Microsoft Does it Again

Microsoft does it again, another on-stage demo which goes completely wrong:



How pathetic is Microsoft anyway? Does anything they produce work!? I'm not being platformist here, but c'mon - Apple's Steve Jobs comes on stage doing a jig and looks like the cover guy of Playgirl Magazine, Microsoft's Steve Balmer comes on stage and looks like a hippo having a heart attack, and takes 2 or 3 minutes to recover his breathing. On-stage their voice recognition does an atrocious job and they blame 'ambient noise' like there wouldn't be any in a normal office, while Apple have had voice recognition that works for over 10 years. Various Microsoft on-stage shows have crashes, remote controls that don't work, programs that show the Blue Screen of Death. I don't think there's ever been an Apple demo which didn't work, and they were showing off more impressive stuff!

And the daily grind for the average user - I boot Messenger and it asks me every two minutes to allow a different port number than the one I just authorised it for. After ten minutes of chatting whatever the person at the other end types just comes up as a blank line at my end. It tells me I have Hotmail and when I try to access it, it gets into a complex loop of self-forwarded web pages which never get to Hotmail. Which is fine, because I can't use it any more anyway - I lost my password and when I clicked on 'Lost Password' it tells me that it sent instructions on how to change my Hotmail password to... guess where? My Hotmail account. The one I can't access. I install a Microsoft product and the installer progress bar ends after 10 items, then stays at 100% for another 10,000 items after that. Or breaks right through the right-hand-side of the dialog and keeps going... right off the screen. Or the installer says it's finished and when I click 'Finished' it then starts installing another component of the same installation. Dialogs that use 'Yes' or 'Cancel' to questions like "Installer will now finish" Video's using MediaPlayer that take 5 minutes just to buffer when YouTube or Google Video finish playing the whole thing inside a minute. And having buffered it, when I rewind it to play it again it has to rebuffer it all over again before it plays! I fast-forward a bit and then watch 3 minutes of black screen with audio only, because there are no keyframes or else they're not implemented well. I install Word and it won't open half the files I created with previous versions. And keeps second-guessing me (wrongly) about everything I want to do. And oh, don't I look so, so professional to the client with those stupid boingy sound effects and animated helper characters running around the screen!

Nothing this dinosaur of the company produces works properly, or indeed even halfway properly. There are never any new ideas of concepts, only second-rate clones of products from others. Their operating systems are full of thousands of holes and vulnerabilities, viruses run rampant, and all because everything they ever do isn't the result of dynamic, intelligent programmers, but instead the results of a bunch of outdated suit-men cobbling together something, then instead of taking the time to get it from concept to marketable product, they just release it as a finished product anyway.

The staggering thing about it all is this - wouldn't you think the men that produce this crap would just say, "Damn it, what a loser of a job I've got. I don't know why I even bother coming to work to produce this crud. Surely I could get a job with a real company that produces things that work?"

Pathetic. Absolutely, completely, mind-numbingly pathetic.