Microsoft Still Sucks

Hell's Handmaiden joins a chorus of local computer consultants, IT industry company executives, and just plain computer users I know who have uniformly concluded that Windows Vista (r) is profoundly bad.

This past weekend, as the Denver Democratic Party Assembly/Convention, I had occasion to use the company's other flagship Microsoft Office 2007 (r) on someone else's computer, for the purpose of calculating the number of delegates allocated to Obama, Clinton, Gravel, Udall and Benner from the portion of each House District in Denver. It did the job, but the user interface is a big and painful transition for anyone familiar with any prior version of Microsoft Office (r), or for that matter any of the leading Wintel competitors to Microsoft Office (including Open Office (r?) and Word Perfect(r)). Reviews I've heard from the same pool of people I mentioned above regarding Microsoft Office 2007 run about 4-1 against MS Office 2007.

In short, the two of the main products upon which Microsoft relies for its dominance in both the desktop/laptop PC software industry are abysmally bad. For what it is worth, Internet Explorer(r) and Windows Media Player(r), its other pieces of once dominant software are also nothing to write home about, although they are less obviously deficient in day to day use.

Perhaps competition from Safari(r) and Firefox/Mozilla (r?) and Quicktime(r) puts more pressure upon Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. The main competitors to Vista are Linux and Mac OS. But, to get Mac OS, one must have a Mac, and most users believe that they are too stupid to use and support Linux (rightly or wrongly) and fear that it will have compatibility problems with their other software (rightly or wrongly).