Das ist empörend: Microsoft slams umlaut for email depth charge A bug in Outlook 2016 is making it harder for German users to get their email. If users include the two-dot umlaut in their email password, the system won't authenticate them and their IMAP account will refuse access. Microsoft has warned that the issue could result if any Unicode character is used, but it cites three …
I see articles like this now and just sigh.
Microsoft do not seem to test anything anymore, or think of anything outside a little Redmond bubble. I mean sure they've always had moments, like most software vendors, but it has become relentless.
Bug after bug, issue after issue.
Things that did work being removed for no good reason (looking at you Outlook 2016 half-removal of functionality for Exchange 2007 systems). Not really removed initially as it worked, but then broken completely intentionally a bit later.
Undercutting partners with inferior services (I'm looking at your Office 350), then trying to force partners to sell the solution customers actively want out of.
Nightmare.
Totally agree. Codepage 865 (the danish one, in case you didn't recognize it) had some of the special danish letters mixed up with the symbols for cent and Yen. I still see the occasional bill printed by an cash register running some ancient software with the company name printed as "s<yen>n" instead of "søn".
It was "fixed" by switching to codepage 850, meaning lots of fun when trying to figure out why pc's set for one codepage would print *almost* correctly on printers set for the other ....
In 1982 an ACT Sirius arrived on my desk, after a lot of lobbying from me. It came with a choice of operating systems, CP/M 86 and MSDOS 1.2. I tried both and thought "Who would use MSDOS? It's awful." Later I was forced to use an IBM PC XT. I cursed the evil lump of nastiness, it was hopeless especially in a side-by-side comparison with the Sirius.
So yup, 34 years (and counting) of sighing at the mess that MS makes. Sadly the sheeple like Microsoft because it saves all that inconvenient thinking.
And I'm not talking about outsourcing to overseas entities, Microsoft hires mostly contractors even within the United States.
Imagine if Linus Torvalds only was allowed to work on the Linux kernel for 18 months at a time, then was forced to take 6 months off. After the 6 month hiatus, he comes back to find that someone else has taken over as head of the Linux kernel in his absence, and poor Linus is forced to make landing pages for new distros instead. While working on the landing pages, he gets pinged daily by the new Linux head asking for advice on how to manage the commits, on top of his new responsibilities. Linus now works two jobs for the price of one, and as a contractor he has to leave again in another 18 months.
In this hypothetical situation, you can easily see how Windows development becomes very fragmented and unstable over time. There's no accountability for the problems because there's a good chance that the responsible parties have either left the company or been moved to another department, and the massive training gaps leave a lot of unskilled workers in charge of mission critical projects.
Do not continue to give money to Microsoft. It's like giving implicit approval to their ridiculous business practices, and they will keep running head first into a wall if you assure them that they'll get paid regardless.
This is the end result of decades of outsourcing.
And I'm not talking about outsourcing to overseas entities, Microsoft hires mostly contractors even within the United States.
Ah, but herein lies a degree of irony. If they had offshored it, a degree of recognition may have appeared that there are other languages than American (to distinguish from the Queen's English).
It's shocking that in this day and age they are STILL not able to recognise the fact that other nations, languages and thus character sets exist - they may pay some lip service to internationalisation, but their heads are clearly still stuck in ASCII. At best they have at least moved on from 7 bit..
Pathetic, truly pathetic.
I was a contractor for Microsoft some years ago (local employer, figured it'd be good for my resume). Local law [1] requires a 100-day break after each 1-year long stint [2] so as to avoid having to give employees the same benefits as a full-time employee.
What has resulted is that contractors will work for 1 year at one local company, then 1-year at another company, then back to the first company the following year, ad nauseum. This has lead to issues where contractors stagnating because they end up under the same manager they had a year ago and their re-hiring process is just a formality. It gets to the point where there are no new ideas coming in, just the same bland one getting spread between two companies. This process has spread from Microsoft and is now affecting Amazon, Boeing, Expedia, F5 Networks, Nintendo of America, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Valve, and Zulilly. Every once in a while you get something like AWS, but then they contractors working on it go over to Microsoft and you end up with Azure where they will start to homogenize and become indistinguishable (AWS sinking and Azure slightly improving until they meet in a mediocre middle).
This isn't just a localized problem, its become deeply embedded into the Silicon Valley region, and its taking a stronger hold as there are a lot more companies to cross-pollinate between and many people in niches where they can only get hired at a single company and its competitor.
[1] Not so much a law as a legal precedent set by a lawsuit that the local companies are trying to avoid falling afoul of
[2] There are specific types of contracts that can get around that, but that's a discussion for another day
... everything must become case sensitive and ASCII7. Collation tables are evil because they take too much space in the 8k memory of 1970s computers.
Oh, and get rid of spaces whenever possible, scripts don't like them too much especially since too many forget how to deal with them.
