Friday, July 24, 2015

Microsoft Is Stupid


Dear Microsoft Office 365. This is a bug in your admin interface in Office365. It prevents administrators from changing to be able to implement preview features. I've reproduced this bug for your India based support engineers using a screen share and using your screenshot scripting tool like 3 times. I am not your QA staff. Go fix your own damn code. This bug is easily reproducible - turn on DEBUG mode in your own browser, browse to the Update Services page and click the link - the button appears to update but there is no way to save the settings, and if you exit and return the settings are back to where they started from. It's NOT MY PROBLEM TO DOCUMENT IT FOR YOU!  Fix it and stop trying to make it the customer's fault that you can't QA your own code.

_eReleaseTrackSettings.aspx is the file. The line number is any line wih the code function "showCorrectDialog". The error is that the function is undefined, probably because of something stupid like you didn't syntax check the code before releasing it to production or you forgot to link in a library. In any case that's ALL THE DEBUGGING I AM DOING FOR YOU.

So far I have done the following:
  • Reproduced the bug for an engineer using screen capture.
  • Reproduced ALL THE STEPS using PSR.EXE TWICE. 
  • I am not your QA staff. You employ foreign workers at $4/hour for that.  Use them.
  • If you'd like to hire me to do QA I charge $150/hour.  Let me know where to send my invoice.
  • In the meantime you're inconveniencing thousands of users who probably cannot figure out why they can't enable the preview mode which would allow them to download and install Office 2016 which you are spreading far and wide to download EARLY because "bonus" because Office365 user.
  • Tell me - how many users not already running the preview have you had change over to preview mode lately - I bet it is ZERO BECAUSE IT'S BROKEN
There is nothing that frustrates me more than incompetent IT support engineers who will not admit the problem is in their own code, and keep on trying to blame the end user.  They hope that I will just let them close the ticket out of frustration, and then hope the problem goes away. Except it won't go away because they won't escalate the ticket to the level needed to solve it (Development).  It's more important for them to CLOSE the ticket than SOLVE the ticket.

This problem affects every one of my customers that wants to use YOUR new product - something YOUR marketing is suggesting they try.  You are idiots not to escalate this to the highest level possible, since the first impression they have with your new software is - crap this thing is broken.  And you wonder why Windows 8 was a failure.

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