Thread: Why can't Microsoft make products that work?

It seems that many of their softwares include features that assume you are too stupid to make it do what you want. The problem is that these features are impossible to override in many cases, and don't allow you to do what you want.

For instance when inserting an image in Outlook (as an inline image, not an attachment) Outlook automatically resizes the image because it assumes I don't know how to do that myself. The problem is, that it commonly takes images that are less than 100k and resizes them larger (in some cases to over 2mb). There is no way to de-activate that setting.

Who else has Microsoft frustrations? I know someone is torqued off about the automated crap in Word...

Bill Gates is doing pretty good last I heard.

That is actually an interesting point... The market should dictate that if someone had software that was superior (and there are several out there) that Microsoft should be out of business. Yet... They continue to thrive, despite giving the finger to everyone that uses their software. Why does that happen?

(another example of Microsoft giving the finger: Internet Explorer is the browser that is least compliant with W3C guidelines. I'm certain that they are well aware of the guidelines, they just choose not to follow them.)

They do!
A few of their products are very very good. Just look at excel. A fine piece of software engineering.
They are a company with an enormous task of serving a huge array of machines and configurations. The fact that they make all this work, more or less, impresses me.

That said, I wouldn't use a Windows machine for the life of me.

I prefer Unix/Linux and OSX.
Quite simply because that is what I am most effective and comfortable with.

Originally Posted by HNSB

...it assumes I don't know how to do that myself.

A lot of people don't, and for them, the product works

I too use Linux and wouldn't be happy if windows was the only game in town. Freeware/shareware is a wonderful thing. My main gripe is that so many programs are propitiatory to microsoft and won't allow shareware devs access to their code.

First, we're talking Office, not Windows. OpenOffice is nice, but it's nowhere near MS Office.

I get annoyed at times with the auto-resize in Outlook '07, but honestly I find it more useful than bothersome. You can always set the scale to 100%, as that's how I handle the times where I need a 1:1 image (e.g. with text).

The MS Office is where MS makes most of their profits, so it can't be all that bad. It's true that there is a somewhat free market, but it's also true that Microsoft was a monopoly for quite some time.
Apple is actually much worse than Microsoft, the only thing they can do better than anybody else is designing a user interface.

I haven't been forced to use microsoft products in ages though, so I have rather superficial view of them. Last time somebody told me they need to spend $200 on MS Office license because they needed to be able to do mail merge, I looked up what it was and how to do it in Pages. It was a little bit harder than in MS Office, but turned out not $200 harder.

Watched this the other night. Gives insight into the history of Open Source and Free Software.

Revolution OS