The other day I was going to add some credit to my Skype account. While doing so I realized it had an old e-mail address registered, so I changed it from within the iOS app.
You know how Skype accounts got merged with Microsoft accounts way back? Well, that apparently broke the link as my Microsoft account and my Skype account now had separate e-mail addresses, so now silently a new Skype account was created (and I assume a new Microsoft account?)
The credit got added to the newly created account, so I now have two accounts to manage (one with credit and one with my Skype contacts).
I went through some similar ordeal twice before, once with Skype when they introduced the link and once with Azure (which rendered the account unusable, luckily I was just evaluating still). Both of those times I spent several hours spread over several days trying to resolve it with support, both times unsuccessfully. Truly Kafkaesque experiences.
This time I gave up after 30min and now have to juggle two Skype accounts until my credit runs out.
It's like no one ever considered that there can be exceptions to "the happy path".
That's the problem with software; there is one happy path and an infinite number of unhappy ones. I've had applications run for years and then get an issue because some user did some series of steps that the application has never seen before or want to do something reasonable that nobody thought of before.
Here it seems that the built-in feature to change the primary e-mail address of one of the biggest VoIP services in the world was never actually tested properly and breaks your account by default. It’s bizarre how broken Microsoft’s account system is.
I’m actually surprised I haven’t yet heard of people having their GH/MS accounts break in unexpected ways due to linking them.
The problem is this case it was never designed to work this way from the start. It's a bunch of cobbled together systems, some from acquisitions, that are now forced to play nicely together.
As much as we like to think that Microsoft has infinite resources to re-write everything, they really don't. They have the same problems the rest of us have. Now I have to get back to figuring out why a half dozen users from our HR system are failing to import.
EDIT: Those users failed to import because the vendor changed an internal column name last week that is exposed in the export (and now it even has a typo). Ah, The joys of software development.
At least in your case, someone is fixing it. In MS case, the broken windows seem to stay that way and pile up eternally and I'm not even sure if the engineers who could fix them become aware of them. I did get escalated/sent around to a bunch of different people, seemingly all at different levels of indirection. I assume the issues are still exactly the same several years later.
For me, the bigger issue is that the problem was not resolved.
I had a very similar issue with Minecraft and Family accounts where the credit went to the wrong account. Microsoft just wouldn’t support this issue so I ended paying for something twice.
I come from a testing QA background, and I will steal this quote, it is marvelous:
"That's the problem with software; there is one happy path and an infinite number of unhappy ones."
A bit of a wow for me was when I learned about exit statuses: 0 is success, everything else is error because there is only one way that a command can do what you want and hundreds of ways it can fail.
It might seems obvious, but that seriously taught me something.
I had a similar issue with my Android phone at a certain point deciding that my work login (which is a GSuite account) was my main one, and breaking everything for several days. I can't remember how I got it fixed, but it's another example of how things can get very tricky when the "user" is the same as the "online account."
To be fair, Teams also doesn't unterstand "I don't want notifications for the next 48 hours". I think "not understanding that there is no 1:1 relation between a person at work at a specific computer" describes Microsoft and their products quite succinctly.
Teams also does not allow people to manually set their on/offline status which makes it unusable in some German companies because it can be used for surveillance.
Is it maybe an option administrators can toggle to be enabled or not, because I just checked and there is definitely a appear offline option on my teams.
On Windows one way is to create multiple user accounts and switch between them. With fast user switching you can multiple people logged on and move between them. If you need to share files, you can just setup the access rights to allow it.
Another convenient way is to user the browser profile. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all support them. For some apps (Slack, Teams) there's not much difference if you are running it inside browser or a the separate client app.
In general the issue likely exists, not because companies are stupid, but because resources are limited and multi-profile support is not likely top priority for the most important customers (large organizations).
My OS connects to wifi automatically. It suspends when I close the lid. It warms the color temperature at night to reduce eyestrain. It keeps a short log of all the things I've copied to the clipboard, and it maintains a display of the time and date. I don't have to tell it to do any of these things - they're based on (usually correct) assumptions about how I use my computer. It would be a pain if I had to tell it to do all those things explicitly, every time I wanted them.
