About Microsoft

Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft software products. Most of their products are horrible, but in many cases you really can't live without them.

The quality of most of their products is mediocre at best compared to the competition, where it exists. But it is so dominant in the mass market software application segment that often there is no choice other than to use their products. Political scientists call the United States political system "the Microsoft of nations" and it isn't a compliment. It is the Wells Fargo of software companies.

Microsoft is living proof of the fallibility of big business. Its ability to make immense profits and secure huge market shares selling such low quality products is one of the defining paradoxes and economic mysteries of last half century.

The mediocrity of its products is particularly frustrating because this is one of the biggest companies in the world with virtually unlimited resources available to hire the smartest programmers in the world to improve its software. And, the flaws in that software often seem like they should be tantalizingly easy for any half decent programmer to improve upon. Yet, year after year, improvement in their products comes painfully slowly and usually only after its competition has long ago left it in the dust. 

I'll list some of their products to illustrate the point, from worst to best.

1.    The Bing Search engine. 

This is the worst search engine in the entire world. It qualifies as malware.

2.    Microsoft Sharepoint/OneDrive.

This is the worst cloud based file storage app on the market. It is error prone, fussy about names, has an autosave feature that makes it easy to delete work in your current drafts that is a pain to recover previous versions of, and generally prone to breakdowns. All of its competitors are far superior.

3.    Microsoft Teams.

This is the worst collaboration app on the market. It is clunky, unreliable, and unintuitive.

4.     Microsoft Windows.

On the merits, it is probably the worst operating system on the market with the trademark Microsoft traits of being buggy, awkward to use, and unintuitive. However, it is better supported for a novice than Linux.

5.    Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail

This is yet another product with massive market penetration and worst in its market segment quality. Its proactive AI type features are annoying rather than useful. In its Apple OS compatible version it is almost impossible to export emails from which is something that lawyers often have to do. Its email filtering and classification features are crude compared to the competition. It doesn't handle large attachments particularly well. The user interface is clunky and prone to misbehaving if you have fat fingers. It routinely misclassifies important messages as spam.

6.     Microsoft OneNote.

Unlike most major Microsoft Office apps, almost nobody ever uses Microsoft OneNote. Anyone with Microsoft Office who could use it, uses Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel instead, because they mostly don't even know it exists. It really doesn't meet anyone's needs and clutters up your hard drive.

7.    Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Honestly, Internet Explorer isn't all that horrible, but every other browser on the market in better, which is how IE's market share fell from being the dominant Internet browser in the world to its current pitiful dregs of users who remain, mostly due to inertia.

8.     Microsoft Power Point.

Power Point doesn't have a lot of competitors for some reason and isn't deeply flawed, but inflects pain upon corporate and government workers and students and teachers all over the world because it encourages bad communication and presentation habits. Fortunately, it is stagnant and is rarely mission critical.

9.    Microsoft Word.

Due to compatibility issues, Microsoft Word is the dominant word processor and it has a de facto near monopoly on the word processing software market. So, most of us really can't manage without it in school or work. This is unfortunate, because it is a really bad piece of software. It has far too many features to deal with making the user interface clunky and accident prone. Its "styles" based logic makes it behave badly when all you really want is what you see is what you get. It is good at tricking you into deleting your files (although not nearly as bad as Sharepoint which operates in a completely different way that is totally unintuitive after becoming familiar with Microsoft Word). It is bad enough at math and science text processing that this industry has abandoned it wholesale in favor of LaTex. It is memory hungry. Its autocorrect and AI type features are annoying rather than helpful. It is hard to customize and frequent updates thwart your efforts to do so as well. The subscription model is intrusive and interrupts your workflow. It manages metadata poorly. I could go on for another paragraph or two, but you get the point and probably have first hand experience working with it.

10.    Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Excel is probably the best of the major Microsoft product lines. Relative ease of use causes it to be used in all manner of applications that a simple spreadsheet wouldn't be expected to be able to handle. International financial institution class teams of economists use it for their economic models. Scientists used it to analyze cutting edge experimental results and to analyze genetic data. Government agencies use it to maintain and share all sorts of statistics. Teachers use it for grade sheets. Coaches use it for team rosters and player statistics. Textbook writers and media outlets use it to make charts and graphs. Small enterprises use it to do basic operations research tasks like optimization. Families use it to do rough drafts of their tax returns. Microsoft Excel isn't the best program at most of the things it does. It can be hard to troubleshoot errors in its formulas which aren't very transparent. The aesthetics of its worksheets often scream "amateur" and crude. But, it doesn't take much skill to use it for fairly sophisticated applications, and it is less buggy than most Microsoft products. It is one of the few Microsoft products that has been a better quality product than many of its competitors for most of its existence, and it is almost as dominant in its market segment as Microsoft Word. It is the A-10 Warthog of office software.