|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Are you Righteously Indignant? Do you have a good story to tell about your experiences with Microsoft culture and products? Submit them for inclusion here. |
Righteous IndignationsI've been receiving unsolicited emails from Microsoft at a rate of around ten a week. While not a problem, this is certainly irritating. So I followed their unsubscribe directions at the bottom of the e-mail, which involved having to register with them at their web site to not receive e-mails! Still the e-mails came, if anything more frequently. So I tried emailing abuse@microsoft.com, spam@, webmaster@ and several email addresses quoted in the e-mails, asking rather politely to be removed from all their mailing lists. Several automated responses were dispatched to me, post haste, saying that while they couldn't reply to every e-mail they received, they would read them all. And then the e-mails stopped! For a whole two days, before they started again. [Christopher Mellish, 20 April 1999] (Editor's note: Microsoft regards the sending unsolicited e-mail from a MSN account as a violation of the terms of service, as do most reputable Internet service providers.) My company is a Microsoft "partner". We have been using NT 3.51 in our network for about 2 years. It is nothing but trouble, has been nothing but trouble. I work in a manufacturing plant and we have production machines that run AIX on RS/6000's. Our compnay wisely elected to stick with the RS's for critcal production functions since an hour of downtime costs us about $100K. Recently the NT boxes have been giving us more and more trouble. In one department they had to add additional servers just to maintain functionality since at any one time 20% of the servers are unavailable for one reason or another. Two weeks ago we had a systemwide outage for 3 hours the NT servers quit syncronizing and no one had access to any of their own files or any programs on the network. With one glaring exception... A little old P90 running Caldera Linux and Samba. It was the only server available throughout the system. We could not get to the RS's easily since the Refections NT software resided on an NT server. Of course they trucked along nicely during this entire outage. Now for the punch line. One of the executives bragged that during the whole outage "his" server stayed up, and asked our IS man to tell to the world how he was able to keep that one server up and running. Our proud IS manager unfortunately told the truth. It got back to out MS rep, who told his Veep that the reason the system crashed was NOT due to NT but because of the Linux box. IS was ordered to "upgrade" the Linux immediately. Of course the Veep in an accountant. [Miko Wakabayashi, 16 Dec 98] This was reported in our staff meetings today and we all shook our heads. I work for the largest defense contractor in the world (Lockheed Martin, 100K employees). Being so big, we are a big customer of Microsoft (and had been one of Apple's biggest customers) - we do not compete with Microsoft in anything. When we installed Exchange recently, it was the 5th largest corporate install of software in Microsoft's history. The President of our IS company and some of his big wigs got some scheduled time with Bill Gates in conjunction with some sort of conference in Seattle. In their meeting, they mentioned to him that some of his software was causing connectivity problems with the internet for us. He went ballistic, as we say. He got upset, yelled at them and threw them out! A nice way to treat big customers. Sadly, we'll continue our migration to NT. [Anonymous. 13 Dec 98] One of my friends, who shall remain nameless, has a friend, who works for Microsoft Denmark. When Windows 95 was originally lauched, the employees were instructed by the management to intentionally disregard from any requests for upgrades to old software (e.g. upgrades for 16-bit applications, for Windows 3.1 and DOS). Instead, when a customer called and asked for an 16-bit software update, the employees instead asked why they didn't just upgrade to Windows 95, and the wave of 32-bit software that followed in its wake. If the customer insisted on not upgrading, the Microsoft employees would usually say "OK," and tell the customers that they had placed an order for the software the customer asked for. But the requests were all trashed, and within a few months, most of the people who had called were some way other the other forced to upgrade to Windows 95, because they couldn't get the nessesary upgrades for their old systems. [Peter Bjørn Perlsø] One of my hobbies is amateur road racing. Some of the fellows I regularly race with are Microsoft engineers and we have some friendly banter going back and forth about Macintosh and Microsoft. They tease me about using an "obsolete" (marginal at best) platform and I tease them about being minions in Billy's Dark Side Empire. A couple of weeks ago in our pit area at the Willow Springs race track, I posted one of