Category: Microsoft

End of an era for me

Yesterday was my last day of work for my employer. I am officially retired, after 37 years of “Doing computers” for them.

Mildly interesting, I also got an email from past me via https://www.futureme.org/:

The following is a letter from July 26, 2021, delivered from the past by FutureMe
Dear FutureMe,

Friday I powered off 80 of 81 servers, shutting down GroupWise at work. My 25 year career as a GroupWise administrator has been on hospice care for seven months now. Night before last, I pulled the plug on it.

I was sad, of course. I don’t actually agree with those people who say on their deathbed that they regret spending so much time at work. I built things. The work I did made other people’s lives better. I loved that job (until it changed, and I no longer did). There is a lot of good to say for becoming really competent at a big old complex thing.

But, with my career in seven months of hospice care, I managed to get to the acceptance level in my stages of grief. I was great at something no one wants anymore. Such is life.

The whole Microsoft world is such a mess. These people have the attention span of a five-year-old, and it shows. Competent they ain’t. Well, the PowerShell idea was a good one. And they often do get the different cats in the herd to step up and at least try to define their interfaces. But overall it is a wild mess.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my non- GroupWise life. I hope something good comes along

P.S.: Did I call it? Microsoft now has their official Linux distribution: CBL-Mariner. Therefore, Windows 15 will really just be CBL-Mariner running WINE. 😉
Future Me

Five years ago, I was motivated to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible. I started paying $2,000 per month to get to zero. This was accomplished in November of 2025.

I had to drain my cash reserves a lot. My financial advisor had told me that she wanted me to have $25,000 in cash in the bank when I retired. I calculated when that would be and picked a date. Later I had to move it a week to better align with the company pay periods. But it was a happy coincidence that my retirement date was five years after I was made to shut down GroupWise.

I had even asked my manager if they would have given me a golden handshake to get rid of me; he ran it up the chain of command, and they said no. But if the truth is to be told, I was a crappy employee these last five years because my heart wasn’t in it. I needed about $20,000 to pay off my mortgage, and if they had left my position unfilled for seven weeks, that would have offset it. Then there would have been additional savings, as it would have taken a while (four years) for the promotion chain to bump people up from step 0 to step 5 (to where I was). So I stuck around. I needed the cash.

I did do everything that was asked of me during the migration to Exchange Online. Not only that, but I even learned some of the features that Exchange Online has that GroupWise will never have. But man, search in Exchange / Outlook sucks. It should be an embarrassment to all of management at Microsoft.

I also ran the project to get rid of Proofpoint to go all-Microsoft. We lost capability there too. But even though it sucked, I did what I was told.

My retirement going-away lunch was great. My co-workers were super kind. They got me a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. I hope they didn’t have to buy it new, because the price of RAM today is ridiculous, and it would have been too much money.

Another gift was a whole collection of Buc-ee’s steak grilling spices. I love it! I’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s yet, but I’ve been told that they are as large as a K-Mart used to be.

The cards people signed were enough to make a grown man cry.

I will be forever grateful for the path God put me on that let me be “The GroupWise Guy” for my employer for so many years.

Microsoft list of “We’re not done until you don’t run”

I’ve since seen a few more instances of “Microsoft software isn’t done until competitors won’t run”. I don’t have a nice succinct list, though.

I don’t think I should include the WordPerfect for Windows font problem in the above list. In the above list, Microsoft wrote code to damage their customers who used competitors products. Microsoft tested that code and shipped that code using their monopoly position to customers who were then blindsided by the malevolent code.

The WordPerfect for Windows font problem was different from that. Like the DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run problem, WordPerfect and Microsoft had a formal partnership agreement. But Microsoft didn’t ship subverting software in this case. They promised to ship a working API spec for calling a font to be rendered, and then … just kept delaying. While Microsoft Word was getting rewritten to use TrueType, their partners were crippled by not being allowed to know how to call TrueType. So “withholding support” isn’t the same as shipping corrupting software. More details at Ars Technica.

Microsoft does the I.F.S. again.

