Yes, some of you haven’t been here long enough to see one of my rants and think I’m a nice level headed individual. Others of you have seen the odd rant, I did actually do one a week for a while.
So its a rare thing to bring me out of my ranting retirement.
Here goes:
I’m neither a Microsoft fanboy, nor its harshest critic. Generally the applications are ok, the OS so/so, the business tactics reprehensible at times.
But you’d think that given Microsoft’s experience in the Interweb, they’d have learned a thing or two.
There are a few benefits to being with my employer. One, which was just recently announced, was a “home” version of MS Office 2007 Enterprise, for a rediculously low price. Of course to make it work, there were some hoops to jump, and the software would be downloaded to my home system. I could order a backup copy on DVD for a few dollars more.
The initial part, registering with my sekrit password and getting a key sent went smoothly and took mere seconds.
But trying to complete the transaction at the online store has been frustrating to the extreme. The online store, hosted by a third party, is slow as heck. The MSN home page loads in milliseconds with embedded videos and pics. The “click to buy” page for MS takes minutes to load. And then the checkout process just dies a painful death, leading to a timeout.
I’ve done it now, maybe 20 times. I’ve watched it in the Vista task mamager. Its not for lack of CPU or memory. I’ve even turned off my anti Virus in case that was interfering. When I watch the transaction in the networking window, I see a nice comb pattern – spike, timeout, spike, timeout.
You’d think a big company like Microsoft, with a reputation to uphold would ensure that the experience was smooth. I could have downloaded Open Office a dozen times before I can actually pay for a copy of MS Office.
James