Microsoft became incompetent in IT

Title and submission discussion

• Some argue the HN title better reflects the article’s substance than the original, while others point to guidelines to keep original titles unless clearly misleading.
• Disagreement centers on what counts as “editorializing” vs improving a vague original title.

Enterprise success vs consumer frustration

• Several note Microsoft’s revenue and stock keep rising, driven largely by Azure and enterprise bundling (e.g., Teams winning because it’s already paid for).
• Enterprise customers reportedly still get real human contact and proactive calls when things break, unlike consumers and small businesses.
• Others stress layoffs and cost-cutting indicate prioritizing shareholders over product quality or support.

Account lockouts, auth, and broken UX

• Many share experiences of being locked out of Microsoft 365, Authenticator, Outlook, LinkedIn, and Minecraft with circular, dead-end recovery flows.
• Multi-account sign-in with Microsoft 365 on the web is described as effectively broken, forcing people to use private browsing or browser containers.
• Complaints about Windows 11 include ads, intrusive updates, and user-hostile defaults.

Email, spam, AI, and “incompetence”

• Self-hosted email users report Microsoft aggressively spam-filtering non–big-provider mail, calling this “criminally incompetent.”
• Outlook/Teams “AI” search is widely criticized as worse than old filters, ignoring explicit search terms. One commenter objects that this claim is anecdotal and unsubstantiated.
• More broadly, people see AI-based anti-abuse and verification systems as brittle and opaque, with no effective appeal channel.

Historical perspective on Microsoft quality

• Several recall multiple “peaks” (DOS 6.22, Windows 2000/XP/7, Office 97/2000, VB6, SQL Server support) and notably better support in the 80s–2000s, including deep, unscripted troubleshooting.
• Others argue Microsoft has always had serious quality problems; today’s mess is continuity, not a new decline.

Incentives, scale, and industry-wide decay

• Many say the core issue is not IT incompetence but economic incentives: support that reaches a human costs more than a user is worth at massive scale.
• Bureaucracy, outsourced L1 support without real escalation, and “enshittification” are described as industry-wide, with similar horror stories from Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Meta.
• Some conclude the only real defense is owning your own domain/data and avoiding dependence on tech giants where possible.