I.F.S. = Incredibly Fucking Stupid

TL/DR: 5,000 workstations are hit with a surprise reboot in the middle of the morning because the policy says “Audit mode only” and the documentation doesn’t warn that “Oh by the way….”

At work, one of our security team members changed a policy in Microsoft Defender. The policy had a piece: Audit Mode Only.

When I read Audit Mode Only, I would believe that this would be a low-impact change. Nothing really is going to change, but some things will start to be logged. That’s what I would expect, and that’s what my co-worker expected.

Silly him. He hit Apply and 5,000+ machines got notified that they would be rebooted in 5 minutes. And then 2 minutes. And then all the work you have in progress was sent to go kick rocks.

If adding Audit Mode Only were going to impact things, wouldn’t it behoove Microsoft to warn people? Yeah, no, we’re talking about Microsoft here. Nowhere before the Apply button is one warned that one is about to reboot every machine in the organization.

Look at the date on that: 5 years ago. And four years later in the same thread, one guy reports still being hit with it.

Turns out that hitting Apply deploys the policy that won’t do anything but audit, but deploy does force a reboot. Surprise!

I think the biggest failing here is that for five years, Microsoft had a chance to put large warnings into the product about what will happen, and they did not.

The icing on this cake was that it happened at 10:30 AM on a Tuesday. Once per week, at 10 AM on Tuesdays, our highest elected officials hold a Public Meeting, in their chambers, where official business is conducted, with a couple hundred people in attendance. The timing couldn’t have been worse (or better, if the goal is to expose what clowns Microsoft are).

Microsoft Outlook Search is not going to get better

It will get better if you pay more, though.

It has been four years since we abandoned GroupWise, and I still get people who say to me, “Man, I miss GroupWise.” They know that I was the GroupWise guy for twenty years, so it is the obvious topic when I pass them in a hallway.

But still… they have a point.

I know that what they hate about Outlook is that search sucks. Randomly, there was even a meme on a website two days ago:

Outlook search is glaringly bad. You know the email that came in only a few days ago. You know a word in the subject line. You go into search, put in that word, and … there are countless results but not the email you’re looking for.

You try a different keyword, and the search still fails it. You try searching by who you think sent the message, and finally you find it WITH THE KEYWORD RIGHT THERE IN THE SUBJECT LINE!

(insert particularly profane profanity directed at its founders, its management, its programmers, and the horses they rode in on here)

GroupWise never had this problem. I know because I got to maintain the indexer. I had nightly jobs that kept the index up to date. The GroupWise search function was great. Once in a while, if someone’s mailbox had a problem finding things, I’d reindex the whole mailbox.

Fundamentally, Microsoft Exchange has a poorer design, which does make it tougher for Microsoft. Well, okay, if your product is crappier, it should be cheaper too, no? It is not.

And you, dear reader, who is being played for a chump by Microsoft, can fix this problem by just throwing a few more dollars per month at Micro$oft:

Copilot

Yes, if you pay for a Copilot license, it can ingest your mailbox. Then you use Copilot to find your email for you. It does so with ease.

Which goes back to the point: sure, what you paying for is shit, but why would Microsoft fix Outlook search when you’re going to be thrilled with the results after paying more for Outlook + Copilot?

I am certain this is what is behind the newly announced E7, G7, K7 license plans. Microsoft knows how to dangle the carrot in front of the hungry, and the hungry keep ignoring that it was Microsoft shorting them their rations in the first place.

New Year, new Microsoft fuckup

At work, someone else on my team is responsible for pushing out desktop software, and the decision has been to remove Adobe Acrobat and use Microsoft Edge instead. That’s fine; I agree with simplifying the environment and only installing Adobe stuff if one has a license because one’s job is creating or editing PDF files. The fuckup is that Edge notified me this morning of a new feature in Edge: “We’re picking up where you left off. If you don’t want this feature, you can turn it off in Settings”

Liars.

The settings button is right there – the icon looks like a gear – but clicking it brings up only “Pin toolbar”, “Hide all annotations”, and “View document properties”.

No, the document properties don’t control anything.

