I tried some kind of BBC micro at a computer museum, and found out that if you had an error anywhere in your BASIC program, it would just print "error". No line number, no hint at what the problem was.
I could understand some kind of ancient system not having the detail or knowledge to explain what happened in particular, but this is something that still happens in a lot of Microsoft software in particular.
Outlook has a consistent tendency to give you errors like "Couldn't get your mail for some reason", or Windows saying "Hey networking isn't working". No "connection timed out" or "couldn't get an IP address" or "DNS lookup failed" or any other error message that is possible to diagnose. Even the Windows network troubleshooting wizard (the "let us try to diagnose why things aren't working for you" process) would consistently give me "yeah man idk" results, when the error is that I'm not getting an address from DHCP and should be extremely easy to diagnose.
I get that in a lot of cases, problems cut across lots of errors or areas of responsibility, and getting some other team making some other library to expose their internals to your application might be difficult in an environment like Microsoft, but it's just inexplicable that so much software, even these days, resorts to "nope can't do it" and bail out.
