Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.

I cannot even begin to count how many times I've tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn't find it.

I never want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!

Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?

    /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r -f -v -domain local -domain user -domain system

    mdutil -E -a

> The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately fired.

I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.

The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible.

It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events".

Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web.

Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's the program you want to run" to popping up it's search engine.

Alright, I'm glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I just plain don't understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it useful?). Why does it even exist?

I can see Microsoft put a lot of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works.

I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to do precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit?

Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.

How can I disable Cortana?

I've tried and failed. I don't know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them quickly.

I really wish Microsoft wouldn't bloat Windows with all these useless features. They're still acting like they are building a mobile OS. Windows 10 would be fantastic OS if it wasn't for all these misguided attempts to act like iOS and Android.

This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. You were probably in a terrible mood when you wrote this which makes it much worse than it is. It could try to parse the tracking id for sure and you probably have never dealt with tracking packages before through an API but they give you not that much info most of the time, just like "arrived at shipping location" or "on route to destination" type messages with some times, totally depends on when the tracking is sent out. This is just a very specific use case that isn't so user friendly anyway but sure they could do it better but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary.

One piece that's missing from this post is -- what did the email containing the tracking number look like?

GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends schema.org markup for it. (https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-...)

The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don't even have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana.

Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing.

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/

This is just old school Microsoft engineering. Add a feature bullet point to the package, don’t worry about how it’s integrated or if it works. It’s the same with most anything from them you dig in to.

As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft and Windows (although, let's face it, Windows has been so much better in the last few releases), I personally think Microsoft, its engineers, as well as its PM deserve (some?) empathy rather than anger for this.

I mean, I can almost imagine how this thing happens. Someone somewhere sometime said, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if xyz?" Someone else replied with "oh yeah, and it's not THAT hard!" And the PM is probably like "well, low risk, too, so whatever you wish."

Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief "yo, so cool" moment.

The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But let's be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: "some nobody-care feature is not easy to use" or "if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times, press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself". The 1st one is vague and, let's be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM would do the 2nd bug first.

I mean, seriously, how would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment below actually says, "I did not realize it exist") is "easy to use"? No automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use it and probably come prepared) won't catch it. A/B testing probably won't even get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down) probably have priority between "when I have better work-life balance" and "when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues."

--

I will agree that all of these don't justify for a shitty experience. Shitty experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has "I swear I will switch to Eclipse" moments. And Scheme has about 70 different ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case.

So, maybe a bit more love/understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the users') blood pressure anyway.

I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying "Hey Cortana, pause" is really handy if you're in the middle of watching Netflix, and you get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana didn't take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.

Removing cortana was the first thing that I did when I installed windows 10. However even the basic search is incredibly bad. It took months before it even considered searching in Downloads folder (patch fixed it I guess?). And portable apps? Yea, gl with that.

But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows apps. That's just pure trash. There're no aliases so if you don't know exactly how MS named the functionality you're fucked. And if you know the english word for it, it doesn't show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it used to be called but not the current translation you're also fucked. E.g. in english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be "Spořič obrazovky" but now it's "Šetřič obrazovky". (btw neither of these even show up in the creators update, but in falls they fixed it and "Šetřič obrazovky" will return correct result).

Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english keyboard layout.

It's increadibly frustrating to use and I've mostly given up on it and use powershell whenever I can. That doesn't fix my problems with diacritics when searching documents though.

Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like a human).

That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application, they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated.

There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.

I've been very disappointed with Cortana. On numerous occasions it has been faster to grab my Macbook out of my backpack. Why is Spotlight able to find a file on my Windows desktop's network share that Cortana would not find?

And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that's a compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.

It's got nothing on "Bixby," Samsung's me-too entrant into the world of largely useless voice assistants.

"People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my devices."

How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!".

This is most user journeys with MSFT products recently.

That entire menu makes me serious question whether anyone at MS actually uses Win 10.

No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...

Interesting that elongated micro-whines have now turned into long-form blog posts.

To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with "Sorry I don't know how to do that" which is frustrating.

Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.

The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed up in politics.

I have really enjoyed the comments here. I have observed that among my acquaintances Cortana can be either really helpful or really not helpful but I don't see a lot of in between sort of "good for this, but not this" sorts of reviews.

From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of 'communication mismatch' and how they detect it.

Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and stops, I've seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and subsequent re-framing is completely missing.

The other thing I've observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be 'human' in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates to it like a 'user' not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person pitched to Siri "I want pizza" and was frustrated at the response ("This is what I've found on the web about Pizza") And added "I want Dominos Pizza" (additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable to parse an acceptable language target for 'I want'.

Changing that to "Call dominos" or "Where is the nearest Dominos" works well because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions).

All of this the "level 4" version of autonomous conversations where the computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a response.

Seriously. I refuse to use Cortana on my Xbox One and went back to the native “Xbox” commands. The latency of cortana was atrocious and usually after all that would either reask the question or not do what Xbox would. Microsoft is really good at taking a good thing (Xbox) and making it more bloated and slower.

Jeez, this guy gets really angry and swears for pages and pages over a stupid little feature he doens't like.

Funny how MSFT used Cortana, sure she is a popular character, but she falls very far away from good to deadly to us. She ends up going rampant and turns other AIs against us. Not the most forward thinking, given where they are taking the character.

Agreed. The whole piece was emotional, but just reading that statement took it to irrational.

