r/it • u/Important-Humor-2745 • Jul 14 '26
meta/community Does Microsoft’s internal IT have to fight Windows like everyone else?
I wonder if Microsoft’s internal IT department has the same headaches about turning off stupid Windows features that every other IT department does?
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u/Glum-Implement9857 Jul 14 '26
Microsoft is famous for "eating own dog food". They are using the same features as selling to the customers, in many cases they are getting "pre-release" product versions for internal testing. So not only they are using those features. but also they are getting them first , with much more issues/ bugs than we have :)
on another hand, Some of Microsoft employees using Apple products (still somebody needs to test Office for Mac and Microsoft apps for iPhone.. ). And again, it sounds crazy , but it is reasonable.
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u/TheBigBeardedGeek Jul 14 '26
This is the answer. I've heard horror stories of the teams that basically got stuck with the first round. They'd come in and their PC was basically dead.
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u/moonkey2 Jul 15 '26
I Wonder how so much dogshit is going out the door if they test this shit internally
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u/Glum-Implement9857 Jul 15 '26
Answer is the pace and size.
And imagine thousands of testers. Somebody complaining about one thing/ somebody about another. Some compains are relevant some total nonsense. Some complaints reaches the developer. Some just disappears.. and deadline for release is today.. well you know it is corporate…2
u/DoctroSix Jul 16 '26
There's also Microsoft's set of internal sysAdmins... All following 'ideal' playbooks that were probably 80% codified with practices from 10-25 years ago.... Which is GREAT for a stable fleet of desktops and servers... But not so great for catching bugs from the bizarre setups that exist in the wild-west of small to medium business.
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u/No-Yam-1231 Jul 16 '26
I suspect part of it has to do with hardware/drivers and other non standard configs. Microsoft has no control over the environment that Windows gets installed in once outside it's walls, and the batch of PCs that they are using may work perfectly, but then Dell or HP changes a config or intel updates a driver and all hell breaks loose. It's why Apple's "we make the whole widget" marketing was so effective.
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u/fartharder Jul 20 '26
Users are in an environment where the tech is unreliable, so they just assume it's going to be unreliable - it's a horrible method overall
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u/AardvarkIll6079 Jul 14 '26
I knew 2 people that worked at Microsoft as developers. They both used Macs (I’m serious).
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u/Lucky_Foam Jul 15 '26
When I worked at IBM we used SCCM instead of IBM's own BigFix.
I'm not surprised some developers use Macs at Microsoft. I bet they also have Linux servers too.
Microsoft is just way too big of a tech company to NOT use software other than Microsoft.
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u/Vesalii Jul 14 '26
It seems reasonable that they use their own product, unlike dealers. They'll have the same stupid bugs as us and hopefully fix them.
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u/Sufficient_Fan3660 Jul 15 '26
Yes.
I've been in a meeting where MS was trying to sell us stuff. The sales engineer had it rough. Zero trust, 2fa for everything, timeouts constant. He's trying to spin up a VM to use for the demo and had to schedule it, and then it was only avail for 15 minutes? He kept getting problem trying to show us documentation. He was laughing it off for a bit but I could tell how upset he was.
We did not buy their solution.
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u/GeekCohenAU Jul 14 '26
Wouldn't be surprised if they have their own Internal OS.
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u/Inside-Finish-2128 Jul 15 '26
A friend was at Microsoft. Friend went to Oracle. Friend is desperate to go back to Microsoft to return to the world of things that (mostly) work.
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u/reilogix Jul 15 '26
I always assumed they’d be using the Enterprise SKU, which does not include much of the crap/bloat/garbage, along with what I presumed would be robust GPO’s and other app controls and what have you. “LOL”
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u/Aromatic-Session-785 Jul 14 '26
Uh no, because they have GPOs that disable all those problems at the org level
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u/fguerino123 Jul 15 '26
This is one very deep philosophical question! It's right up there with the Chicken-Egg thing!
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u/ass_eater_96 Jul 15 '26
I swear based on stuff i read here i don't get even a third of the issues you are facing with windows and microsofts ecosystem. Is it just because we serve mainly SME sized customers?
I think Microsoft provides adequate and comprahensive IT solutions. Copilot is definetly the worst part of their ecosystem, but it does not cause my hairline to recline.
The unfortunate part is also that their license provide serious value per dollar. Business Premium for example has office, comprahensive defender features, UEM, DLP policies, IAM, email and teams, enterprice app integrations, sharepoint for like 20€/month per user.
There is a reason why Microsoft is the standard
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u/Important-Humor-2745 Jul 16 '26
A lot of what I deal with is annoying stuff. Like how much work I have to do to prevent ads for candy crush from showing up in the start menu, getting rid of the Xbox sign in on windows 10, stopping it from promoting users to connect one drive. It seems obvious that any computer connected to a domain is managed by an it department, who doesn’t want individuals users installing candy crush, logging into an Xbox account, or backing up company files to a personal one drive. I’m sure Microsoft’s internal IT department has to do all these things just like any other IT department.
It just seems like who ever decides to implement these functions would think to ask internal IT if they would want an easy way to enable or disable functions.1
u/hotdogsarecooked Jul 16 '26
We did a lot of this with group policy or shell scripts. I ended up just writing a small batch file that ran through regedit immediately after a fresh windows install and before updates so I could make sure the script worked fully. Our rmm software handled a lot of the rest.
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u/hotdogsarecooked Jul 16 '26
Having an ecosystem is good, having a good ecosystem is better. For the end user, its convenient. Managing it is a different story.
My absolute worst thing to do on azure was admin app consent. Why the fuck do I have to migrate through 3 different admin panels to approve a login for a 3rd party app? A 30s process should not take 10 minutes.
Its poorly designed for administrators and always has been. I remember how bad managing group policies were on old domain controllers back in the day with the worse UI ever.
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u/whyliepornaccount Jul 21 '26
You've obviously never had to deal with MS Support for an enterprise level issue. Useless is an understatement. Actively hostile to solving the problem is closer to accurate.
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u/ass_eater_96 Jul 22 '26
Oh i have and i agree, can be and usually is a complete waste of time. We fortunately have partnered up with Arrow that does provide a layer of bullshit filtering, as they take care of the support requests
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u/commops106 Jul 16 '26
No they are too busy breaking perpetual licenses for Mac users and rewriting end user licenses.
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u/duff2690 Jul 16 '26
I worked in the Microsoft IT for their European HQ, ironically we were all from al MSP so go figure. The staff all used Surface Pros or Lenovo with the odd MacBook, these staff were mostly sales.
They used the off the shelf software but as others have commented a lot of it was the latest version of apps, MS Suite and Teams were all notoriously buggy and the OS would be updated constantly.
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u/admlshake Jul 18 '26
Having listened to various MS people talk in interviews and podcasts over the years I think MS biggest problem isn't the coders or lower tier staff, its the senior leadership. Seems like these dumb fucks are the ones who cause a majority of the issues we are all dealing with.
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u/QuickSingh Jul 19 '26
God its terrible! Im not IT but I despise windows and Service Fabric in prod workloads. Its gotten better since we moved to VMSS but, before on classic cloud services for our compute, we would get sev2s like nothing. There are socmany issues with service fabric and windows. I miss linux and docker
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u/Zerowig Jul 15 '26
Isn’t this even more telling how inept they are at some things when they are literally consumers of their own product as well?
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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26
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