@ Vince - The real stupidity is every European language has a different alphabet even if they use a Latin derived alphabet. I would expect a password entry to accept any valid unicode character not just what is on the standard US keyboard. This sounds like it was not tested until the German alpha testers (the users) started to use it.
If you actually believe anyone else has better unicode support you're high. This kind of stuff exists all over the place and is missed by testing all the time. It's just that we only hear about it when someone like Microsoft does it because they're big and they're bad and they're easy to blame.
If you actually believe anyone else has better unicode support you're high.
.. or using Linux. Or OSX even, just to disprove that fact that "Americans" can't get it right.
This, like security, is yet another problem fairly specific to Microsoft. In this case, that legacy is doing a fair bit of own petard hoisting...
It occurs to me after reading AC's remark "that legacy is doing a fair bit of own petard hoisting...", that one of these days M$ will hit an unexpected brick wall when something goes wrong with Windows and they can't fix it! because Windows is so burdened down with code to support legacy soft- and hardware. Where did I read that the source code for Windows is in excess of one billion lines now?
You make it sound like this is a problem only with Microsoft, when all you have to do is look at a lot of current generation AAA game releases.
Arkham Knight, while okay on consoles was so massively flawed on PC that they actively stopped people buying it and started refunding players until it was fixed. No Man's Sky has similar flaws that reek of being released too soon with too little testing.
I'll admit in this case though it's not that it's *just* Microsoft doing it that's the problem, it's that you expect something better from such a large and "experienced" company.
Microsoft is a bug factory
To be fair to Microsoft, all software has bugs. The real question is: Does their software have more bugs than other software vendors? Or is it that they *appear* to have more bugs because their software is used by more people than other vendors?
Statistics: A slippery phenomenon indeed.
"Microsoft didn't test German-language options properly?"
Remember this is the company where the OS (win7 is latest I have used) would allow you to change the language of the keyboard. Per application.
FFS! Who in their right mind thought "you know what, when someone using a German PC plugs in a UK keyboard and sets the keyboard mapping to match, lets make them do it for every fsking program they try to use, mkay?"
> German PC plugs in a UK keyboard and sets the keyboard mapping to match, lets make them do it for every fsking program they try to use
Paul, I do not use Windows, never had, but are you sure there isn't an option to tell it whether you want the keyboard layout switch to happen globally, per application, or some other combination?
The real question is: Does their software have more bugs than other software vendors? Or is it that they *appear* to have more bugs because their software is used by more people than other vendors?
Nope. We're talking percentages here - the number of people using it is irrelevant. What IS relevant is # of bugs over time, and that is the one thing that Microsoft can indeed legitimately claim a first place in without any need to rig the numbers - heck, even WITH rigging the numbers it remains firmly in the no. 1 position there.
So, in summary, yes, their software simply has more bugs. Those are simple, rad facts, not massaged statistics. There are simply no excuses, what they release as production others would not even consider beta quality. It's cr*p. Sure, it comes in a shiny box with a lot of advertising, but that doesn't change the factual content.
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Yes, and many other languages, even in French: Emmaüs (a community that help poor people), Volapük,... But these are in fact all foreign words.
The "spelling reform" also proposed to change some anomalies like: aiguë, ciguë to aigüe, cigüe,... (which would make more sense indeed)
But the article says the 3 letters quoted are examples, and they could be more. And sure a lot of languages have letters like: é è ù à, which are all natural at any place including passwords.
Simply because all our characters fit nicely into 7 bit ASCII (or 8 bit EBDCIC if you prefer). We don't need silly umlauts or accent marks to express ourselves, we just change pronunciation as we need to (see the word 'lead') and go from there.
Sure it may be confusing, but if you look at it, translations of phrases used in dialog boxen take more characters (for the most part) in the non-english forms.
What a country that uses these things! Even when we take words from others (Uber comes to mind), we knock off the silly umlauts and call it our own!
Then there are political people who want to change all of this. (*SIGH*).
Of course none of this addresses the stupidity of Microsoft and their breaking of something that was working for a long time. That goes into the category of "We're Microsoft, we don't care", but I digress.....
By that argument Hebrew would have been even better, it would fit quite nicely into 6 bit, numbers punctuation and all, and we could have stopped at the PDP-8. Of course on-screen rendering with vowels would have been a bit more difficult in the early days, but I once had a DOS program that managed it OK.
...Redmond hasn't even the excuse that, being on the West Coast, it doesn't encounter languages other than English very much. There's rather a lot of complex symbol systems in the Pacific Rim countries.
English characters. must have been invented in England then, and copied all over the place. Shame on Gutenberg too, one has to assume.
"Johannes Gutenberg refers to the process as "Das Werk der Bücher": the work of the books. He had invented the printing press and was the first European to print with movable type,[13] but his greatest achievement was arguably demonstrating that the process of printing actually produced books."
Well there are those who claim 8 bit was better than 16 bit.
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