It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.

To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see.

It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.

But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.

an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.

Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.

Azure is also such a mess.

10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)

I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?

It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft.

It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.

Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s

You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.

I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.

Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.

> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

Their PM motto is "quality is a feature", and obviously not everybody needs all the features.

The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.

>> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.

Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!

>With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged,

Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.

It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.

> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.

I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years.

It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.

I pretty much doubt it's incompetence.

It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage.

And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!

> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.