Technical Writer

An anti-Microsoft rant.  Unusual, because I like their products and 90% of all the computer programs I use are Microsoft.

Here in Australia—and I believe the rest of the world—Apple are running a series of Mac vs PC ads.  Most of us have seen them by now.  One in particular really resonates, the one that has a go at the overly intrusive security system on Vista, which requires users to cancel or allow virtually all user actions in an effort to make the PC secure.

We have Vista at home on one PC, and sometimes I want to turn off all security because those annoying messages frustrate me.

The worst thing is, I’m not even sure where the problems really are.  Vista, or Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).  I suspect it’s a combination of both, but that makes any problem twice as difficult to track down.

IE 7 was released not long before Vista. I know I started using IE7 only a month before I got Vista.

Here are three specific examples I have personally come across, one work related, two from home.

• At work, on our SharePoint Portal Server (2003) we use Microsoft Office web components.  We have used them for over twelve months with no problems.  Users have no problems accessing them, provided they set their portal server as a trusted site.  Recently, a small number of users upgraded to IE7, and suddenly we’re having problems with web components.  If the site is not a trusted site the user gets a message warning them that someone is trying to download date, asking them to okay it.  If the site is a trusted site they simply get an error. I am sure it’s only a setting, but it is extremely frustrating.  You would think that Microsoft would have ensured their own products were compatible, at the least.
• Vista and Java.  The home PC that runs Vista blocks Java on startup.  I have to go in and physically say it can run every time.  I can see no logical reason for this except that Java is a non-Microsoft product. Few people go long on the internet nowadays without running a Java applet or two.  Microsoft knows this, so why bother to make it so hard?
• The Microsoft genuine advantage. By the time you put up with having to manually load Java, and issues with programs that used to run perfectly but no longer do, you start to get annoyed with everything the company does that isn’t seamless.  This last issue probably isn’t really an issue, but compounded with the other two problems, it is really annoying me.My software is the genuine article.  Every Microsoft product is either store bought, with genuine serial numbers, or in the last two months it’s part of my TechNet subscription. Two days ago I attempted to download the Microsoft Save as PDF addin.  This is one of those products that Microsoft validates first, to ensure that you have a genuine version of Office before it will allow you to download the addin. That’s fine. I do have a genuine version of Office.The validation failed and it took two days to find out what was wrong.It turned out I had an unregistered copy of Visio on my PC.  I had loaded Visio up one day last week, but had not yet got around to entering the registration code.  You know how it goes—sometimes you get called away in the middle of things, and come back to it later.  It’s not even part of the standard Office suite.

The whole security thing is really annoying me at present. 

I am reminded of a security expert I worked with, who once recommended that I never create forms where the user had to okay alert that told them when something was happening, when those things were not errors.

“If you make them click okay all the time when nothing is wrong,” he said.  “They start ignoring the messages.  Then, if something really does go wrong, they miss it, because they’re so used to ignoring the messages.”

That’s about where I am at with Microsoft at present.  I am sick of their so-called security, which is continually bringing unimportant matters to my attention.  I am already at the stage where I ignore any messages Microsoft puts up, and all I want to do is turn the whole security thing off.