Anyone but you again

In this new age of corporate transparency and customer connection at Microsoft there is a thought that crosses the minds of everyone at least once or twice a year. If it doesn’t cross your mind at all over the course of a year then I’d probably tell you that you aren’t talking to enough customers and putting yourself out there enough.

This is the thought that you have when you see a customer complain to a VP publicly on their blog that we don’t do enough for our current customers because (rough translation of a common theme) “one bit of feedback about a small feature I have questions about hasn’t seen a reply… it’s been almost 4 hours! Tell your people they need to care about me”.

It’s the same thought that crosses your mind when a customer includes you on a complaint to another team’s manager to tattle on an employee for not replying within 24 hours to the latest of what has been 20 rants in the last month that had been directed at a particular employee.

Yes, you can be a squeaky wheel and get greased by Microsoft. The VP will dutifully forward your complaint on to the right team, invoke his power, and see that you get a reply. The beaten employee will probably take a deep breath and craft you another reply to your 21^st rant.

Yes, we probably deserve some of this overreaction as retribution for years of our “rest and vest” forefathers at Microsoft ignoring you and your concerns, complaints, comments, and questions. Sort of like saying your kids will enjoy the extra layers of sun-block 2000 because polluting was convenient for our generation. It’s a good thing the kids are passionate about being in the sun or they wouldn’t put up with some of it.

The thought is… yes, customers should have some responsibilities. Seth Godin captured the sentiment perfectly with his “bad passenger” scenario yesterday. I’m in a position (since I push people towards customer connection) that I’m forwarded some egregious examples of “bad passengers”. 99.9% of customers are great, but there is that .1% that make you feel like the answer, to that .1%, should be… “you know what… linux sounds like the perfect choice for you.. in fact, I heard that the Linux, Java, and Apache communities seem to be missing their idiot”.

I can’t ask the .1% to stop, but I can ask the 99.9% of you to make sure newly minted customer focused individuals at Microsoft continue to get the positive re-enforcement. Meanwhile we’ll continue to try and by as open, transparent, and respectful as possible to those of you paying our bills. And maybe the encouragement will get a few more engineers out of the closet and the positive cycle will continue. A quick thank you, a link to their first blog post, constructive feedback, etc. Any of that would do.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  Curious how the title of this post fits perfectly with the first comment to it.
  
  JohnGalt, no one is going to listen to you if you don't even bother to listen to them.  Rereading this blog post would be a good start for you.  Learning how to determine where specific complaints belong would be a great next step.  However, the single most effective thing you could do is stop trolling with blatantly false generalizations, assumptions about the personal characters of people you don't even know, and negative statements empty of actual content.
  
  In the meantime, Josh, this is a thoughtful post, and I hope certain people take it to heart.

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  > it’s been almost 4 hours!
  
  Or 4 years, or longer.  And it's not for a feature, it's for a bugfix.
  
  > The beaten employee will probably take a deep breath
  > and craft you another reply to your 21st rant.
  
  Or craft a 21st copy of a form-letter reply which either ignores the problem, tells lies about what to do, or both.
  
  > the answer, to that .1%, should be… “you know what…
  > linux sounds like the perfect choice for you..
  
  If Microsoft would provide refunds to those .1% then the number of complaints from those .1% should drop off enormously.  Yes let those .1% use Linux and get what they paid for.
  
  I've seen enough "won't fix" replies for the next version of Visual Studio (let alone Visual Studio 2005), I do thank Microsoft for becoming more upfront about it but I'd like a refund for this too.
  
  However, I don't think Microsoft's support has gone downhill since being outsourced to India.  Useful replies are still a minority but they're more frequent than they used to be.

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2006
  I'm fine with rants as long as they are constructive. I want people to provide a ton of usefull feedback on the feedback center about when and where our products are borken and what specifically needs to be fixed.

• Anonymous
  July 04, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 05, 2006
  I don't see anywhere that says you would pay if you called.

• Anonymous
  July 05, 2006
  > I don't see anywhere that says you would pay if you
  > called.
  
  Microsoft US's support pages and Microsoft Japan's support pages say what the fee is to call.  In Japan it's 4,200 yen.  A few years ago when I looked at the US page it was US$35.
  
  A few years ago a Microsoft US employee advised me to phone Microsoft Japan's support phone number to ask for certain known hotfixes.  I made a list of my product IDs and the Knowledge Base article numbers which I intended to ask for.  Microsoft wouldn't even let me state the KB article numbers on the phone unless I first opened a paid support incident.
  
  A few weeks ago when MSDN downloads of some Vista beta stuff were working and MSDN downloads of some Office beta stuff were failing.  The MSDN concierge couldn't reproduce the problem even after we exchanged screenshots.  The concierge advised me to contact the MSDN Japan office.  The MSDN Japan office couldn't reproduce the problem and told me if I couldn't solve it then I should contact Microsoft Japan support (i.e. a paid incident).  Finally I figured out the problem:  BITS (Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service or something like that) could download Vista beta stuff to any hard disk directory, but it could only download Office to an MS-DOS compatible 8.3 directory name on the customer's hard disk.  I wrote back to the MSDN Japan office, gave details, and explained why I refuse to pay a support fee to report this bug.  The MSDN Japan office thanked me and said they would report the bug internally.  Not once was there any suggestion that I could get out of paying a fee if I had reported the bug properly.
  
