Why I Hate Microsoft So

You know what?

I don't really have anything against Microsoft as a company. I'm sure if I could, I would buy shares in this company as they would seem to be a good investment. I'm sure they treat their people well. But tonight, I got truly annoyed with Microsoft and it wouldn't be the first time. This company just has a knack for borderline misrepresentation, certainly withholding relevant information, and downright lousy customer care and software design practices from the viewpoint of the end-user.

A little while ago I installed Office 2007 - the edition purchased by my employer - onto my employer-issued laptop. This was encouraged. Better software all around, I was told. Use what your students are using, know what they see and experience, keep up with the people you are supposed to be teaching, and all that. Fine.

Only one problem - the old edition of MS Office on my laptop came with Outlook 2003 which I used to sync my handphone contacts - these are work contacts, mind you - and worked just fine. The new edition removed Outlook 2003 and didn't install any new Outlook in its place.

One teeny weeny question: why didn't the installation software tell me this? What could possibly be the benefit and how could it possibly be necessary to remove Outlook 2003 if Outlook 2007 wasn't a component of the 2007 edition purchased by my employer? Why program it into your software to remove a component for which an update does not exist in the selected bundle? My employer paid for Outlook 2003 didn't it? Why wasn't there even a warning that this might occur?

Now I have to cast around for options, eg. reinstalling Outlook 2003 somehow. I wish I'd tried a sync with my handphone immediately after installation - but who could possibly have guessed this might occur? It certainly wasn't something within the realm of logic (Microsoft might beg to differ, which would really not be a surprise, but then Microsoft simply **isn't** the end-user).

I wonder which universe Microsoft's beta testers come from that nobody seems to have picked this up and tagged it as an issue to be addressed. Am I supposed to believe that none of Microsoft's testers owns and syncs a PDA or smartphone regularly to Outlook? It seems to me that this issue was deliberately ignored. Just wipe it out, leave the user to find out on his own, make trouble for him. Yeah. That's the Microsoft Way.

I suppose I should count my blessings that my *.pst Outlook data file was still there on the laptop, intact. Now I only have to find a way to retrieve the data.

The above brings to mind other ugly experiences with Microsoft that I've had, over the many years that I've been - through necessity rather than choice - a MS user - ranging from having to dial long distance to activate multiple copies of software (what a real waste of time that was), to discovering the hard way, ie. through actual use, that essential functions such as mail-merge in newer versions of Office won't work properly with datafiles created using older versions, especially over the LAN. And, mind you, the network config wasn't Linux or anything exotic - it was Windows NT, Service Pack 6, serving a PC running Windows Millenium, at that time the latest MS OS, from Dell, running the latest version at that time of MS Office, which version came as part of the bundle from Dell. So it was all Microsoft software - and they didn't work properly with one another.

Sigh. The power of Monopoly to bring corporate prosperity in spite of technical mediocrity.

LMT