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Why People Don't Like Microsoft

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for February 15, 2001

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2001

This is a topic to which I've given a lot of thought over the years. Why don't ordinary computer users like Microsoft?

Sure, there are the complaints brought up by Microsoft's competitors, business customers, and, more recently, the US Department of Justice and 19 states' attorneys general. According to at least one judge, the company has broken US anti-trust laws.

But these are official complaints. If legal arguments and judicial findings were the only criteria ordinary computer owners used to guide their emotions, then by extension companies such as MP3.com and Napster would be in the same category and subject to the same visceral loathing heaped on the House of Gates.

If simply being the richest man in North America (and most of the rest of the world) was a reason for being hated, then the logical target should be Oracle's Larry Ellison - because after the fall and spring threshing of high-tech stocks, he's now in that lofty realm.

If simply producing popular software that didn't always work properly was the single criterion, then every company that produces programs would be high on everyone's list of targets. I know of no major software release from anyone in the past ten years that hasn't arrived on store shelves with a long list of bugs. It's the reason for the old adage that advises, "Never buy version x.0 of anything."

You may argue that it's a combination of these factors that has drawn public ire towards Microsoft, and to an extent, I'm sure you're right. But frankly, it's not enough.

So, let's look at two examples from what I'm sure is a long list of many that you're going to send me within the few days after this column sees print.

Registration Wizard

Ever since last spring (2000), versions of Microsoft Office 2000 have shipped with a new "Registration Wizard." To put the problem succinctly, if you don't register your copy of Office, it stops working after 50 uses.

Microsoft justifies its actions under the heading that its doing this so that users will have access to program updates on a more timely basis. And they freely acknowledge that the primary reason is stop people from making illegal copies of the program. In short, it's a new copy-protection scheme. It means that if you want to run Office on both your desktop and notebook computer, you have to call in for an authorization key to unlock the software. It means you have to do it again if you need to wipe, reformat, then re-install the software. It means you have to do it again if you replace either your hard drive or your entire system. As a minor annoyance for people like me who need to test software under different versions of Windows, it means I have to call several times to get the @#$!@ thing unlocked for systems running Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows 2000.

As a result, I've decided not to review the next release of Office (10) scheduled for later this year unless it comes without copy protection (it's a personal decision and doesn't affect other writers here or elsewhere). I'm going to do what I suspect many consumers are already doing - either live with the software I've already got or switch to products that don't hassle me. For example, I now almost exclusively use Sun Microsystems Star Office 5.2 unless I must provide 100 per cent MS Office 2000 compatibility. Star Office is a free download from www.staroffice.com (then click on "download section" under the Digital Store heading in the left-most column).

Dumb update

Then we come to another example that typifies the reasons users give me for the "digital" salutes (aka "the bird") they throw in the direction of Redmond. I recently moved all of my primary workload to a new system running Windows 2000. I do use MS Office 2000 for a pair of tasks: running Web sites through Front Page 2000 and providing a platform for people at the Computer Fest shows to run PowerPoint slide shows for their seminars.

After the installation from CD (a pre-Registration Wizard version), I thought it might be a reasonable idea to bring it up to date with the Office Service Release 1 (SR-1) from Microsoft's Web site. Big mistake.

I have my new system set up to boot into a variety of operating systems. As a result, I try to keep the primary partitions assigned to them as small as possible. One way to keep things under some control is to install programs on another, larger, partition so I can keep my C:\ drive as small as I can. I'd installed Office 2000 on a different partition.

It should have stayed there, but through what I call programmer arrogance (we know better than you), the installation routine for Office SR-1 moved it to C:\. The first clue I had that there was a problem was when I suddenly started getting "You're low on space" messages from my C:\ drive. Then I noticed, while looking for an Office component, that it was missing from where I'd put it. To make it even more complicated, the installer had buried it in a folder with an unrecognizable name, about five layers deep.

Over the next few days, every time I started an Office application or tried to open a Web site for editing, I kept getting messages that said, in effect, "The feature you are trying to use has to be installed. Get your CD." Only one small problem; it would no longer recognize the CD as the program's source and the necessary files weren't in the folders that SR-1 had created. Grrr.

To bring a longer story to a short end, I finally uninstalled the update, then started from scratch. Sure, reinstalling it from the original CDs fixed the problems I was having with Office, but then it added one more. At some point during the uninstall, the process also removed some registry keys that allowed Windows Explorer under Windows 2000 to show thumbnails (small graphic renditions) of all files with the .JPG or .JPEG extension. Why? Darned if I know – chalk it up to more programmer arrogance or just plain dumbness. Fortunately, I was able to find a solution on the Microsoft Knowledge Base (support.microsoft.com) but implementing it is a tedious process.

I read recently that Microsoft is worried because fewer companies than expected have upgraded their systems to Windows 2000 and that many consumers haven't upgraded to Office 2000. I don't wonder why.

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