  Some English-language Knowledge Base articles say that support fees can be refunded if a Microsoft engineer determines that a specified hotfix will solve all of the customer's problems.  So even when the possibility of a refund is stated, the conditions are pretty much impossible.  You know that a ton of other bugs remain unsolved even after a hotfix fixes a few.  I've just given you a pretty trivial example of a problem which wasn't diagnosed by Microsoft's engineers.  And in Japanese versions of Knowledge Base articles, I haven't even seen a hint of a possibility that support fees can be refunded when the bugs are Microsoft's.

• Anonymous
  July 06, 2006
  Norman: As I've pointed out numerous times you are NOT charged for reporting a bug against MSFT products. You can ALSO report bugs for free online via the feedback centers.
  
  If you where or are charged for reporting a bug please let me know the case ID and support engineer you were working with.

• Anonymous
  July 06, 2006
  Thursday, July 06, 2006 4:03 PM by jledgard
  > As I've pointed out numerous times you are NOT charged
  > for reporting a bug against MSFT products.
  
  Yes I've seen that pointed out before, by you and others, but when I point out the fine print in MS's English language KB articles and the entire absence of such assertions in MS's Japanese pages there has been no followup.
  
  Plus I don't think you phoned Microsoft Japan's support office to try to list KB articles for which you wanted hotfixes.  I did make that phone call when one of your colleagues persuaded me.  Your Japanese colleague doesn't agree with you a bit.
  
  > You can ALSO report bugs for free online via the
  > feedback centers.
  
  Yup, that experiment was worth trying, allowing bug reports on a few products to be submitted for free.   I submitted a few on the old feedback site for Visual Studio.  Your colleagues actually accepted a few of them, and one even sent personal e-mail to inform me that one would change from "resolved - won't fix" to being reopened.  The quantity of "won't fix" items is still pretty discouraging though.
  
  I'll honour the amount of effort you made in this thread.  For the Visual Studio bug that I found today, I will try to navigate the cumbersome Connect interface to submit a report, and will try to overlook the number of "won't fix" resolutions that already occured.
  
  It still doesn't make up for the garbage response to the MSDN bugs that I reported using "Contact Us" links.  Temporarily Microsoft had improved its quality of responses to those kinds of reports, but it didn't last.  The two that I quoted from this week show a return to the same old standard that helped provoke so much cynicism.

• Anonymous
  July 10, 2006
  Do you have a case ID you can give me?
  
  Online feedback: We fixed 80% of the fixable bugs in Whidbey and plan to fix 90% moving forward.  What % would you like us to hit? What specific issues are you frustrated didn't get fix.  I need hard data and constructive feedback to continue this conversation.  

• Anonymous
  July 10, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 13, 2006
  Thank you for admitting that you are more theory than fact here.  :-)  The FACT is that you would not be charged for "opening" an incident it the cuase turns out to be a bug in the product. If you ever are... feel free to let me know and I'd love to know the details.
  
  The %s you are looking for wrt the bugs of "fixable" VS reported.  They are pretty close.  Most of the ones that are "reported" but not "fixable" are because they were duplicate entries... ideally the report back from MS would say as such.  Other cases would include something that would induce a breaking change in a platform that would cause pain to customers leveraging the "broken" behavior.  

• Anonymous
  July 13, 2006
  > Thank you for admitting that you are more theory than
  > fact here.  :-)
  
  Your colleague's refusal to let me even state the KB numbers of hotfixes until after I would open a paid support incident is still 100% fact.  Your colleague repeated that rule at least twice during that phone call.
  
  Now maybe your employer would allow a paid support incident to be opened before actually charging.  Sorry to repeat a point which has been invariably offensive in the past, but still:  Will you put up the money for this experiment?
  
  > Most of the ones that are "reported" but not "fixable"
  > are because they were duplicate entries
  
  In the old "lab" site I think I saw some entries marked as duplicates rather than being marked as "won't fix".  When your colleagues told me they decided not to fix bugs, they really told me that they decided not fix them.

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2006
  Your company's policy for Vista beta 2 is different in some details but nearly identical in effect.
  
  I reported several bugs in Vista beta 2 x64 (AMD64) Japanese build 5384.  Some of them were marked by your colleagues as being not reproducible, whose accuracy I really truly doubt very much.  Some of them were responded to by your colleagues with requests for me to try build 5472, but your colleagues didn't give a URL from which to download build 5472.  MSDN has the July 2006 CTP downloadable in English and one other language but not in Japanese.
  
  Next come two of the kickers.
  
  In response to some of my bug reports, e-mail messages say that your colleagues asked for more information.  Which bugs are they asking for information about, and how can I see the contents of their requests, well there is no way.  The messages contained URLs of pages on the Connect site.  The Connect site says that I am not privileged to read my own bug reports, let alone read your colleagues' requests for additional information.  I asked for help.  Then came the answer.  Last night your company sent three e-mail messages saying that the policy is intentional.  Victims who were silly enough to pay for MSDN subscriptions in order to work free for your company on weekends in order to report bugs to your company, well, these are called public betas.  Your company does not want to fix bugs that we find.  Your company does not even want to let us see your colleagues' requests for additional information, and this policy is intentional.
  
  Earlier betas of Vista had an icon on the desktop to download the bug reporting tool.  Page
  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/evaluate/tenthings.mspx
  still says that betas have that icon on the desktop, though of course it's no longer true.  In page
  http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=467250&SiteID=17
  one of your colleagues told us how to download the bug reporting tool.  That is what I used in order to submit the bugs mentioned above.  In one bug report I mentioned the absence of the icon.  One of your colleagues marked that as "not reproduceable".  I must admit, some of your company's lies are still pretty funny.

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