2.24.22 UPDATE: We've been listening to your feedback, and we've made some design changes. We're releasing a new version that addresses the most common themes and makes it easier to achieve the previ...
Updated Feb 24, 2022
Version 12.0
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tcrbang You make the assumption that anyone at Microsoft views us as human beings. We're not. We're "users". We don't even graduate to "customer" unless we are a VP-level individual with purchasing authority and work for a Fortune 2000 or a government.
I seriously doubt that one person at Microsoft will lose even one minute of sleep over the fact that some cell on a spreadsheet lost a lifetime's worth of data, or that these changes may make it so that some remote workers can no longer meet the requirements of their employment. None of that will change their revenue or gross margin figures by more than a rounding error. Not even long-term reputational damage matters, because by the time that manifests enough to start impacting QBR analysis, everyone involved will have moved on to new roles, and clean-up will be Someone Else's Problem.
It isn't hard to add humanity to your development or QA processes. But the reality of life is that they DON'T get added if the incentive structures don't exist to support them. This whole debacle is a failure of corporate culture, and specifically a failure of the leadership chain that is making decisions around Microsoft's long-term cloud strategy and the incentives related to it. I'm willing to bet that even if the Onedrive team were themselves human enough to care about all of this, they just never had the time or resources to implement compassion. That was never in the budget, and even if it were, there just wasn't time for it in order to meet the launch deadline.
What matters to Microsoft emphatically is not that their customers are happy. What matters to Microsoft is that their customers modify their behaviours, business processes, and even how they live their lives in order to accommodate what is optimally remunerative for Microsoft. It has been that way for well over a decade: Microsoft does not serve its customers; it serves Wall Street. Customers are simply obstacles. Emotive, unruly, unhelpful obstacles that must be "guided to the right decision". The Right Decision, of course, being that which works best for Microsoft.
Our needs were never part of the equation.