Microsoft Receives Heavy Criticism For Changing Windows Live's Login Procedure

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 9, 2011
Updated • Dec 16, 2014
Microsoft
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When you look at various sign in and log in forms on sites and services like Google Mail, Facebook, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail you will notice that they all look different despite sharing the same basic system. Users somehow need to enter their username and password, and often have options to stay logged in when using these forms.

Microsoft recently changed the Windows Live sign-in without prior notification. You may recall that the service displayed multiple user tiles if users had signed in with multiple user accounts before. It also offered options to remember the user (remember me) and to remember the password.

The new Windows Live Sign-In has been changed, and those options have been removed. Users who access the login page will notice that Microsoft has removed the user tile per saved account option and combined remember me and remember my password into a keep me signed in option.

Microsoft has been criticized by users for removing previously available options. Remember Me basically has been removed completely. It was convenient for users who did not want to save email and password, but only their email address so that they did not have to re-enter it every time they sign in to a Windows Live service.

Remember Me was also responsible for the user account tiles on the sign in pages.

Why have the two features been removed by Microsoft? There have been three core reasons for that, according to a post by Eric Doerr on the Inside Windows Live blog:

Customer confusion: We got consistent reports from customers who were confused by the design. Not understanding which checkbox did what and as a result accidentally leaving account tiles at an internet cafe or a friend’s house were common complaints. Depending on your settings, sometimes you were signed in but still had to click the tile, sign-out didn’t always work as expected, sometimes you had to enter a password and sometimes not – it seemed random and confusing. To make matters worse, tiles only worked on Internet Explorer; other browsers always had the simpler experience.

Some customers were confused by the two checkboxes and the tiles, that's what the statement above basically says. Microsoft is however not addressing the underlying problem. Users should not use remember me, remember my password or the new keep me signed in on public computers, ever. Those that do have a different problem than just leaving their account accidentally logged in on public computer systems. The new setting does not change this at all. The only thing that is not longer displayed is the user account tiles during sign-in, but it still can happen that users stay logged in on a public computer.

Changing trends in device ownership: As more people bought laptops and smartphones (which tend to be used by just one person), we heard more feedback that the tiles just got in the way, and what people really wanted to do was to just get to the service without interruption. We knew from our telemetry that fewer than 2% of users were using the tiles, but 100% of our users were interrupted by them in the old design.

A change again because of some users who could not figure out how to remove tiles from the sign in pages. While I have never worked with tiles, I'd guess that each was linked to a cookie on the system. Clearing the cookies would therefor remove the tiles from the system. Again more of a issue for users who do not know how to do basic stuff like that.

Consolidation on a primary account: Increasingly, customers are consolidating their Windows Live usage into one primary account. It used to be common for one person to have multiple accounts. As we’ve integrated Windows Live ID across other products like Xbox, Windows Phone, SkyDrive, and Office –the core account has become more valuable, and it’s become less necessary to switch between accounts.

While that addresses one issue that some users may have, it neglects the fact that many households are using a single computer system and single user account on that system for their Internet. And suggesting that those households and communities should create separate user accounts for each user may be sound, but it neglects the fact that many computer users do not know how that is done.

windows live sign in old new

User comments have been mostly negatively, including:

Captain Sky

As others have said, by removing the ability to only save your email address and not your password you have made things less safe. Very strange change in my mind (and many other I have talked to about this).

Zwanzer

You say that working with aliases is the solution to that and I tried to figure it out.

It is COMPLICATED and I can't get it to work when I login.

I cannot understand why you replaced something very easy and user-friendly with something that is so complicated.

Cindyjay

My friends and I all have families who share the home PC. Being able to sit down and simply select which account one wanted to use was perfect. If security was ever an issue, one simply would not choose to have password remembered.

Integrate email accounts? Not if we're talking about mom, dad, brother, sister, grandma and whoever all sharing the same computer....... all with their own Hotmail accounts.

The suggested solution (to create multiple user accounts for windows on 1 computer) is in my situation inconvenient because of the normal startup (which normally brings me to the desktop) is now interrupted with a login. And I should do so specially because of Hotmail???

Jumbo Frosty

Customer Confusion? If customers were confused between the difference between "Remember me" and "Remember my password", why not just change the labels to something less confusing, like "Remember my User ID" and "Remember my User ID and Password".

Changing trends in Device Ownership and Consolidation on Primary Account explain why you would want to add the "Keep me signed in" feature, but doesn't explain why you would get rid of the old features. For people who are sole users of their computer, it is great to give them the speed and convenience of remaining signed in without having to retype their user ID and password.

But why take away a feature which is beneficial for people who share a computer (such as a family computer) or for security reasons don't want to remain signed in (like accessing Hotmail from a work computer, and don't want to worry about logging out before someone from their company helpdesk accesses their computer).

Even the work-around suggestion of creating different Windows logins is absurd. With the old Hotmail feature, I could be creating a PowerPoint presentation on a shared family computer. If my wife wanted to check her email, she could just interrupt me, and with a few mouse clicks view her Hotmail email, and let me get back to PowerPoint. Instead, you are suggesting that I close my PowerPoint presentation, log out completely, and then she log in, check her email, and then log out, then I log back in, and then reopen my PowerPoint presentation. Hardly simpler, faster, or less confusing.

Well the list goes on and one. Have you noticed the changes on the Windows Live Sign-In pages? If so, what is your opinion?

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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