But what about the little guy?
Links April 18th, 2003 |Robert Scoble pointed to Scott Johnson’s YAAMR post. Two hours after Scott made his post, he had an offer in his comments from a tester at Microsoft to pass on information about his crash to the appropriate team at Microsoft.
First thought: that’s cool.
Second thought: too bad things like this aren’t likely to happen for the rest of the poor shmoes battling Windows (like, oh, say…[ahem]…me, for instance). Offering high-profile bloggers help after they’re linked to by another high-profile blogger is certainly a nice thing to do, and nothing in itself to sneeze at, but all of Scott’s complaints with Windows are perfectly valid, and are the kinds of frustrations that many people have to deal with on a regular basis.
The fundamental problem itself is still unsolved — Windows is often a royal pain in the ass to deal with. Most of us have to deal with it on our own, though, and common experiences like Scott’s are going to keep happening, and Microsoft is going to continue to be perceived by many people as a lumbering, unstoppable behemoth of a company that can’t actually write decent software, but doesn’t seem to care because they’ve got such a lockhold on the industry.
Somehow, I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.
[See also: Too…many…windows… | Rule #1: Validate | In retrospect, this was really stupid. | A little too obvious? | Security: Mac OS X vs. Windows ]






April 25th, 2003 at 9:49 pm
We’re working on making Windows better and we’ll keep looking for ways to fix it. Including by reading your weblog.
April 25th, 2003 at 10:27 pm
Always good to hear, Robert. Just so’s you know (if you wander back this way, at least), I’ve been reading you for a while now, and you definitely strike me as someone who has a definite passion for what they do, and really will work for what they believe is best &mash; along, I’m sure, with the majority of Microsoft employees. While I’ll freely admit to a definite Mac bias, and do grouse about Microsoft somewhat regularly, I’m not foolish enough to really believe that all 55,000 of you are Evil. Heck, there are even a few things in Windows that I wish Apple would pick up on (ubiquitous keyboard navigation, for one).
Anyway, have fun at the new digs, and thanks for stopping by!