An OS must dovetail with our lives. If we reject the ambition of a computer as an intelligent agent that cooperates with us, and demand that it take no action without explicit command, we limit its potential and make a lot of inconvenience for ourselves.
> It would be easier, one suspects, for Google to implement multi-ID support in Chrome
They have. I use a work profile and a personal profile all the time. There's also a guest profile. OK, profiles take whole windows rather than individual tabs, but I don't find that a problem.
The biggest problem is that although I can right click and open a link in another profile, there doesn't seem to be a good way to reopen the page I am already on. I have to copy the URL, select the other profile, press new tab, then paste. Sometimes it would be nice to easily add tabs to a block list so that if I try to open e.g. facebook in work mode, I get a "You can't do that, click here to open in personal mode" screen instead of a facebook login page.
> And I know of no system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own IDs, nor browser that allows the same with tabs
I'm probably missing something, but Microsoft makes it reasonably easy to switch from personal account to work account _even with the same email address_ -- in Microsoft Edge in the same profile, in the mobile Outlook & OneDrive apps, and so forth.
Sure it could be better, but the simple workaround is to just create a browser profile (which is pretty easy to do in Chrome and indeed in Edge) per family member, set up distinctive themes for each profile, and so on.
I try to stick to Firefox for most things and wish they would make this even more intuitive for non-developers. It’d be great if my friends and family could easily toggle between profiles but I don’t want to teach them to type
+1 on this. My life got a lot better and easier when I started using FF container extension. I can now have one container for my test accounts, another container for my prod, one for my DND gaming accounts, personal SocMedia. It's flipping great. I recommend anyone looking at this trying it out.
Not GP but I use containers a lot. I have 3 profiles: default, work, and (OSS project shared accounts). It helps a lot if you have sites that are only-one-container. For example, I never open Google Analytics in my default or OSS container, so that one can get defaulted to my "work" container. For sites that you need to open in multiple containers frequently, it's a bit more cumbersome, but there's secondary addons that you can use to add hotkeys, just search "container hotkeys" or something and pick what you like.
Then beyond that there's just a lot of "reopen this site in...."
Also sometimes I just leave certain tabs open for days at a time that are in the right containers, so that helps a lot too.
So I felt that way for a while then I realized the trick was configuring the Extension Shortcuts for Multi-Account Containers.
I use Ctrl+Alt+J to open up my first container, Ctrl+Alt+H for second container, etc. Once I did that it became very easy to open up a container seamlessly and I started getting more mileage out of containers.
As a disclaimer I also consider it a workflow failure if I have to leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse so YMMV.
I also have mapped CapsLock to Ctrl.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention the containers I have are
- Work
- Work Test Users
- Work Admin Accounts
- Personal
- School
- Professional Social Media
- Online Gaming
I have been using containers for a long time. I use temporary containers for most things, so that tracking isn't an issue. If I have an account that is easy to login to (HN, say) I just use a temporary container and login through my password manager. If it is harder to login to, google say, I create a separate permanent container, name it Google, and use that.
Based on the fact that I now have the worst ad suggestions in Facebook of all the people I know (yes, we discuss this subject) I am pretty sure this works.
For email, I used multiple instances of Mozilla Thunderbird with multiple profiles. The existence of the multi-profile capability is not well advertised and not user friendly, as I need to create desktop shortcut with command-line arguments. But it works: i now have two different office 365 ID and they don't step of each other's toes.
(Yes, they do need to be completely separate processes. Tab would not work. OTOH, I find it soothingly reassuring hat they are separate processes. I feel the risk of the program have a subtle bug and starting to mix the two ID much, much lower in this way. It would need to be quite a severe bug.)
I did set each Thunderbird profile to use a different theme so that I can try to avoid confusing them.
Teams is the latest example for me of the "all enterprise software is crap" rule.
Imposed by management who drinks the koolaid even thought they are most likely not going to use it at all themselves, and almost universally detested by the actual users who will be forced to use it.
> And besides, I wanted to give Windows 11 a fair chance
So they went ahead and used pre-release (not even alpha) software that is explicitly not for folks who want stability to give it a "fair chance". Sounds like great judgement from OP.