Even Microsoft Copilot doesn’t know where this new setting is. It says it should be found behind the three dots menu … and inside that, the gear icon for Settings, and inside that, the Cookies menu, but that is fruitless.

Mostly, I’m complaining about two things:

  1. Someone on the Edge team created a new gear icon for their random three settings, and QA didn’t reject it with “We already have a Settings section – put your stuff there!” No, they let the stupid design ship into production.
  2. By making the new option default to “on”, Microsoft is reinforcing what is wrong with them: “it’s not your computer, we will do whatever the hell we want because it is our computer.”

Perhaps the fuckup is that upper management at Microsoft has so emasculated their QA department that they don’t have the ability to prevent stupid from shipping into production.

And as always, someone at Microsoft did not conceive that their new idea might be half-baked. “We’ve created a new feature! Of course everyone should be inflicted with it!”

Grrr.

Once per week, our help desk system runs a report I created, and it sends out a file attachment with the exact same file name. This is a report and does not need to stored long term – it is a snapshot of what happened during the last week. There is zero reason to add a date to the file name and end up with 52 new files per year. The idea that a new file with the old file name is a different file apparently didn’t occur to whomever was pushing the new feature.

What I don’t want, is to start reading this document on page 17. This week is a new file, even though the file name is the same. Last week, I got to page 17 because that is where the summary finished and the detail began. This week, I want to start on page 1, because that’s where the summary starts.

I would like the ability to disable this pick up where you left off feature1, but that option appears missing in all the settings menus I could find.

So not only did Microsoft ship into production a duplicate gear icon with lame options, but they didn’t get the new option into the real settings. I cannot turn this new feature off.

I am so looking forward to retirement, when I won’t have to put up with Microsoft’s dysfunction.

  1. Microsoft, famously as I remember it, was the inventor of the phrase “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” a.k.a. “It is working as (poorly) designed. Pray that I don’t design it further.” ↩︎

Microsoft added AI to Bing (fail)

For the first time ever for me, today MS Edge gave me a search result that automatically sent me to their AI chatbot. Of course, the result wasn’t helpful – I needed information about how to do the task with PowerShell, not interactively. So I clicked the button to copy the AI chatbot prompt, did new search, typed in “powershell” and pasted the original query in. It came back with results.

The results were wrong. Completely wrong. But they looked like they might be right.

If I were some new sysadmin trying to figure out something I was unfamiliar with, this would have so fouled me over.

I just have to laugh at Microsoft being so incompetent.

I mean, I know I have a chip on my shoulder about Microsoft. But man they keep shooting themselves in the foot. It’s hilarious.

Microsoft’s company motto appears to be “Quality is Job Secondhundredandthirteenth”.

Microsoft moving their documentation to GitHub – What could go wrong?

I’m not a Windows expert: as much as I dislike Microsoft for their lack of ethics, this should be no surprise. So when I do need to do Microsofty-sorts-of-things, I need to RTFM – which I’m fine with. They took the time to write the manual so I wouldn’t waste valuable people’s time with basic questions. I should Read The Friendly Manual.

I also know that things people link to might change behind the scenes. There’s no way for the changer to know that something else on the planet links here, so yes dead links happen. It should be a temporary problem; and as soon as someone who knows where the page moved to can supply the answer, the dead link can be fixed.

Recently I got a 404 This is not the web page you are looking for on Github. The source document is on Microsoft’s GitHub for PowerShell. Specifically the paragraph that said “Install PowerShell using Winget (recommended)”. That contained the sentence “Note: see the winget documentation for install instructions.”

I’ve never dealt with Winget before, so yes, please, let me read how to install it.

As of this moment, if you were to click on the link winget documentation you get 404 This is not the web page you are looking for.

Okay, this can happen. I have zero idea of what the actual link should be; but, I can let someone know there is a problem. I opened an issue in GitHub.

And it was closed, with the comment “The URL is correct on the published docs site. The links in the markdown source files are relative to the docs site, not to Github”

Well that’s nice. Between that and 404 pennies, I can get a coffee at Starbucks.

