Slashdot Mirror
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.
You can, via PowerShell, change it back. I will be pissed if they take it out completely.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
I have to give both Microsoft and Slashdot credit. At least they do listen somewhat to users who voice concerns about their products. It's still not as good as Windows 7, but at least Microsoft is getting rid of some of the worst parts of Windows 8 in Windows 10. And Slashdot did the right thing by getting rid of its shitty beta site after so many users pointed out just how shitty it was.
But Mozilla? Do they listen? Nope! Firefox keeps getting worse and worse with each release. The ruined UI stays ruined, and stuff like Electrolysis and asm.js are just half-assed clones of stuff that Chrome has had from the beginning, or has a much better approach for. Then Mozilla pisses around with something as fucking awful as Firefox OS.
And then there's GNOME. Do they listen? Nope! GNOME 3 was by far the worst open source screwup we've ever seen. It's still total shit, years later. If you don't believe me, go look at recent versions of gedit. Yeah, that's how badly they fucked up what was once a usable text editor.
Finally we have Debian. Do they listen? Nope! Debian's quality has taken a nosedive since they started pushing systemd. What was once the most robust and stable Linux distro, even when it came to its testing and unstable versions, is now one of the most unstable and fragile Linux distros.
Microsoft and Slashdot have done the right thing by at least addressing some of the many issues raised by users. But these other projects, like Firefox, GNOME and Debian, need to start doing that instead of just treating their users like dirt.
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.
Here's some feedback: can we please go back to referring to programs as programs?
It's because they put the feedback app in the start menu and with the start menu finally back in Win 10 users actually knew how to find it to launch :)
I found this very disturbing.
http://saveie6.com/
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
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
Let's just hope they can task an intern level employee with sifting out the stupid and passing only the potentially useful stuff up to where it might be useful!
OP was quoting Tron Legacy, where the context of the discussion is that no meaningful changes had happened, but it's a new version on schedule to generate more money for the company.
Thirty four characters live here.
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 am never going to develop a website using a tablet or phone or anything other than a desktop with shitloads of memory and a full keyboard.
Anyone using .NET, which was supposed to be a big thing starting around 2003 or so, and is still a big thing, is not going to be doing this on a tablet.
I don't want to use a tablet interface to develop for your stupid tablet interface using a tablet. I'm not going to do it.
I will encourage leadership, and that means people who would be glad to spend money for me, to not update at all.
But my voice apparently goes in the bucket of "user" rather than "people who further extend our monopoly".
When a technical preview receives that many comments it's a truly bad sign for multiple reasons:
1. The vast majority of it is likely to be noisy crap or stupendously duplicated complaints which drive issues out of view.
2. With that much feedback some seriously heavy analytics will be required to actually identify the core issues addressed in the feedback.
3. With heavy analytics useful posts get destroyed, and what may have been a detailed bug report complete with reproducability instructions may be simplified to "Issue with start menu"
I would have preferred it if they had less feedback.
I use a Kubuntu laptop. That said, what we see here is the downside to open source. There is no real penalty for not listening to users and just doing what you want. If you are doing it for free why would you care what others think, as long as you think you're right. Same deal if you have somehow gained a funding source that also doesn't care. BTW, Maybe Google liked Mozilla fucking up Firefox since that would push people to Chrome (yes I know they have a deal with Yahoo now, but most of the stupid shite was done when they got their money from Google). Gnome was a case of this combined with a crew that got too big for their britches. Design have always been uber-gnu and did things as they saw and see fit, and don't have to answer to anyone but themselves and if you don't like it, use Redhat. So there (sticks tongue out). There are a lot of projects that do care. But I think k hubris is easier with open source when you are less likely to lose a paycheque.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Oh, I always give tons of feedback when using Windows. But I am polite enough not to save it.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"It doesn't print" isn't a complete and useful report because it is just one step up from simply saying "it doesn't work". Presumably it does print for some people, so the developers really need to be able to narrow down the problem.
Does it crash as soon as it starts the print process, or does it go appear to generate each page? Does it send anything to the printer (flashing light on printer), but just no pages are emitted? Is it just that blank pages are emitted? Or random garbage characters? There can be many symptoms of not printing, and they would each suggest a problem in a different bit of code.
I haven't read the privacy statement for this, but it would be sensible for the OS to capture recent activity in a bug report, no?
Yes, it does log activity in the beta versions of Windows. It seems that their collective head is in the right place. However, all the logging in the world can't see what has come out of your printer.
Mass release of technical preview software is is showing contempt for users and developers by wasting both sides' time by duplicating effort. In my experience the best way do it is to initially release to a small sample of users an fix the issues they raise. Then release to a somewhat larger sample and fix the issues they raise, etc. If you are getting more than a handful of duplicated reports then you are ramping up too fast. If you are getting reports in at a rate that exceeds your developers capacity to evaluate them and, if necessary, follow up with the user then you are ramping up too fast.
"It's still not as good as Windows 7...": now that is comment which worries me...
of one million.
You loose credits. So there will be less contrabution to your product, distribution companies will not use your product and your name may be a stain, so your contributions may not be welcomed in other projects.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The trouble with a voting system where >99% of the users won't vote on >99% of the proposed changes is that you have special interest groups and semi-celebrities that dwarf everyone else who can't be arsed. You really need to get the opinion of a representative sample and see if 10% like it and 90% don't care or 10% like it and 90% want to burn it with fire.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't get the hate about Mozilla, the "File Edit View..." menu bar is enabled back with a couple of clicks and then what I'm getting is good enough. Still gets faster, lighter and less crashy because all of the work is under the hood, and last month replacing Ad Block Plus with ublock made it faster/lighter too.
Depends on whether MS decides to continue the success story that Windows 8 was.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What I find interesting is that Microsoft's server version of the OS is pretty damn good. With the server, MS knows exactly who their target market is and develops tools that are amazingly good (Visual Studio is much the same). In that OS, the Modern UI elements they blend in with the tools (like Server Monitor or Resource Monitor) actually make sense and give the admin of the machine an good overview of the health of the machine. I don't see their crazy attempts to blend in touchscreen elements with traditional programs to try and force UI paradigms. Furthermore, you can even decide to install the "core" version of the same said OS. That version has no GUI. It's command line only. Granted it's Powershell, but if you've drank the MS kool-aid and learned PS, it's not a terrible way to admin a machine.
In the consumer market, they really don't know for what platform they should develop the OS for. In the past, they have blindly laid down the UI paradigm of Touchscreens and forgot that Windows machines are also used for content creation, not just consumption. In the process, pissing of the majority of their consumer base that don't use touchscreens. It wouldn't be perceived so damn bad if MS made a decent tablet without it costing $2k and without the multiple hardware iterations to get there. I remember watching the reveal of the Surface and thought if they actually come through on hardware, they could actually have something useful that professionals would seek out. But no, they screwed that up too.
I think it's business as normal in MS and this press release is there only to feed the news cycle and for blogs to get all a twitter about. Internally, MS will manage to screw it up yet again by not regarding any of the feedback as worthy to alter their internal course of action.
As much as I dislike what Firefox has become, let's not for a second assume that the vocal minority that actually provides advice to your developers is in any way guaranteed to represent the rest of your user base.
Your community can provide feedback to specific cases. It cannot tell you how to design your product. You want good design, hire people with experience in design. You want the ultimate "design-by-committee", let users have a disproportionate access to your design process and watch them fight and fracture the community as they grab for power.
Relevant clicky "Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do":
http://blog.codinghorror.com/l...
Have gnu, will travel.