[userbinator]

I once even spotted a Microsoft employee who took the time to raise their concerns on the public tracker:

That is just incredibly exasperating to see. When even MS employees are being forced to "bend over and take it", you'd think there would be some sort of "find the people responsible for this shitshow in the Windows team inside MS, and keep emailing them to fix it" 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?

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'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.

I can't believe the incredible amount of reality distortion they must have in order to spew forth marketing BS like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753528 with a straight face.

[asddubs]

I mean, I'm a long time linux user and think windows has been steadily getting worse too, but in reference to your linked comment complaining about "inclusively designed" being a meaningless buzzword - I was confused what it meant too, but reading the actual article the full sentence is:

>We’re proud that Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows, built with and for people with disabilities.

so that just means it's designed to be more accessible to people with disabilities. I don't really think that's the problem, and it is a concern that is directly related to product quality. Seems like you just have a bone to pick

[userbinator]

It is a meaningless buzzword, and has taken on an almost doublespeak connotation.

Remember when Windows let you adjust the sizes, colours, and fonts of every single UI element? Windows 3.x had that.

They removed that 3 versions back (Win8).

Then they removed some more in Windows 10, and in Windows 11, even stopped you from moving the taskbar to a different edge of the screen; and then, they have the gall to say it's "most inclusively designed".

"Actions speak louder than words."

[asddubs]

Well, I can't comment on their effectiveness in having made the operating system more accessible since I haven't (properly) used it in a decade and a half and I'm not disabled, I'm just saying the phrase does have meaning, and relevance to usability, as they used it. Whether their description is accurate is another question

[thaumasiotes]

> They removed that 3 versions back (Win8).

With Windows 11 still in the future, isn't Win8 just one version back?

[hulitu]

Windows is not accesible even to people without disdabilities. I have to carefully select the background color or else i will end up with a light text colour on light background or dark text colour on dark background. Or to search half of hour for the cursor in a Word document because Microsoft decided that blinking the cursor is so 80s and the cursor is hidden.

[gigglesupstairs]

Add to that the horrible icon only interface that they are perpetrating in Windows 11. Just horrible UX.

[oblio]

Doesn't Windows have a high contrast mode?

[nitrogen]

What if you want your own colors and your own level of medium contrast that works well on your specific display and lighting conditions?

[oblio]

Use an alternative Windows DE, I guess (are those still around?). Or just use Linux.

No OS is as flexible as Linux and it can't be, since desktop Linux frequently doesn't offer support so you can do whatever you want to it but it's on you to fix it.

[duxup]

Yes it does.

[VRay]

Internally, Microsoft is chock full of super pissed-off people. Everyone's pissed at everyone else, since everyone there is constantly bombarded by angry friends' and relatives' complaints. A decade under Ballmer of firing anyone who wasn't good enough at weaseling ("unregretted attrition") has resulted in a company full of people who literally don't work at all 90% of the time.

The company does an insane amount of spying ("telemetry") on its users, but all I've ever seen ANY of that data used for was weaseling out of things. "Oh, only 5% of users use that feature" or "Oh, that bug only happens 0.1% of the time". Of course, if you use a product with 1000 bugs and each one of them has a 0.1% chance of occurring on any given month, you're going to run into bugs all the time

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

From an outside Windows user and admin perspective, I find it weird to blame Balmer here. I recall the era under Balmer as one where Microsoft made a lot of stupid moves, sure, but they were generally still pretty responsive to user feedback and I distinctly recall receiving our paid support on SQL issues from actual Microsoft-employed SQL engineers. Today all our paid support issues seem to go through clueless third party companies, and Microsoft very much seems to actively despise Windows users.

[tester756]

>you're going to run into bugs all the time

yet it doesn't reflect reality

[jmgao]

> 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?

Presumably, that's "Thanks, <my username>@" as a signature, since the name matches.

[gigel82]

I heard the issue is that there no longer are "people responsible". Since Windows was moved under E&D, there is literally no one claiming ownership of Windows. So divisions like WebXT (the folks shoving advertisement in the OS, forcing Edge usage, etc.) are doing as they please with no oversight.

Windows is no longer a 1st class product at MS, it's 3+ layers below the CEO, same tier as Teams, or OneDrive... so no wonder it's going down the shitter.

Pretty strange if you ask me.

PS. This is 2nd hand info from friends that are MSFTers.

[headmelted]

I don’t think conflating inclusivity and/or diversity action with specific product issues is helpful or comes off well here.

[nitrogen]

A team that ignores product quality will soon run out of money to spend on solving social etc. issues. Effort follows attention, so attention should be weighted appropriately across issues, but it's not uncommon for companies and causes to over-index on just a few issues and sacrifice other aspects of team dynamics and product quality as a result.

[headmelted]

You might as well say that the team that enjoys a beer and meets up to watch the game on a Sunday is ignoring product quality.

You’ve no basis to point to social causes or anything else and say “something is causing a stink round here and it’s that!”.

Software is built by people. People have viewpoints. There will inevitably be overlap in those viewpoints. There’s no reason to think any of this has anything to do with the thread.

[nitrogen]

I'm not the OP. They linked to a prior comment of theirs that makes their case in this specific instance. Their take may or may not be an overreaction.

However, commenting generally (with all the caveats that implies), it's abundantly clear from personal experience and the commentary of others that there are certain causes which have a habit of absorbing all the air in the room. You claim there is no basis for this observation. This Feedback Hub discussion gives us one example, where a "zero negative feedback!" mandate takes the air from things that would be more beneficial to (in this case) product quality.

In the OP's example, redefining words to have meaning contrary to their prior accepted usage is an example of air (or energy or attention or whatever you want to call it) being spent disproportionately, with quality suffering as a result.

To borrow an old metaphor, a falling tide grounds all boats. A cause, any cause, whether it's a zero negative feedback mandate or whatever, that lifts some boats while lowering the tide overall, will eventually leave every boat stranded, including the ones the cause is trying to save.