Posts by paatisooth

Microsoft forges One Teams App To Rule Them All

An extension of the mess that is MS Identity

You'd expect that a giant like Microsoft would at least be able to come up with a consistent approach to identity, but this split personality "microsoft account" vs "work or school account" is about the stupidest and most infuriating solution you could every hope to see. I can't begin to describe the frustration of trying to login to a service using my Microsoft 365 account and being told "that microsoft account does not exist". *I* know that's because my 365 account is actually an Azure AD, sorry, Entra AD account, and a Microsoft Account is actually a Windows Live account, but try explaining that to someone non-technical. The Identity team at Microsoft should be ashamed that this mess is the best they could come up with.

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

This is the standard MS approach

Microsoft does this over and over. They announce a product which is supposed to be really cool, and looks really cool, and lots of people get excited about it. Then they release it to a tiny set of countries, so that most of the world cannot access it. Then they shut it down because of low adoption. The list of regions that WSA was available in is ridiculous. It's full of countries or regions which most people have never heard of, or have populations measured in the thousands. It's great that the pope can install WSA in the Vatican City, but people have been clamouring to get access to it and MS just ignores those requests.

They did the same thing with Cortana - they spent years hyping how awesome it was and implementing stupid things like making it speak Klingon, yet expanding availability to more than a handful of countries only happened after years, at which time they lost the entire momentum of hype that was created when it was first launched.

I'll never understand the logic that goes on in MS, where they build products and intentionally prevent people from using it, then can them for a lack of interest or adoption. Maybe if they spent less energy on rebranding products every 6 months they'd be able to put more energy into building products that people can use.

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

MS seems to have lost the plot in recent years. They have fantastic ideas which they share with great enthusiasm, and then end up scrapping or delivering an extremely crappified version of what they originally outlined. Sometimes they even release a version or two so that once they scrap the idea they allow us the bitterness of having had a brief chance to see something great.

I'm sure it started out much earlier but the first example I can recall is Windows Home Server, which had a fantastic way of just chucking in a bunch of disks, regardless of size, and combining them into a single volume which included some level of redundancy as well. Then they released WHS2 which did away with the JBOD volume and enforced much stricter limits on the types of disks that could be included. I am still inconsolable about the loss of Windows Phone... the writing was on the wall when they abandoned the consistent square tile-based UX and started sticking circles everywhere because that's what Facebook and Apple were doing for profile pics. Astoria would have been magical, being able to run Windows, Linux and Android apps side by side. Now we get to incur the overhead of a VM, and WSA is inexplicably restricted to a handful of obscure regions (at least the Pope can run Android on his Windows machine in the Vatican City if he wants to) and a tiny number of large countries. MS is developing MAUI, a single-codebase cross-platform development framework based on their own .net technology, and yet they have rebuilt their flagship Outlook product from scratch as a trash web app wrapped in a bundled browser.