Multi-user, single device support as a use case has gotten worse and worse as the years go by, as more and more people stop sharing devices essentially and get their own, and thus it gets tested less and de-prioritized, since 'users don't use it'. It's not a windows only thing, it's an everyone thing.
Application virtualization is a godsend for Windows - the only way to escape DLL hell or isolate authentication domains in apps that make bad assumptions.
Think Docker, but for desktop operating systems and not as complicated as Docker.
Microsoft bought the granddaddy - SoftGrid - SoftGrid's technology is the underpinnings of App-V, which is a great solution for Windows software deployment for enterprise Microsoft shops.
There are a few other solutions - one of the more promising is Sandboxie: https://sandboxie-plus.com
Well worth looking into if you are having issues like the OP was raising.
Yes, you probably shouldn't have to resort to solutions like this - but at least there are potential options even if they are sub-optimal!
I know a lot of people here use Linux or dual-boot with Windows.
Question: I have some automated testing software I wrote which uses user32.dll to perform mouse clicks, so is there a way to make that work on Linux? It's the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux permanently.
Please take a look at a program called `keynav`. I use it for clicking things with my keyboard instead of the mouse, and it works almost flawlessly, except in VirtualBox.
It's source-included, so you can figure out the method they use.
> In education, Google has no infrastructure – and where it does make an impact via Chromebooks, they are dedicated to the student as a student, not home/life chimeras.
... is not true at all in my experience (American University/grad student). The two universities I've been at both use gsuite for everything but video calls, where we use zoom. Emails run by Gmail, docs with Google docs, sharing with Google drive. As a remote TA I've used Jam board for in gsuite as a collaborative whiteboard.
Only for one release. They will remove it in the next release.
Teams is work in progress. The problem with Teams is that also its requirements is work in progress.
This sort of crap isn't just windows 11, it's everything Microsoft. Like: I teach at a university that has drunk the office 365 koolaid, but because my research assistant has a personal Microsoft account, there is no way that we can figure out to have him be able to share a OneDrive folder that I can actually access from my university account. It's just such garbage.
Its almost as if Microsoft desires a unified vision but is unwilling to make the sacrifices to get there. That's just not gonna happen when its an episode of Too Many Cooks
> In fairness, simultaneous use of multiple IDs is rarely handled well by modern UI'd desktops and remote services. All systems assume you have one ID, and if you have the temerity to want more, then you must log out and log back in again, an idea unchanged since mainframes stalked the earth.
So doing some testing and you will not be able to run android VMs without the Pro version. HAXM will not install no matter what you do and even the registry will fix itself in windows 11. Windows 11 will not let you even control certain settings and it makes it useless for development unless you get pro.
Who in the world wants an OS-as-a-service that exists to connect you to the Microsoft cloud? I want an OS that runs locally and without telemetry, handles hardware abstraction, and allows me to run applications. Windows 7 was pretty good at that. Everything since has been a step in the wrong direction.
Maybe I have a different use case, but I feel like Windows 10 is mostly ok about this. I actually like being able to just log in to my Microsoft account in order to bypass having to find where I put the authorization key. Once the OS is authorized, then I just turn off all the telemetry/cloud services/etc. and it runs smoothly and without fuss. I don't think there's any requirement for it to be online in order to function other than update downloads. I might be overlooking something, though.
Edit to clarify that I do not have to use Teams, thank goodness. That garbage is awful.
You know how Skype accounts got merged with Microsoft accounts way back? Well, that apparently broke the link as my Microsoft account and my Skype account now had separate e-mail addresses, so now silently a new Skype account was created (and I assume a new Microsoft account?)
The credit got added to the newly created account, so I now have two accounts to manage (one with credit and one with my Skype contacts).
I went through some similar ordeal twice before, once with Skype when they introduced the link and once with Azure (which rendered the account unusable, luckily I was just evaluating still). Both of those times I spent several hours spread over several days trying to resolve it with support, both times unsuccessfully. Truly Kafkaesque experiences.
This time I gave up after 30min and now have to juggle two Skype accounts until my credit runs out.
It's like no one ever considered that there can be exceptions to "the happy path".