Reader response: Hating Microsoft
Why I hate Microsoft:
More than a hundred hours of my time, plus having to get a $200 priority technical support account, to find workarounds to bugs in the original MS Exchange.
A Web site on which it is very difficult to find anything --- without CompuServe I'd never know about Win95 updates --- and, most recently, its abandonment of a way to access particular knowledge base articles by Qnumber (although by experimentation, I have discovered that Qnumbers can be inserted as search topics!).
No listing posted of the purpose of Win95 system files, or even of the meaning of Win95 file extensions (although, to be fair, after four or five complaints to technical support using my priority account, and demanding to be able to contact a supervisor, I finally did get a partial list translating many extensions).
Dialog boxes that waste space, making it necessary to pursue layer after layer of nested screens when looking for a setting.
Help files that rarely list the precise path to crucial screens: "How do I tell my modem to receive a fax?"
Uninstall routines for MS software (particularly Internet Explorer) that do not delete the files. (DOJ, are you paying attention?) Heaven only knows how many unused and unnecessary Network Neighborhood and MSIE and MSN files are wasting space on my hard drive, and perhaps conflicting with other software.
A Notepad utility that has less capability (e.g. no search and replace) than the Dos Edit utility did.
A Wordpad utility that cannot number its pages!
And on and on and on ......