How do you report a product bug to Microsoft?

Hello Microsoft...

I work for Boeing. Every airline we work with is referred to with a three-digit code. Air Canada's code, for example, is ACN. 

Would you please allow me to ENTER ACN in a cell in Excel and NOT change it to CAN?

Thank you.

John

>  simple decision trees to determine who gets what bug or suggestion 

Before determining who, I'm pretty sure they determine whether (to look at the bug or suggestion). And I would be not surprised if in that determination they employ algorithms created for them by Nobel winners, which find out, eventually, something like (degree of increased satisfaction from the improvement) * (number of satisfied paying customers who will notice). In that process, the vast majority of suggestions will be thrown out.

I participated in many beta programs, for Microsoft and others, and in each beta test 99% of all submissions are not bug reports, but ideas how to improve the product, even when the developer is specifically asking for bug reports and is well past the phase of determining feature set. You can't even imagine the stream of ideas every big software maker is bombarded with every day from all directions, each submitter being confident that he knows how Windows should work better than Microsoft and all other Microsoft users combined. To find out that 1% of them that actually makes sense and that is requested by at least two users, is very nontrivial task. To further find out that 1% of 1% that you have the resources to implement, is another.

I enjoyed reading your reply - very humorous! Look, Microsoft has some fantastic products and is innovating about as fast as any company can. Power BI, Machine Learning, Azure are all exceptional products that I find useful in my business. Given these resources for big data analysis, even if Microsoft opened up and very visibly ASKED EVERYONE to give them input on products, the stream of information wouldn't even come close to the amount of information each individual flight of a Boeing 787 generates.

Setting up an intelligent system that uses simple decision trees to determine who gets what bug or suggestion is NOT a hard thing to do. Your statement that it may be difficult to locate the person (expert) who can address a bug is, if true, a damning statement of incompetent management on the part of Microsoft. Do you think, when something goes wrong with a SpaceX flight, they cannot figure out who to talk to?

They may only have 4,000 employees but their systems are vastly more complex than Microsoft products, and, if you can solve the problem of finding the right person out of 4,000, you solved it for 200,000!

Anyway, enough said. Maybe Microsoft will get the hint someday and benefit from a better feedback system.

Microsoft is very big company. They certainly are interested in users' feedback, but they also need to prioritize their resources, so they go "for the biggest bang for the buck", i.e. they research what bugs affect the most users.

You being educated enough to go to this board and ask the question in competent manner is already sufficient indication that you don't represent most users, so don't expect that anything that comes to your mind will be fixed or even looked at by competent eyes. However cynical this sounds, it makes perfect business sense when you have limited resources. Competent eyes are expensive.

You can also see it from the fact that on these boards, Microsoft support reps and MVP's often give their answers. With very rare exceptions, their answers are practically always by far the most incompetent and irrelevant, to a degree where you can first look whether the next comment was made by someone affiliated with Microsoft, and safely skip it if it was. The reason is the same - Microsoft very consciously targets the audience with the most widespread IQ, so their helpers are aligned with them, rather than with you.

Just exactly how does "it" supposed to work? The more than obvious point is that Microsoft does NOT provide an easily identified method for their users to provide feedback and bug reports. Period. No excuse.