

Perfect example of unintuitive Microsoft workflow - dendory
http://dendory.net/blog.php?id=4e5d9c30

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Elepsis
1\. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft
to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it
would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people
responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

2\. It looks like you were using Chrome to try to open a document in the
OneNote client? For better or worse, you have to have a plugin to do that
today; there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your
PC.

The plugin we have gets installed with Office 2010 and works on IE and
Firefox. It does not currently work in Chrome, which is probably why you saw
the issue.

That's not to say that the metapoint is lost on all of the folks who work on
these features, and we try very hard to make flows work with no edge cases.
Even for a company like Microsoft shipping often requires tough compromises,
though, and unfortunately you hit some of the rough edges in our experience we
haven't yet been able to address.

(Disclaimer: If it wasn't clear already, I work on some things related to this
flow.)

~~~
dendory
1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail
system, that's pretty impressive.

2- I'm actually using Firefox, and I had 2 instances of that plugin installed
for some reason, and it still gave me the error. Although my main point is
that the error dialog doesn't tell you the real problem.

And btw I like OneNote, it just seems I won't be using the desktop version.

~~~
jodrellblank
_1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail
system, that's pretty impressive._

It's as fair and annoying as having downloads blocked from Microsoft's website
on a freshly installed server. (On one hand, at least they treat their site
the same but on the other hand, it's putting yet another needless hurdle in
the way of what I want to do. If I didn't trust Microsoft why would I be
running Windows at all?)

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aymeric
Looks like "Microsoft doesn't understand user experience" articles are
becoming popular again on Hacker News.

I would like to remind people that even a design focused company like Apple do
softwares with crappy user experience (think iTunes).

User experience is hard to get right and what you would consider a good user
experience might not be a good one for your neighbour: some prefer clicking on
buttons, some prefer clutter-free UIs with keyboard shortcuts.

~~~
ootachi
Are you crazy? iTunes has one of the best user experiences of any app on the
market today. Period.

~~~
burrokeet
Yes I agree, with two exceptions - first when clicking somewhere opens a new
itunes sub-window (who wants that?) and second they changed the reveal-in-
finder command from apple-R to shift-apple-R

Other than that it rocks (literally)

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AJ007
Pretty much any time I try to download anything from Microsoft's websites they
are a mess and make almost no sense. Everyone who is a web designer and
responsible for web design at Microsoft should be fired immediately.

One example of Microsoft's ridiculousness is their hosted Exchange services --
<http://www.microsoft.com/online/products.aspx> I signed up for it some time
last year. I couldn't get it to work with Outlook 2010. Their answer, call
tech support. I don't sit on the phone to talk to just anyone, and I damn well
don't sit on the phone to make hosted web services work with a companies
desktop platform.

Another example is Microsoft Adcenter. Adwords was more advanced in 2005. A 6
year time gap for technology is unheard of. Virtually impossible for them to
play catch up at this point. Their desktop software, Adcenter Desktop, running
on their own operating system, Windows, crashes all the time. Ooops. The
usability of the Adcenter web interface compared to Google's is like receiving
a massage verse walking on glass. Its painful.

The sad thing is, Microsoft sits on a pile of very very valuable assets. Even
with slightly above average management their business could stand to benefit
enormously from Google's antitrust problems. The adcenter platform should be
free money raining from the sky for them. But it won't be. And that is too bad
because we need real Google alternatives.

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nvictor
well good points but what does it have to do with intuition? wrong word
perhaps?

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WayneDB
This reminds me of Bill Gates 2003 complaints about trying to get Microsoft
Movie Maker installed.

<http://boingboing.net/2008/06/25/bill-gates-2003-flam.html>

