Rant: Microsoft

[jim]

I've always hated this company and their products. I've been able to avoid using their crap up until I became a pointy head manager, and now have to some of the Office tools and now of course SharePoint. It's hard for me to understand this company every managed to sell anything. I've never had to deal with their support ... until yesterday. Good god. Long story short is my son bought Office for his Mac 3 years because his university suggested it. He dropped the computer or something and had to have the hard disk replaced (they replaced for free), and last night we went through re-install process from the backup disk. I had downloaded Office originally, this was mailed to us without the product code as a backup. Well it turns out that confirmation email they sent 3 years ago to god knows what of the 10 email addresses my family has is important - it has the magic 25 character product code. Oh well, surely I'll just be able to get on a chat session and get this straightened up right away..

2 hours later, we got it. I got hung on twice after having been bounced around a couple of places and put on hold. The online chat feature wasn't working, it kept saying I was next in line and then it just throw an error. So I did the call back - which said they would call back in 5 minutes until I entered the data and then it gave me a confirmation and said 7 minutes, and then when I submitted it went to 9. 20 minutes later I got a call, blaring muffled garage punk rock music in my ear, and there I began my on hold ordeal.

One conversation sent something like this:

MS: Where did you buy the product?
Me: I downloaded it from your online store. I've lost the product code, you probably emailed it but it's lost.
MS: So you downloaded it. Where did you download it from?
Me: Your online store.
MS: Which location?
Me: What do you mean which location, it was 3 years ago and I went to an online store and bought it. You mailed me the backup disk later. I have it in my hands, and I see it was mailed from a Microsoft facility.
MS: I need to know where you bought it from.
Me: I bought it online.
MS: Did you buy from the internet?
Me: Yes.
MS: I believe you probably bought this product from our online store on the internet and downloaded it to your computer.
Me: Yes, that is what I have been telling you. I downloaded it from your online store.
MS: It appears that you probably downloaded it from our online store. The disk you have is the backup we mailed you. We mailed you a product code in your confirmation. You should type that product code in and you will be able to reinstall your product code.
Me: I don't have the product code, that's the whole point of my call.
MS: You didn't get the product code in the email?
Me: I probably did, but I lost it.
MS: You can't install the product without the product code.
Me: I know. That's why I'm calling you.
MS: You probably bought this from our online store and downloaded it to your computer. We would have mailed you a confirmation with the product code. Use that and you will be to install your product.

....

Eventually I got transferred, but on hold, listened to more static garage rock like in that Modelo commercial which I hate, and the finally got to another person who promptly hung up on me after introducing himself.

...
Fast forward about an hour, and I"m chatting with a person named Jewel. Jewel saved the day, but not before some drama. The whole conversation above basically in text. At one point, this person asked me a question about the purchase and I just lost it. I told them I have given you my name, the approximate date of purchase, how I purchased it, the actual date the backup disk was mailed to me, the name and address of the person you mailed that backup disk. I said "You are a technology company supposedly, surely you have a method of searching given that information. I have bought nothing from you before, any record that pops up is probably mine". Sure enough, 5 minutes on hold with texting and the person says they just need the last 4 digits of the CC number, which I was able to provide, and then they sent the key.

I have never wanted to be a CIO before, but I do know. Because when I am a CIO of a company, day 1 we are getting rid of every single solitary MS product we own, no matter how painful. This is crazy, we have done very little MS development here but I had a couple of people in my group for almost a year and you to buy this damn MSDN subscription or whatever which mega bucks to get access to documentation and stuff like that. Coming from an open source background my entire career, I just can't wrap my head around this model. It's insanity.

[expletive] [expletive] [expletive] company. The worst.

[cardinalkarp]

This had to be a person overseas.

We have the same issue....it's like they are robots & have a few different prescripted lines of response to you, know matter what you ask them.

[jim]

The person had an accent and I couldn't quite put my finger on it, so I'm sure you are right. I left stuff out - he kept asking me what city and state I bought the damn thing from. "DOWN-LOAD. INTER-NET INNNNN_TEEEEEERRRRR___NNEEEETTTTTTTT. COMMMMMMM------PUUUUUUUU------TTTEERRRRR. I downloaded it .......using the internet .... inter .... net". "What city sir?"

God damn it.

