I think 90% of the time I use MS products, I am happy enough but there are some things that definitely would make them suck less:
* Sort out the single-sign on thing as others have said. Why do I have to tell you whether my account is work or personal? Why do you let me have 2 accounts for the same email address anyway?
* Endless tinkering with things like menus, control-panel settings (usually takes me 10 seconds to find the "Apps option", mostly pointless eye candy like in Windows 11 when most people would rather you just fixed the myriad of minor bugs that have never been fixed
* A proper support system, not just 1000s of call-centre types telling you to trying re-installing windows
* As a dev, not always making massive changed in .Net before sorting out the bugs they introduce far to easily. An example, I recently updated an MS extensions library and because they had added a load more constructors to a class, my dependency injection started failing but, of course, there were no obvious helpful errors.
* They have never sorted out the licensing. It is horrifically complicated and very expensive and would be easy enough to fix if they cared. Yes, we get that you are trying to make sure we don't avoid licensing by purchasing large multi-core machines or using VMs but you could do a better job
* Harmonising their hundreds of customer-facing sites like MSDN, Bizspark, Outlook, Office 365, Product Feedback etc. Even the design is all over the place but in some places you can login with the "wrong" account and it still lets you into a new account. Not cool. If I used the wrong login, tell me it isn't registered so I can find the correct one.
On the other hand, I do like their more open culture and you are more likely now to have a conversation on github with real devs who can explain some of those crazy choices they might have made.
> Sort out the single-sign on thing as others have said. Why do I have to tell you whether my account is work or personal? Why do you let me have 2 accounts for the same email address anyway?
Because the classic use-case is that people in corp environments have set up MS accounts on their work email addresses dating back many years, while the company had on-premise AD/Exchange and actually bought Office licenses. Now, the company switches to O365 + Azure AD because the CEO is following the hype train... and there comes the problem ahead: Microsoft is in a difficult legal position as they can't just blindly "merge" old accounts with corporate accounts (as the creators of the accounts may have created them on private devices, the accounts hold private data, ...), so the cleanest solution is what Microsoft has done: keep the "old" accounts around and don't contaminate them with corporate.
* Sort out the single-sign on thing as others have said. Why do I have to tell you whether my account is work or personal? Why do you let me have 2 accounts for the same email address anyway?
* Endless tinkering with things like menus, control-panel settings (usually takes me 10 seconds to find the "Apps option", mostly pointless eye candy like in Windows 11 when most people would rather you just fixed the myriad of minor bugs that have never been fixed
* A proper support system, not just 1000s of call-centre types telling you to trying re-installing windows
* As a dev, not always making massive changed in .Net before sorting out the bugs they introduce far to easily. An example, I recently updated an MS extensions library and because they had added a load more constructors to a class, my dependency injection started failing but, of course, there were no obvious helpful errors.
* They have never sorted out the licensing. It is horrifically complicated and very expensive and would be easy enough to fix if they cared. Yes, we get that you are trying to make sure we don't avoid licensing by purchasing large multi-core machines or using VMs but you could do a better job
* Harmonising their hundreds of customer-facing sites like MSDN, Bizspark, Outlook, Office 365, Product Feedback etc. Even the design is all over the place but in some places you can login with the "wrong" account and it still lets you into a new account. Not cool. If I used the wrong login, tell me it isn't registered so I can find the correct one.
On the other hand, I do like their more open culture and you are more likely now to have a conversation on github with real devs who can explain some of those crazy choices they might have made.