Steinfeld's wonderful, humorous cartoons. It shows a fellow at a desk looking at two piles of books. One pile has three fat books entitled PCs for Dummies, DOS for Dummies, and Windows for Dummies. The other stack has a lone, thin volume entitled Mac for Dummies. One of the Microsoft engineers saw it, looked at it and laughed and said, "You know that's true. If it weren't true I wouldn't have a job!" [John F. Page] I am a graphic designer/illustrator who's day job is creating presentations and other documents for a telecommunications consulting firm. Of course, most consultants are Wintel users. However, my desktop publishing/graphics department is still (for now) Mac based. The LAN guy for the company asked me to be a troubleshooter for problems with our Mac created presentations being viewed and/or printed on PCs. Microsoft PowerPoint is our unfortunate "standard" for presentations and "graphics". I conducted several tests to help track down the compatibility issues, creating presentations on the Mac with various graphic file formats, and then opening them on a Win 95 machine to view and print. The results were shocking. Apparently, Win 95 Powerpoint is completely incompatible with Mac Powerpoint. All but one placed image in the presentation would not print properly from the PC. Everything worked fine on the Mac, but would not translate to the PC. Also, the PC version (PowerPoint 4) was able to read and insert many more kinds of graphic files. And finally, I learned that if I placed the same Mac created images into the presentation on the PC, they all printed just fine. Coincidence?! [Eric Turner] My dad owned Microsoft's (I say owned here in whatever sense Microsoft would have it apply) Publisher v2.0. Anyhow, my dad saw an advertisement for a free 60 day trial of the new Publisher '97. He decided to give it a try. Upon receiving the CD, he installed it. He noticed that after the installation was finished, his old icon directing him to Publisher v2.0 was gone. He thought nothing of it, and decided that it would pop back up after his 60 days was up. Well, two or three days ago, the 60 days expired. He wanted to go into Publisher to do some work on a flyer. He wanted to open an existing file and edit the dates and so forth to make a new set of flyers. He went to look for his old icon expecting it to be there, since it had been over 60 days. Instead, he found the icon for Publisher '97 still there. Of course, it wouldn't run. So he called the 800 number that was found on the jacket of the CD he had received. He explained to the operator his problem. After some 10 minutes of finally getting the operator to understand his problem, he was directed to another number. This new number, however, was not an 800 number, but instead was going to be a toll call. At this, my father became extremely angry. "Why do I have to pay for a problem they created?!" he exclaimed. I shrugged my shoulders, not knowing what to say. This was all on top of previous experiences with trying to get help from Microsoft, who, as far as I know, is still charging for customer support. [Dustin Tiemeier] I work at a news publication and am responsible for the systems programming. My colleague who deals more with content gets all the phone calls received a call from a Microsoft programmer who asked him when we were going live, and what type of software we use. He told her that we were using Netscape's products, a couple of Suns, RS6000s (aix) and Linux boxes for our site. She stated, "That's good, you wouldn't want to use any of our products, they're held together by paper and spit." [Patrick Galbraith] A coworker, who periodically attends Microsoft conferences, tells me that Microsoft employees giving presentations at these events are not allowed to say the word "Netscape." If they do, they get fined. Euphemisms such as "other browsers" must be substituted. Even when Netscape Navigator is being run on the screen for comparison purposes, it is flippantly referred to as "some other browser." When a guest speaker, not employed by Microsoft, took the podium, he announced "Unlike the previous speakers, I can say NETSCAPE without being fined. I may not be invited back here to speak again, but I can say NETSCAPE." [Darel Finley] A friend returned from Comdex and was talking about his experience. He said, in a room of new Intel processors, nothing worked, everything overheated, software froze up. He was surprised. Talking with his friend/computer publisher who saw all this with him, he asked, 'So what will you report about this?' The publisher said: 'If I said anything much against Intel or Microsoft, I would be unemployed in a few months.' This guy publishes Computer Reseller News out of Long Island. He knows one just doesn't criticize the money tree. Shake it when they say shake -- and the money will fall. [Alan Thibideau] |
The recent assertions that Microsoft had its current Internet strategy in play as early as December 1993 are utter nonsense.
JOHN DVORAK, PC Magazine
|
|||
 |
||||||
|
|
