I mostly agree with the original post and this follow-up. The Insider Program in its current form is not what I signed up for.
I signed up for the program as soon as it become available because I wanted to help make Windows better.
Why did I want that? Mostly for selfish reasons. I tried Linux and MacOS, they are not my cup of tea, and Windows, while not perfect is a better alternative from my point of view.
And I wanted Windows to be successful, because if it failed and became a dead or zombie OS I would have to switch to Linux or MacOS, and I really don’t want that.
And in any case, helping improve the OS that I use over 50% of my day is probably not a bad idea.
Unfortunately last summer, after the Anniversary Update, I decided that enough is enough and I left the program.
So, what went wrong? Well, basically I felt that most of the time I invested in the Insider program was wasted. A list of things I think are wrong:
- The volume of feedback from Insiders is so high that any important feedback is lost in the noise. And MS doesn’t seem to have the human resources needed to deal with this huge amount of feedback. This means we don’t really need more insiders. We need better insiders, and better feedback, or more resources from Microsoft to be able to find the good feedback in the sea of crap.
- As a result of the first problem, most of my feedback about real issues and bugs was ignored, for months or even years. Those bugs that made their way into production builds. And not just my feedback. I think generally over 90% of the feedback is ignored. After releasing the Anniversary Update to the public it took them months to address issues that should have been addressed before release, because the Insiders reported them.
- The Windows Phone saga. I was also an Insider for the mobile Windows 10. And I put a lot of time and effort in that too, only to see MS throw all that work away by basically giving up on their mobile OS and phone business. I gave feedback. When it was ignored I went to the forums and complained. When it was ignored I went to twitter and complained to Gabe Aul. And finally, the result was that they excluded some devices in early 2016 from receiving Windows 10, because those devices, like my Lumia 1020, had a lot of negative feedback. Of course they had negative feedback, if they didn’t fix the bugs they introduced.
As a result, I’m no longer a Windows Insider. I’m no longer using the fast ring, or the slow ring. I’m using only production builds. As a matter of fact, because of my lack of confidence in the Insider program, I even set Windows to defer feature updates (meaning I will receive a new Windows version only when is promoted as CBB, Current Branch for Business), because I feel the production releases are initially too buggy, due to the shortcomings of the Insider program, and I need to wait for a few months before they become stable enough. I really don’t want to be used as a beta tester anymore for free.
However, even after leaving the insider program I can’t stop myself from giving feedback using the Feedback hub. I’m not sure if it helps or not, but at least it gives me the opportunity to vent about the annoyances I experience while using Windows. Which is kind of what I’m doing here as well.
The latest example, the abomination that is the Mail UWP app. The damn thing has been unstable and buggy since Windows 10 was released. It has gotten better somewhat, but one important problem persists to this day: the damn copy/paste keyboard shortcuts don’t work reliably. I need to press Control+C 5–10 times to make sure something is copied to the clipboard. Or just give up and use the mouse context menu.
This copy/paste Mail issue has been of course reported in the feedback hub countless times, and has been ignored by Microsoft for almost 2 years, because the issue persists today, in the Creators Update (I have my new computer on the Creators Update, my tablet and laptop are still on the Anniversary Update). There is a “changes made” badge now on the issue in the feedback hub, but they don’t say when they made the “changes”, there is no timestamp, no Windows build number (they do say “your current build”, but I’m not sure I trust that), and they don’t specify the Mail app version where they made the changes either.
So, what is the result of the Insider Program? Basic features like copy-pasting with the keyboard, a feature introduced in Windows 1.0, 30 years ago, are now not working properly, and fixing such issues takes years, instead of days. This is not what I signed up for.