Oh, Microsoft

There is a huge group of people in the software development community who love to trash Microsoft. Every good story needs a villain and MS keeps playing the role so well. I’m not a fan of Office, ASP, .Net, etc., but its hard to argue with the impact that Windows has had on both businesses and consumers worldwide. Having worked on many complex enterprise applications I also appreciate the complexity of the MS world: The thousands of coordinated decisions that must be made each day in order to just survive much less thrive. Its easy to talk about a clean solid code base for your single application in a greenfield. Try it when you have dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of demanding customers, all running a different set of versions, patches and customizations.

That said, every company has a life-cyle and I see very little in the way MS is functioning for me to believe it is anything but on the downward slope of a Bell Curve. While they continue to add new features and products just as they have done every year since the 1980’s, these additions seem to have the same feel as those features introduced in Windows 98. At that point, features alone were often enough. However, we’ve come a long way since then. The execution of a feature is often more important than the feature itself, and Microsoft still doesn’t understand this. Give me a quarter of the features in the current Office suite, but executed really, really well and I’d have no problem spending $150 or more for it.

The reason I’m even writing this is I recently did some online marketing, registering my business with a number of online services including Microsoft Live. The more places my business shows up, the easier it is for people to find me. To create a listing, I needed to create an account. Everyone does that. It’s fine. From there, MS sends out a letter to verify you are the business that you say you are. OK. That’s also fine. A search listing that has 1000 verified businesses in my area is much more useful than a 1,000,000 crappy spam listings and few legitimate ones.

But here is where it gets fun. I get a letter in the mail from MS. Go to a website to verify your listing. https://llc.local.live.com/listingcenter.aspx. OK. I type a lot for a living, so putting a complicated URL in my browser isn’t a big deal, but it probably is for some. Also, are those l’s or i’s at the beginning of the URL? Why couldn’t this just be http://mylisting.live.com? I’m guessing they have a few folks who know how to route internet traffic in Redmond.

Next issue: Security alert. The certificate for this site is not valid. Hmm. OK. Well, we’ll allow an exception. I’m guessing this is legitimate and another MS hiccup we’ve all become accustomed to. Exception granted. Site displayed.

Next issue: This site does not support Safari. It does support Firefox and IE. I can’t get in. If the site supports Firefox, why oh why is Safari not supported. The one or two minor differences between Safari and Firefox are nothing compared to the differences in making an app behave the same in IE and Firefox. OK. I’ll use Firefox instead.

Next issue: I can’t remember my password. This is my issue, but the email I get to reset it reads like a, well, it reads like a MS communication. OK. Next step.

Next issue: Put in the code we mailed to you. OK. This is in a big font on the letter mailed to me. Easy enough. Done. I’m done! Aren’t I? I think I am, but the page now says “Pending Review”. I’m not sure what that means. There is a “Review listing” link on the right. Should I do something? I try the link but there is nothing that indicates I need to approve the listing or something similar. My listing remains in “Pending Review”. I guess I’ll assume that someone from MS will eventually bless what I have to offer. We’ll see…

Microsoft unless you can radically change, in five or ten years you’re going to look a lot like GM today.