I've had a number of really negative experiences with MS evangelist - I generally see them as a sales tool, especially on the dev-side of things (I can't think of a single good developer that I know who would want to become an evangelist).
Anyways, in my ever-lasting cynicism, this is what I got from the blog post:
-There's a bug in IE
-IE bugs are hard to debug
-There's a bug with MSDN downloads
-It takes "a lot of help" for an insider to figure out how to report an issue and identify the people to report it to
-It took 20+ days, and numerous attempts to get help from Microsoft
-When the IE team says its "tracking it", you shouldn't expect any resolution
(Disclaimer: I'm the "Ravi Rao" mentioned in the post, and I work full time on the IE Team at Microsoft)
That's extremely unkind, if you ask me. We have a support line that puts you in direct contact with Product Support Services people who are best equipped to debug your issues, and I know that every support call generates a ticket # and gets resolved; in cases where the PSS Engineer isn't able to debug/sort out the issue themselves, they get escalated to us, on the Product Team - I've done tons of investigations myself, and we funnel the information back to the caller via the PSS, so they're not dealing with 10 different people but rather, maintain a single point of contact.
In this case, I not only exchanged email with Joel, but also with Ross Boucher of 280 North behind the scenes, and within the same day, narrowed down the bug to our JScript engine. A trouble ticket was generated the same day I learnt of the problem, and that's how we were tracking it. You could get the exact same service by calling our 1-800 support desk albeit the support folks will have to go through their script to make sure the mistake isn't human error at your end, to begin with ... sure, it'd be great if all your issues got resolved within 30 minutes of us hearing about it, but the reality is that it may sometimes take longer than that. You're spinning it absolutely the wrong way if you imply that having "insider connections" is essential to getting a bug report investigated.
Joel and I (and others internal to MS) worked hard to get a startup's problem resolved as soon as we could; I can't believe you're actually complaining about it.
I want to give another thank you to all the folks at Microsoft who helped us track down the problem and provided us with a simple test case that reproduced the problem. They were quite helpful, and we (along with all of our users) appreciate it.
"IE bugs are hard to debug":
Well, this particular one was hard to debug. People work around all sorts of other problems in IE without needing to contact Microsoft.
"It took 20+ days, and numerous attempts to get help from Microsoft":
It was 10 days, and most of that was my fault. I was new to Microsoft at that point, and still learning how to get bugs filed.
"It takes 'a lot of help' for an insider to figure out how to report an issue and identify the people to report it to": When that insider is new, yes :(
- The author or his startup friend didn't google "report bugs to microsoft" and click on the first link http://connect.microsoft.com/ where you can report bugs for programs including IE.
- Dealing with big companies takes more time than dealing with one small teams.
- When the IE team says it's tracking a different issue, and you don't mention it again in your blog, people who hate MS will jump to negative conclusions.
Anyways, in my ever-lasting cynicism, this is what I got from the blog post:
-There's a bug in IE
-IE bugs are hard to debug
-There's a bug with MSDN downloads
-It takes "a lot of help" for an insider to figure out how to report an issue and identify the people to report it to
-It took 20+ days, and numerous attempts to get help from Microsoft
-When the IE team says its "tracking it", you shouldn't expect any resolution