Microsoft did something good in Windows 11

I know that I dislike Microsoft because they cheat. But if I’m going to have at least a little bit of integrity, I need to admit it when Microsoft does something good. Yes, they did something good in Windows 11, even if it took them 30+ years to copy the idea.

In Windows 11, you can select a file and right-click on it, and the popup menu lets you copy the path of the file to the clipboard.

If you didn’t know about this, and you start using it, you may be surprised at just how useful this is. I’m not, because I’ve had that functionality all along these last 30 years in WinBatch. For 30 years, I’ve had an easier time of it than you, because I’ve always had right-click clipboard tricks at my fingertips.

And I do have some sympathy for Microsoft taking so long to implement this feature. Microsoft had been caught stealing ideas from software vendors who sold (or wanted to sell) Windows utilities. Wilson WindowWare, the publisher of WinBatch, made Windows better by providing a macro recorder for Windows. It was kind of a sham though, because playing back the same mouse and keystrokes – without the ability to edit the macro – was more teaser to buy a product than helpful.

But if you bought the product, it was magical.

And Microsoft decided (this time) to not stab their partner in the back by implementing the partner’s idea themselves.

I did buy WinBatch. I bought it for my personal use. And in fact, I conviced my employer to buy the compiler, at $500 per year. What that gave me was an unlimited site license to run as many WinBatch scripts as I wanted on every machine in my environment. The compiler embedded the scripts inside a .exe much like the Perl PAR modules do, so you get a Windows .exe that runs your Perl script. The interpreter is embedded, the DLLs are embedded, and the script is embedded, and it all launches from the .exe

At work, I put the runtime DLLs on the public folder of every NetWare server where users log in. I compiled scripts to the small .exe option, and then copied the .exe to the file servers. Well, I didn’t copy them, I had a WinBatch copy them for me. Then I edited the Novell login script to launch the WinBatch exes.

Did I need to take an inventory of every drive letter mapping on a machine? Yes. Could I do that for 2,500 machines and write the results to a shared drive? Yes. Oh, and by the way, how about listing which printers were installed too? This was reasonably competent tech for 2005. WinBatch had a set of Windows Registry search-and-replace calls, so I could launch from a login script a utility that changed registry keys on your machine after we migrated you to a new server.

Anyway, I loved WinBatch, and used it daily. And it came with clipboard tricks: any file, any folder, mulitple files and folders: you could right-click and copy either the name(s) or the full path (including file names) to the Windows clipboard.

So when I saw that Windows 11 added right-click copy path to clipboard I was impressed. Microsoft finally did something good.

Now technically, this feature has been in Windows for a decade or more, but you needed to know to shift+right-click to get the menu option. With Windows 11, they finally just made it available without any weird key combinations. Good job, Microsoft.

Dang it Microsoft: can’t you even follow your own instructions?

This morning, Outlook popped up “Allow this website to configure mailbox@domain server settings?” No, I don’t want to, because it messes things up. The website mentioned is the autodiscover.xml serving web site. The dialog box says “Your account was redirected to this website for settings. You should only allow settings from sources you know and trust”

I click the checkbox “Don’t ask me about this website again”.

Then I click the Cancel button. The other button is “Allow” which is specifically what I don’t want to do, ever again.

That’s the combo: “Don’t ask me about this website again” plus “Don’t allow the change”. That’s what the dialog box prompts for, and that’s what I choose, and the dialog box goes away.

And of course it’s nagging me with the same prompt an hour later. It will continue to nag me for all eternity if I have the fortitude to resist it’s nagging.

I have to wonder if somewhere in the souce code commments, someone had to add above the “Don’t ask me about this website again” checkbox “Just kidding. We don’t record or care if the user doesn’t want to be asked again. Stupid user.”

It was Microsoft who presented the checkbox. I’m just asking them to implement what they presented. But apparently they aren’t competent to do that.

I probably ought to write a WinBatch to wait for that dialog box to pop up, and automatically close it with the options I want. And having thought that, I expect that at some time soon Microsoft will offer to sell me a Windows Copilot skill, for the low low price of $1 per month, to auto-dismiss the nag they implemented. Ain’t Microsoft grand?