs on each team are well aware of the problems with the overall flow and want to fix them, but find it hard to make room in their "day jobs" for coordinating with other teams to actually do so. So if anything I bet many of them are happy your post could give them more ammo to push prioritizing fixes.

I'm only somewhat familiar with Cortana but I think your example broken flow crosses four or five teams’ feature areas, and I know that some of the problems you identified have had solutions proposed/designed/even prototyped by various teams for years now, but I guess so far nobody's managed to get all the teams to commit to any one particular solution.

IMO though the biggest sin in your story wasn't that a broken flow for a feature existed, but that someone decided to push/spam a notification that led to said broken flow (and that someone else set up an incentive structure that drove that decision).

[hitekker]

Don't be too hard on yourself.

The same people saying you shouldn't reproach clear and obvious incompetence are the same people calling you, the author, "some random idiot"... in this very comment section.

[nerflad]

I agree with you that it should be implemented better, though I've honestly come to expect this from Windows.

It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.

[0xCMP]

I can see why he did it. These aren't beginners. They're experienced developers and managers. If you work at one of the top 5 tech companies in the world on a product most of the computing world uses then maybe this shouldn't be acceptable.

Why is it that this is acceptable for Microsoft to publish? It's not and what makes it worse is that it often gets abandoned. If they had a history going back and finishing this or making it better I'd give them a pass, but I doubt without something bordering vitriolic appearing on HN/Medium no one will care.

I think that's the real complaint. Doesn't anyone care about the experience anymore? I feel like it's only Apple who both cares and has executed a strong long term plan for this. I opened my iPhone X and that thing worked. I actually love all the little things they added. It is hard to do that, but it's these little things which make the product special or down-right frustrating when they don't.

[symfoniq]

If the current MacBook Pro is any indication, I’m not sure how much Apple cares about experience, either. I’m still trying to figure out who that machine is made for: Horrible keyboard, gimmicky Touch Bar, worse battery life than the previous generation, no ports relevant to existing devices (including Apple’s own flagship smartphone)... I don’t think Apple can be accused of sweating the details anymore, either.

[0xCMP]

Very true, but Apple is consumer focused, vs Microsoft is enterprise focused, and so I think we still have a better chance for Apple to react to this than Microsoft would have.

[Apocryphon]

So maybe they might actually fix it.