Horrible experience with Microsoft Azure

Quite some time ago, several times I was playing with Microsoft Azure. Once, for myself, once we built the prototype project that required cloud infrastructure.  I was able to create a lot of complex things quite easily. Everything was nice, quite intuitive, and I had to use pretty much only common sense and very light internet searching.

But a week ago, I was trying to setup a Azure subscription to pay for GitHub metered usage for testing. But the experience was absolutely horrible. I don’t know if it is related to Microsoft’s statement that AI is doing 30% of their work, but my whole experience feels like I was working with something that barely reached alpha quality.

It started very simply. I entered my Microsoft credentials, and I got an error message that my account is deactivated due to inactivity. It wasn’t a dialog that explained what happened and how to re-activate my account. No, it was a login error. Just in case that was a paying account. Paying to Microsoft.

I used another account, but when I tried to click anywhere, I was asked to re-login. After login I got another message to re-login. I had to switch to Microsoft’s Edge because Azure simply does not work in Firefox.  And this effectively was a demo of my future Azure experience.

Then I was trying to create a directory, then a user, and set permissions. I got error after error after error. Most of them were gone after I tried again. Everything was non-intuitive and quite hard to understand. I was actively using AI because I simply would not be able to find things I wanted to do.

When I switched the directory to another Azure subscription, it created a user and then refused to do anything until I deleted that user. It didn’t like that the user was a super administrator and had too many rights. But I didn’t create that user.

Somehow, UI was way worse than what I remember from more than 10 years ago. Fonts were small, blurry, and hard to read. Even colors were somehow bad. There was no polish, and everything felt like it was just finished a few hours before I started to use it. Technically, I could do everything I needed, but nothing feels polished. Even animations feel annoying.

I don’t know how else to explain it. It felt like somebody created a ticket to add a new user. And the developer did the bare minimum work to finish this ticket. Technically, it is possible to add a new user, but the design is very basic, there is no help when such a user already exists, and so on. Just barebone experience.

Honestly, if I didn’t know that it was written by Microsoft, I would say that 3 students wrote it, and they were quite inexperienced. I had issues even with deleting the directory. It states that I must delete all users before I can delete the directory. But there were no users.

Just in case, it wasn’t a day when they had some service issue. And it wasn’t just a service. As I said, everything looked quite bad. UI, design, errors, strange messages that didn’t explain the problem, etc.

Just in case I’m absolutely not a Microsoft hater. I think they still make the best OS and office package. And I was not trying to find something bad just to have “content”. I was trying to do my job and nothing else.

Microsoft Azure is a product for enterprise customers, but it looks quite bad. There is another product that is also quite bad: Microsoft Teams. I read a couple of articles about internal structure, and it is simply horrible. I thought Slack was bad, but compared to Teams, it's just an example of quality software.

Many people are quite upset with Microsoft recently. They made a lot of bad decisions, and they do not want to stop, and they continue to make more and more. I don’t understand why I cannot install Windows without local admin if there are no network drivers. I don’t understand why I have to sign in to Notepad. I don’t understand why Microsoft is pushing AI into our threats if it is so great. You don’t need to push something great. People would queue up to pay for it. I can continue on and on and write several posts about it.

I think that Microsoft’s management is responsible for this. They clearly lost touch with what people really need, and the worst part is that competition is quite high. MacOS and Linux are quite popular among regular people. A lot of people are switching to using tablets entirely.

I hope they will go back to their senses because I invested too much of my life in the Microsoft ecosystem. I really-really hope. I want good old Microsoft that cares about its customers, and that makes very good products.