The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable".
Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit.
Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.
stalebots serve a purpose but they can be extremely annoying also.
I literally have 10+ issues bookmarked on Github I have to keep responding on to prevent the stalebots from wiping the issue out.
They are all issues affecting my software, and I don't want them closed by a bot just because nobody has gotten around to fixing them.
Maybe I should just go in there and submit a PR, if only I could find the time.
I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
What you're describing does not comport with my experience there.
Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate).
What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company.
> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.
This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on.
> Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals.
Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media.
Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.
One thing I'll say is that it really does feel like the worst decisions about software there were made during the Steve Ballmer era. In my case, trying to keep compatibility with absolutely insane software behavior where it tries to do way more than it reasonably should made up the bulk of my toil and issues customers had.
A former coworker described to me that it was a very different time then. People believed they were the best engineers in the world, building software nobody else could make. In some small cases maybe that was true, but generally it was not. The combination of arrogance and willingness to try to bolt on as many capabilities and unbound extensibility features as possible led to a severe problem for people (sometimes the same people!) later on in life. It's actually been cool seeing how that complexity was methodically tamed. But it also makes me fear for any future company where a similar level of arrogance is practiced.
In fact, for a lot of feature teams fixing the top user feedback issues is often part of their OKRs.
So yeah, I don't know if there are groups in MS which really don't consider their users' feedback, but from what I know that isn't the common behavior.
MS has its faults - every megacorp will have its own share of warts, but this specific one, i am not sure I can believe.
Sometimes I have to open edge on multiple costumer servers, with new user profile in each of them and with no customization of the defaults in place. Terrible experience, multiple clicks to do what you came for in the first place, and then again serving you the delightful and stylish MSN homepage,
I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.
I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product.
Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.
What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving?
I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.
I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while.
My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.
Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.
Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only.
Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.