Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived decline and user impact

  • Many commenters report severe regressions across Windows, Office, Teams, Azure, Power Platform, and even Minecraft, including basic failures (sleep, RDP, Notepad, game-breaking bugs) and opaque account issues.
  • Several say these experiences are pushing them personally toward macOS or Linux, though they’re unsure whether this matters at Microsoft’s scale.

Market power, bundling, and incentives

  • A recurring view is that Microsoft faces few meaningful consequences: Office + Azure dominate profits, and Office/Teams bundling keeps adoption high even when users “hate” Teams.
  • Some see Microsoft as “the new IBM”: a sales‑driven B2B juggernaut where quality is secondary to contracts and bundling.
  • Excel and the overall M365 bundle are described as the main lock-ins; as long as Excel is indispensable, mediocre adjacent products can still win.

QA, Agile, and “end‑user testing”

  • Multiple comments tie declining quality to 2010s layoffs of dedicated testers and a shift to Agile/Scrum as practiced in large enterprises.
  • There’s broad criticism of “one dev does everything” (dev, QA, ops, DB, UX), driven by cost-cutting and tooling, with QA and UX often de‑prioritized.
  • Several note that Microsoft now effectively treats end users as testers; major issues are discovered only in production.

AI, automation, and code quality

  • Some see opportunity in using LLM agents for manual‑style QA of web UIs, finding real bugs and UX issues cheaply.
  • Others argue tools don’t fix a culture that doesn’t value quality; AI risks adding “knowledge debt” and low‑quality code whose full impact will appear years later.

Product‑specific experiences

  • Teams: sharply polarized. Some praise its integration with Office, Outlook, and hardware management at a compelling price; others cite sluggishness, reliability problems, and prefer Slack or anything else.
  • Office/Power Platform: described as increasingly unstable, AI‑obsessed, and half‑finished (e.g., Power Automate, OneDrive/PowerPoint sync issues).
  • Azure: anecdotes of flakiness in AI deployments and slow, confusing portal UX; some say it used to be better.

Gaming and platforms

  • Starfield is held up as emblematic: technically buggy and, more controversially, shallow and content‑light by Bethesda standards, with heavy criticism of paid mods and broken mod ecosystems.
  • Debate over whether Linux can seriously threaten Windows in gaming hinges on anti‑cheat/KLA models and whether a locked‑down “Gamedroid”-style Linux emerges.

Localization, docs, and UX

  • AI‑translated technical docs are frequently wrong (e.g., translating command‑line flags), making non‑English experiences unreliable.
  • Auto‑language switching based on IP rather than user preferences is widely despised and seen as part of the same “we know better than you” attitude.