I would not be here today if he would have responded with "I have to look in SharePoint to find your notes". My blood pressure would have absolutely caused my heart to just explode right then and there. It would have killed me.

[GeddyWrox]

I know you probably won't agree with me, but SQL Server is a pretty good product. I know 10 years ago or so, it wasn't as robust as Oracle or others, etc. But it has come a LONG way. I make quite a bit of money pretending like I know some stuff about it. I wouldn't still be in IT if weren't doing Business Intelligence work on the MS SQL stack.

Sharepoint, though, can suck my nuts.

[jim]

PostgreSQL is my answer. I can't think of a single case where commercial software is better than an open source equivalent. If I were a CIO - open source. We wouldn't buy one single piece of software.

Although I know of one project where we migrated from Oracle to SQL Server for reliability reasons.

BI ... cubes .... executive dashboards ... mind numbing. It will keep you employed though.

[lukethedrifter]

I found some carbon paper on my desk yesterday.

[Arthur Dent]

I can't think of a single case where commercial software is better than an open source equivalent.

For average home computer users, Windows is far superior to Linux, which remains basically only really suited to techies. Also, Microsoft Office far superior to OpenOffice. Though both of those products still suck in a number of ways. Open source software only seems to work really well for technical projects that interest nerds. Or maybe it works best for relatively small programs, or ones that easily split into seperable bits.

I couldn't stop laughing at the tech support story. I actually figured that computer companies no longer bothered providing support of any kind.

[JCShutout]

These might help: http://windows95tips.com/

[jim]

I can't think of a single case where commercial software is better than an open source equivalent.

For average home computer users, Windows is far superior to Linux, which remains basically only really suited to techies. Also, Microsoft Office far superior to OpenOffice. Though both of those products still suck in a number of ways. Open source software only seems to work really well for technical projects that interest nerds. Or maybe it works best for relatively small programs, or ones that easily split into seperable bits.

I couldn't stop laughing at the tech support story. I actually figured that computer companies no longer bothered providing support of any kind.

You are right I suppose for home users, but that's why I prefer Mac's because it's really just Linux underneath. For documentation I prefer LaTeX, the documents just look 1,000x better and I don't have a seizure looking for the right button to unbold my god damned text.

You are completely wrong about open source for small projects/nerds comment though. The group I am responsible for develops mostly using open source solutions. I can tell you that we have a 600k LOC active security network monitoring system completely based on open source that is more sophisticated than anything you can find on the commercial market. Linux/Python/PostgreSQL/Django/Twisted/PySNMP .... We pushed these packages to the limits, and found bugs in one of them (PySNMP) that nobody had found. Our service - which cost $0 - was basically sending a note to the message board where the author scanned it apparently daily. Usually we had an answer the next day, where we could patch it ourselves, and often within a few days we would see an errata being released and we could grab that. 100x better than any customer service I have ever paid for. Our PostgreSQL database is 1.3GB, we stuff about 700,000 records a day in it. It works like a champ.

For any custom, large scale development project you would have to really do some convincing for me not to use Linux/Python/PostgresSQL as the base of it.

[Arthur Dent]

You are completely wrong about open source for small projects/nerds comment though. The group I am responsible for develops mostly using open source solutions. I can tell you that we have a 600k LOC active security network monitoring system completely based on open source that is more sophisticated than anything you can find on the commercial market.

I have no idea what an LOC active security network monitoring system is, but those open source software packages you are using sound exactly like the sort of stuff that open source development is good at. These are all things that will only be used directly only by programmers and other advanced computer users, and they solve the kinds of limited technical problems that computer nerds like to solve and are good at solving. I'm saying that open source development hasn't been very good at creating software that isn't primarily technical and that requires a coherent overall design that non-technical people can easily use, like office suites or operating systems for average users, though many of these closed source commercial type projects will take advantage of (and contribute to) the excellent selection of open source technical components. So, if you were a CIO of a software devlopment company, then sure, promoting the use of open source components is probably a great idea. If you told your non-programmer office workers that they needed to switch from Microsoft Word to LaTeX or even OpenOffice, it would be a disaster.

I think the problem is partly that programmers working on open source projects tend to consider average computer users to be lusers and are just not that good at designing for these needs and partially that such designs need better coordination that is difficult to achieve in a distributed development.