I think the underlying point of the article is that the experience of using Cortana could be improved, and Microsoft should be providing explicit next steps at every phase so that you aren't left wondering what's going on. I'd agree with that. But claiming someone should be fired is ridiculous, especially considering that the author still doesn't know what the feature does and it could still pleasantly surprise him. It may just need an additional dialog explaining what to expect next.

I assume the feature gives you desktop notifications when the package transitions between tracking stages, and even if that's all the functionality it provides it'd still be more useful than manually checking the tracking website yourself.

I think there are times when a firing is appropriate, as sometimes folks end up in a position for which they are obviously not well-suited. Let’s take as an example the PM that broke party chat on the Xbone when it was released. IMO, assuming the design matched the implementation, it is reasonable to question whether the PM had ever used the previous Xbox 360 or had ever played games on a console at all. I’m not saying Microsoft should boot them out of the company, but they sure as hell shouldn’t be writing specs for games consoles anymore. So “fire” them from the Xbox team, let ‘em go back from whence they sprang, be it another division within MS or some other company.

Now whether it is warranted in case, I cannot judge as I don’t use the product.

Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.

I agree. I could just as easily write up an emotional medium post talking about how Cortana is amazing because I can simply add calendar events using my voice. I could then say, "The pm in charge should be the CEO!!!1!!111".

Does it? Why?

People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position?

If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.

It certainly does nothing of the sort. There should absolutely be some kind of consequence associated with this kind of flaming dumpster fire making it's way into a production environment.

I don't think they deserve empathy at all. If they can't implement the feature to the level of being usable they should just cut the feature instead of annoying the user.

So much software development today is about getting story points on a velocity chart and claiming that features have been delivered even if the feature is actually useless. A Minimum Viable Product should actually be viable.

That's a long explanation of how nobody at a large corporation should be expected to make anything work properly.

I just recently was forced to use Windows again for some piece of software that requires it. Windows immediately proceeds to update itself after startup, fails midway to bluescreen. I ended up spending an hour to revert to the latest restore point instead of getting work done.

I don't see how Windows is getting any better than what I used 15 years ago. I think a lot of people using their tech have Stockholm syndrome and fear losing the sunk cost of their investment in that ecosystem. As someone who used to program exclusively in C and C++, I can say it's always worth switching...

At a previous contract I built a VM environment based on KVM. Some of the VMs were Windows, some Linux - a mix of Ubuntu and RHEL. It was a secure environment, where part of the job was malware analysis, so obviously part of this was nuking VMs and reinstalling them.

Anybody who has done this knows with Linux it's easy - RHEL/Centos and Kickstart files are the best, because they work. Next best is Ubuntu/Debian as Preseeds work but they're bloody awful. Once you've got one that works you're fine.

I had all the Windows 10 VMs with 'Professional' keys. Now, I imagine like you i'd suspect a 'Professional' key would imply this sort of lifecycle - rinse, reinstall. This worked for the first month.

But...

Part of the install was getting updates from WSUS, which itself is awful. Turns out halfway through our build Microsoft decided after these updates they'd change the rules. So, where I was providing the autounattend.xml (ks / preseed equivalent) this particular update decided my keys were not worthy. Professional wasn't good enough, when it was previously, so I now needed Enterprise. So none of my VM rebuilds would work without intervention. These are headless VMs. This cost us tens of thousands in engineering bucks.

If I started a company tomorrow i'd go nowhere near Microsoft. I'd not let one of my employees get near a place where they decided business logic needed to go into an Excel spreadsheet. They'd have a Chromebook and i'd pay the $6 a month for them to work without any of the extra crap Microsoft decide to do this month. Yes, Google can do the same, but i'll take the chances at $6 per month as opposed to the Windows, RDS and assorted other CALs that Microsoft decide to do tomorrow. I'd even go to O365 if I trusted them after this. Which I don't.

I agree. The person who wrote the Medium blog about Cortana, actually pasted a full URL in the box meant for tracking ID.

It would be so wow if Cortana were really able to parse the URL, identify the tracknig ID and then use it but how can implement such stuffy. Different providers have different URL and query params for their tracking page. Some may call it TrackingID, some may call trackId, tid, t, xyz....

We are the customers though, that's why it's so tragic a fall. I spent something like $200 for Windows. Microsoft doesn't get to use that excuse here. It's not some free service like Gmail; Windows is paid. See also the OneDrive advertisement fiasco.

I think Windows started going downhill for two reasons: When Microsoft coopted the desktop version to add mobile-oriented features (Windows 8), and then when they coopted it to start cross-selling their cloud and Web services.

Believe it or not:

Many of us far prefer Windows to MacOS.

And it's not just old habits:

I came to the various linux desktop environments after Windows and i still prefer some of them over both Windows and MacOS.

(Spent almost 3 years on Mac. Started as an enthusiastic user. Left really disillusioned. Have later come to the conclusion that it is really great and I'm just incompatible:-)

Up through 7, ignoring the occasional sucky release like ME or Vista that you could simply skip, Windows was quite good. I liked it more than MacOS. Something changed after 7 though, and it's no longer trying to be a good desktop OS that puts the user's needs first.

It's hard to undersell how massive a usability improvement the Start menu was compared to System 7 installed-application-launching, where you had to either manually mess with aliases or just root around the Finder each time.

Update as I can't edit original.

This was not meant as a comment on the preference between MacOS and Windows, or the user experience.

What I am questioning was the assertion that UX was the major engineering driver for MS in building windows. i.e. "optimized for".

While I can buy the argument that apple's engineering was driven by UX (for good or for ill) it doesn't seem to me that this was true for Microsoft. Not that they never think of UX, but it is sometimes trumped by other concerns.