Steve Jobs once said that the problem with Microsoft was that they had no taste. That was as true then (many years ago) as it is now. It is also true that Microsoft has no proofreading department. They screw up the little details with dependable regularity.
A case in point surfaced within the last few days. A minor update to Mac Office 2008 has come out; this update addresses a new bug that was introduced by a previous update. (That happens to just about every developer on occasion.)
But the update itself had a few screws loose. I ran the little “Check for Updates” program in Word. It spun along for a while, and then announced two updates. No problem. Click the “Update” button and let the thing go to work.
If this were an Apple update, that would be about the end of it save typing in your administrator password. But this was a Microsoft update, and therefore the amount of hand-holding and fiddling increased exponentially and pointlessly.
Item one: each of the updaters was a separate program, each requiring clicking through a bunch of little screens as to where to install and accepting the license terms and entering my administrative password. Apple’s “Software Update” handles things much more smoothly. Answer whatever questions are required at the beginning, then go about your business and the updater program takes care of the rest.
Item two: this one was the real kicker. As the second of the two installers ran, it told me that I absolutely had to quit out of—get this—the Microsoft Update program. That was kind of funny. For one thing, why didn’t the first installer need to do that? (They were more or less identical in all other respects.) More to the point, why couldn’t the stupid installer just quit the Update program itself, take care of its business, and then re-launch the Update program when it was finished? Why bother the user with something silly like that?
As I said, no proofreading. They need to think things through and cut out needless hand-holding. But that’s asking a lot of Microsoft, I know: it’s tantamount to modifying their entire culture. Make things easier or more convenient for people? Keeping the computer’s crap out of the user’s face? That’s not the Microsoft way. Pestering me incessantly with idiotic balloons tediously informing me that the computer is “Looking for a driver for this device” or “Installing a driver for this device” or “Detecting new hardware” is the Microsoft way. It’s like being trapped in a room with an obsessive-compulsive autistic techie blabbermouth.
Until recently, installing Windows on a computer required your attention almost all the way through, because at the halfway point everything would stop to ask questions about the network. Why those questions could not have been asked at the beginning of the installation is beyond me. Nor did the installer warn you that it was going to pause for interrogation at the halfway point; in fact, the wording implied that the process would proceed uninterrupted. As if I want to sit there reading those ridiculous I’m-so-cool ads it throws up while installing the OS?
At some point or another the Microsoftians are going to have to realize that most folks are not computer geeks. They haven’t the slightest desire to maintain, update, coddle, fiddle with, or screw around with computers. But Microsoft is a company governed by a geek mentality. They probably think that because they are absolutely riveted to the screen during an OS install, everybody must be like that.
I’ll say this for them: they make dandy development software. When I was programming regularly I used Visual Studio extensively and came to admire it for its comprehensiveness and robustness.
But as for the rest of it: no taste.