Microsoft: Yet another useless ‘Product Feedback’ page

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
April 10th, 2006 • 8:16 am

It really is hard to keep track of Microsoft’s many poor attempts to provide its Mac customers with a proper avenue for product feedback and bug reporting. It keeps changing and, in most cases, the mechanism provided falls far short of the mark.

It’s the same story all over again with the latest Product Feedback page announced by MacBU blogger Nadyne Mielke on her blog.

There’s absolutely nothing new about this page. It might be marginally better than forcing Microsoft Mac users to go through the generic and horribly Mac-hostile bug reporting site. But really, what good is an anonymous product feedback page?

Why on earth does Microsoft feel that anonymity is a bonus here? If you want to report a bug, you want to make sure that Microsoft’s engineers will be able to get back to you to ask for more information or for sample files that illustrate the problem. With this product feedback page, there is no chance of this ever happening.

Add to this the fact that it’s impossible to send a sample attachment along with your bug report, and the conclusion is obvious: Microsoft does not really want to hear about its products. MacBU engineers might get off on their daily dose of anonymous and useless “Your products are great!” messages, but the rest of us would like a proper facility for reporting bugs.

Sadly, after all these years of on-line presence, no progress has been made, and submitting a bug report is still pretty much impossible.


4 Responses to “Microsoft: Yet another useless ‘Product Feedback’ page”

  1. Tr909 says:

    Pierre, instead of the negative tone you could mention that this bug-report page is not good and then come with suggestions how they could make it better.

    For instance today i cam accross a (old) interview with the webdesigner of the ESPN pages with his comments on the transition from table designs to ‘modern’ webstandards. I comment on this because of the following. They were bound to loose 2% of their visitors who will not be able or don’t want to update their netscape4 et.all. browsers and then the designer made a page to guide theses users through the upgrades “all the while constantly refining this update process by keeping track of where users stumble…”
    http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview

    So pierre, I do like your blog entries and reading stuff that might not be all OK in software-land but Negative energy is only wasted… keep up the positive :-)
    regards,

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    I did mention what was needed to make a decent bug report page: the ability to provide contact information and to include sample files with bug reports. Other improvements could include more detailed categories of problems/bugs, instructions about how to describe the problem, etc. Pretty obvious stuff.

    I don’t think I need to take Microsoft by the hand to show them how it could be done. They are not exactly like these 2% of Netscape 4 users…

    Yes, of course, my tone is negative, particularly so with Microsoft. But what’s the alternative? Accepting the status quo? Accepting the fact that a company with billions of dollars in the bank is not even able to come up with a decent bug reporting facility? That this is, somehow, normal and has to be accepted?

    I am sorry. Today’s technological world is far too frustrating to be accepted as it is, and just emphasizing the positive is far too often a way to maintain the barriers of incomprehension between technology providers and technology users. The issue here is not to provide Mac users with helpful tips about how to submit bugs to Microsoft. It is that Microsoft itself is clearly not interested in receiving this kind of feedback from its users. There’s nothing positive that can be said about this new product feedback page. It’s the same old useless web form that won’t change anything to the status quo, i.e. that the only semblance of support that you get for Microsoft products is through the newsgroups monitored by volunteer MVPs that don’t seem to realize that they are being completely exploited by a multinational juggernaut with no real interest in improving the technology experience for its customers. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

  3. Tr909 says:

    i agree :-) but sometimes i get sad with all the negativeness.
    i’m not sure but my guess is that a more positive aproach gets
    more responses and reactions (motivation etc.).

  4. Pierre Igot says:

    I know, I know… I am trying to be as constructive as I can, but sometimes things is just so infuriating, you know? :)

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