The enshittification of technical support information

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I apologise to anyone inadvertently offended with the title of this post, but if the BBC’s Technology Editor can use the word “enshittification” as an example of retrograde progress, then so will I. It was also the American Dialect Society’s “Digital Word of the Year” in 2023, so that seems fair.

You see, I’m writing this on my phone, as I wait for my PC to be rebuilt onto a new corporate setup (and as the US Election results come in, which have not lightened my mood).

One of the issues I had whilst preparing to wipe all my data was a OneNote export process which said:

“OneNote cannot pack these sections because some sections have not yet been fully synced and could not be downloaded. These pages will not be saved. Continue anyway? Yes | No”

Great. It’s probably some embedded media that no longer exists… but that message is not very helpful for identifying a problem. There are hundreds of pages of notes across about a hundred sections. Which pages won’t be saved?

Still it could be worse. There’s plenty of cutesy messages these days that say something along the lines of:

“Oops, something went wrong”.

Nice. What went wrong? Can you give me a clue please so I might be able to find a resolution to the issue?

A brief history of technical support resources

When I started working in IT, we didn’t have the World Wide Web. Admittedly, we didn’t have as much information at our fingertips either but IT support often required a subscription to a database of knowledge articles. These were created by the software vendor and were reliable. At ICL we had something called PC-PARIS (PARIS was the support knowledge base). Microsoft had TechNet subscriptions with support information and updated software. Both of these were distributed to subscribers in CD-ROM format. This was a time when a typical Internet connection ran at around 33Kbps.

Errors had codes. We could look up what they meant and identify the cause. Not now. What does “[your application] ran into a problem and had to stop” mean?

As the web took off, so did blogs. People like me posted answers to problems we found. Then big websites started SEOing their way to the top and user-submitted content was the way forwards. Some of that content was good. Some of it less so. And we’ve all seen that geek on an online forum who doesn’t answer the question but instead provides a terse comment as to why the thing being asked is totally wrong because why would anyone do it that way anyway?

AI FTW?

Now we have AI answering the questions. Google or Bing will insert an AI-generated response at the top of the search results and, sometimes it’s helpful. But it’s an LLM – it literally makes stuff up based on probability. Some of that stuff is just wrong.

I may just be a grumpy old man, but I really just want detailed problem reports, accurate analysis, and reliable search results. Because not all progress is good progress.

Featured image from Pixabay.

Upgraded Azure support for Enterprise Agreement customers

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I recently found myself in a situation where I tried to log a support request on my customer’s Microsoft Azure subscription, only to find that they didn’t have any eligible support agreements in place.

You'll need to buy a support plan before you can submit a technical support request

That seemed strange, as from 1 May 2016, Microsoft is offering a 12-month support upgrade to all customers that have or intend to buy Microsoft Azure services on an Enterprise Agreement (EA), except those customers with a Premier support contract.

Digging a little deeper, I found that:

“Microsoft will begin upgrade for existing Azure customers on Enterprise Agreement on May 1, 2016, and plans to complete the upgrades by September 30, 2016. New customers will be upgraded within 30 days of account activation. Customers will be notified by email upon being upgraded. For more information, please talk with your account manager or contact EA Azure Support through the Enterprise Portal”

But, the Enterprise Agreement Support Offer page that contains this information is subtitled: “to activate, contact your Microsoft account team”, so I contacted my customer’s account team.  Initially, they said that the customer needed to contact their Microsoft Licensing Solution Provider (LSP), who were equally confused, but I pushed a little harder and the account team investigated further, before arranging the necessary support.

So, if you’re an EA customer and you can’t wait until September to get an upgrade to your Azure support agreements, it may just be worth a chat with your Microsoft account team.

Short takes: text editing; Windows Phone; and recovering deleted images…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

More snippets from the life of a geek playing at being a manager in the IT industry…

Replacing text with a carriage return/line feed in Windows Notepad

It’s a long story but I needed to find out how many people are in our department, at a level above me.  My manager is on holiday, so I couldn’t ask him. Instead, I drafted an email to the whole department, expanded the distribution list and then counted the names…

Of course I didn’t quite do it like that… I pasted the list into a text file (which I thought I’d import to Excel as a CSV and then count the number of rows). That didn’t work out (I got 111 columns instead and I lost count shortly after AA, AB, AC, etc.) so I tried replacing the “; ” with line feeds in Notepad. Notepad can’t do that, but Word can… Ctrl+H will open the find and replace dialogue and using ^p as the string for the replacement will insert a new paragraph mark. 111 replacements were made (hence 111 names).

Changing the voicemail number on my Windows Phone

One of the issues with my iPhone is that I can’t change the voicemail number from 901 (O2 – the network my phone thinks it’s on) to 443 (Giffgaff – the MVNO that my account is actually with).  I’ve jailbroken and hacked around with config files but it doesn’t work on iOS 7.0.4.

Thankfully, my Nokia Lumia 625 (running Windows Phone 8) is a little more flexible.  When new, it asked me what the voicemail number I needed was.  In the absence of any information from my service provider (EE), I googled and found information that suggested it was +447953222222. My IT department later suggested I should use +447973100123 and changing it is as simple as hitting the ... in the phone app and entering settings, then changing the voicemail number.  As my messages are still intact, I guess that both numbers actually end up in the same location…

Turning off Twitter’s lock screen updates on Windows Phone

Talking of Windows Phone, when I installed the Twitter app it asked if I wanted to see selected tweets on my lock screen.  It seemed like a good idea at first, until I realised I couldn’t actually click on them.  Turning off the Twitter lock screen updates was difficult to hunt down – it’s not set via the Twitter app settings but in the lock screen settings, as Jamie Thomson (@jamiet) and Craig Hawker (@craighawker) highlighted to me.  Thanks guys.

Recovering deleted images from a camera flash drive

Of course, any of us who work in IT know that we automatically get to provide a family IT support service.  I shouldn’t complain because, after my parents in-law paid for someone to do some work on their PC I was horrified to see that he had removed Microsoft Security Essentials and added AVG (which I had removed because it kept nagging to upgrade to a paid version), installed a load of unnecessary software (Defraggler, Firefox, etc.).  My “keep it simple, stupid” approach to septuagenarian IT had been destroyed by someone who wanted to inflict his way of computing on others.

Anyway, back to the point…

…My Mother in-law was disappointed to find she was missing some images on her digital camera.  She swears the camera did it by itself (I suggest it was user error) but, critically, no new pictures had been taken since.  Following advice from PC Advisor, I used a free application called Recuva to restore the deleted files on the memory card (ironically, from the same software company that creates Defraggler, the tool I said was unnecessary a little earlier).  It was beautifully simple, although I was unable to get Windows to recognise the camera as a drive (it does depend on the camera) and had to mess around with card readers instead.