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Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Has Received 1 Million Pieces of Feedback For Windows 10 236

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?
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Microsoft Has Received 1 Million Pieces of Feedback For Windows 10

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  • by Gumbercules!! ( 1158841 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @10:15PM (#49259323)
    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.
    • by Verloc ( 119412 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @10:23PM (#49259357)

      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.

      • by Gumbercules!! ( 1158841 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @10:32PM (#49259393)
        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.
        • by snowgirl ( 978879 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @11:40PM (#49259583) Journal

          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...

          • That's what the "bonus" concept gets you. It worked so great at C-Level with CEOs gladly burning down companies to meet their bonus goals, let's spread that insanity all over the company so everyone can participate in blowing up value built over decades to meet some arbitrary bonus goals!

            'cause this is how you play the bonus game. You don't work to accomplish anything. You work to meet some arbitrary but measurable bonus goals. Usually you can gauge whether they are doable or not. Now, the goal is of course

      • by duck_rifted ( 3480715 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @10:36PM (#49259405)
        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.
        • It is like XP ... buggy and will require a sp just like XP did and has ugly theme.

          Win 7 was awesome at this stage and solid enough to go head to head with Vista and XP. Just Mere weeks before feature freeze it does not look good.

          • Well, we have around a year still until the first DX12/Mantle games drop, and we haven't heard of any W10 features we can't live without. OEM won't stop shipping Windows 8 right away, so it looks like there's some time to ramp up interest and get things under control.

            But I swear to God, if MS messes this one up and PR firms try to stop me from giving them crap, then I will repeat myself on every damn social media site that exists. I'll even make a (shudder) Facebook account for it.

            But that won't be
        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          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.

    • 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!

    • by Bite The Pillow ( 3087109 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @12:30AM (#49259767)

      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".

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      I sent in my request that Win10 supports bash or even csh like Linux and OS X. But instead we have powershell, which has absolutely no value to me as a hw/sw engineer. I'm not really looking for a new way to lock in, I'm looking for a way that the OS becomes useful again, rather than a beast i'm forced to use for certain company's games.

      Sometimes you get the feeling they don't really want feedback, they want bug reports or free marketing.

      • If you want cygwin, you know where to find it.

        • I want to not need cygwin. I want to not have to deal with / vs \, and C: versus /mount. I don't want to have to write small utilities and have to push a cygwin.dll so people can use them (or even know what cygwin is).

          Basically I want Windows to be functional out of the box for real work, not just playing games or powerpoint.

          • by caseih ( 160668 )

            Then why do you want bash or csh, which are inherently unix-centric and require the use of forward slashes, and know nothing about windows drive letters?

            From your post there I can tell you've never used cygwin. It uses /cgydrive/c for C:, not /mount. Which isn't that hard to deal with. Works well for me, since I'm used to Unix to begin with.

            There are a variety of command-line shells available for Windows you can try out. They each seem to somewhat resemble cmd.exe with various enhancements.

            • They each seem to somewhat resemble cmd.exe with various enhancements.

              That's because they actually use cmd.exe as the console engine. :)

            • Bash or csh don't have to know about "drive letters", just like they don't need to know about /vol, or /usr. It is just part of the file path and any file path that the OS understand is fine for bash or csh.

              As for" forward" [sic] slashes, c:/xyz is a valid path for windows. Even if it weren't, the completion logic in at least bash is fully pluggable so it would just* need a completion module to support backslashes, besides recompilation, ironing out niggles that would creep in and bug fixing.

              Even if bash c

          • That's just it, though: Windows /is/ so functional out of the box, it's just that you're too lazy to put in the effort to learn how to use it best.

      • Problem is in Unix everything is a file. In Windows everything is an object.

    • This is a signal to noise problem and has to always be accounted for. Every feedback mechanism has to accept crappy inputs and filter them. This is not new or unique. Be happy those people participated at all, the automated feedback from them is still valuable.,
    • 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.

      Well, after Windows 8, it's just payback.

      After all, this is the OS gave us:

      "Its flat. Flat luks cool."
      "Start Button iz lame. Start screen is mor usefl."
      "Mrtro is the fut0rz. EVerything is fill screen!!1"

    • I'm sure they were expecting the stupid comments, though. They very likely have a filter to get rid of them.
    • when it comes to giving feedback. I get help tickets from our Tier 1 support people, who are supposedly trained, that don't include usernames or what OS/App is causing the problem. Our customers mostly have masters degrees or PhDs, but getting any useful information from them is next to impossible.
  • Apps? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChromeAeonium ( 1026952 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @10:40PM (#49259415)

    Here's some feedback: can we please go back to referring to programs as programs?

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @10:53PM (#49259459)
    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 :)
  • by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Saturday March 14, 2015 @11:18PM (#49259519) Journal

    I found this [neowin.net] very disturbing.

    • by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

      Looks good.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      Wow, that looks like Windows 3.1 with a taskbar. Yikes.

  • Does a huge spew of vomit count as one instance of feedback, or do they count the chunks and derive a more realistic number?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15, 2015 @12:28AM (#49259759)

    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.

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @01:38AM (#49259951)

    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.

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @02:47AM (#49260087) Journal

    Oh, I always give tons of feedback when using Windows. But I am polite enough not to save it.

  • by namgge ( 777284 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @04:29AM (#49260329)
    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.
  • by Snufu ( 1049644 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @04:54AM (#49260415)

    of one million.

  • I wonder if they count keylogger captures as part of this feedback?

  • Let's see... you're asking people who willingly go out of their way to spend their time beta testing a system for free.

    Hmm.

    I wouldn't expect too much harsh criticism.

  • by FlynnMP3 ( 33498 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @09:42AM (#49261373)

    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.

  • Everyone hears advice, who listens to it?

    For instance, I don't think people like square corners over round. The border-less buttons are slower for the eye to see. Drop shadows helped us figure out which window was on top. But the marketing people who are designing operating systems don't seem to care.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday March 15, 2015 @03:01PM (#49262891)

    ... more than 640K of bug reports.

  • I think it's in my best interest to participate in the beta, because sure enough I'll have to use it some day. But I felt so badly burned by Windows 8 (I have a copy of "Windows 8 Pro" in my bookcase -- anyone want it?) that I had decided to hang onto Win7 until it done don't work anymore. But there's part of me that realizes that the day will come at some point where I'll have to upgrade to something, thus the somewhat anxious interest in what Win10 would be.

    But what the heck. The household got off XP,

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