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Microsoft Has Received 1 Million Pieces of Feedback For Windows 10
jones_supa writes Microsoft's Windows Insider lead, Gabe Aul, has announced that the company has received one million pieces of feedback through the Windows 10 Technical Preview Feedback app. The app opens right from the Start Menu and it has been critical to the operating system's development allowing testers to send details to Microsoft about what they think of Windows, problems they have been facing, and if there are any improvements they would like to see. The app has been part of both desktop and phone flavors of the OS. Microsoft seems to have made a real effort lately to listen to consumer feedback and has been opening up avenues to discuss new features for some time. Have you sent feedback through the app?
Yeah, I sent them a tonne of feedback, while I tested Windows 10 - all of it bug reports but I tried to give them as much information as possible, with each bug I found.
As you can read through other people's bug reports, I noticed 90% of them are not in anyway helpful to the developers - statements like "It deosunt prnit" (with no further information as to what didn't print and on what hardware) or "why are you so dtoopid!" --- "useful information" to that effect.
It's frustrating reading because this is a chance for users of Windows to get the best possible outcome by making their voices heard - unfortunately the vast majority of people making noise should probably have stayed silent, which only increases the chances that genuine bugs and useful feedback will be lost in all that mess.
I think it was more of a PR stunt for Microsoft to be able to say "there are enough people interested in Windows 10 to contribute 1 million pieces of feedback" and "we're listening to you, the computer-using community" than it is about responding properly to any particular piece of feedback.
I think that's overly cynical and not really fair. I believe it's a genuine desire to get it right. Even if you want to remain cynical, they have every economic reason to give people an OS they want.
And that may be true, but there's an inverse problem to the one you're replying to. If they filter the useless feedback, and the escalate the useful stuff then it's necessary that somebody deciding what is useful or not follows a set of guidelines and doesn't really know. Further, there can be organizational corruption of the process. For example, suppose a supervisor of that lower tier of feedback readers likes the aesthetics of something most people hate, so they tell readers not to escalate feedback about it.
This is a non-trivial problem. The only way to eliminate the organizational corruption potential and inject more expertise in the lower tier reading is to use a vote system, like Reddit or Slashdot. Politicians' staff does something like Slashdot, whereby feedback from constituents is categorized and summarized. But that kind of system isn't foolproof either.
It's a marketing ploy, but it's a very good one, and to some extent it certainly has helped to improve the OS. Microsoft would have to actively try to mess things up for that to not be true, and they surely wouldn't be the company they are if they did things that way. I'm hoping Windows 10 is to Windows 8 as Windows XP was to Windows ME. It very well may be, and Windows 8 isn't all that bad. DirectX 12 is almost certain to be amazing, for example.
I was reminded today, that very often a company will kill the golden goose for a kick ass deep-fried goose and have an awesome quarter...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
posting AC because... well, obvious reasons.
In the later stages of internal previews of Windows 8, they asked us employees to give feedback on various iterations of the Metro UX. We'd dogfood the latest, click thru, give feedback, and in several instances, the running totals were displayed. I wish I'd taken more screenshots, because the consistent feedback internally was about 80% disapprove/unhappy with the tiled Metro UI + compenentry on the desktop or laptop. (Much more positive on the phone, tho.) Seriously, with a 20% positive feedback rate, we were told, "customers love this" and "you're the only people who feel negatively about this" and they rammed the crap UI through into production. The rest is history.
What makes anyone think they'll actually listen to feedback this time? This time with a sheltered brogrammer for a CEO, even less tolerance for dissent, and a massive brain drain prompted by layoffs, it just doesn't seem like "better" is probable at all.
I sent in my request that Win10 supports bash or even csh like Linux and OS X. But instead we have powershell, which has absolutely no value to me as a hw/sw engineer. I'm not really looking for a new way to lock in, I'm looking for a way that the OS becomes useful again, rather than a beast i'm forced to use for certain company's games.
Sometimes you get the feeling they don't really want feedback, they want bug reports or free marketing.
Windows 3.1 already had a 3D look and far better icons. This is Windows 2.0 at most.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The penalty for open source is the same as for commercial software - an erosion of their user base. Open source that doesn't get widely used doesn't tend to get a lot of broad developer support either - no one wants to be working on a piece of software that few people are actually using. In the case of Mozilla, their declining userbase directly impacts their ability to earn revenue via search placement deals. Firefox is not developed with volunteer labor.
So, I don't think it's necessarily true that there's no penalty. It's probably more accurate to say it's more of an indirect penalty than with commercial software. Keep in mind that plenty of commercial businesses have failed so badly to deliver a solid, core product that they've gone bankrupt as well. With open source, the "fall" is a bit less dramatic, since the project just quietly stagnates instead of disappearing altogether.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.