Working For Microsoft

No, I am not actually on their payroll. But several days a month Microsoft sends me messages that there are upgrades ready to download to my desktop and laptop. They give me the option to delay – and develop anxiety that something serious may go wrong in the interval – or to interrupt my well laid plans and divert the mouse – and possibly the men I was going to do business with.

I don’t accept these downloads automatically any more. Sometimes doing so puts me in an entirely different ballgame that I don’t want to play.  But in checking the list, I frequently discover that these changes are fixes and not upgrades at all –  their purpose is repair of something that was wrong in the first place. 

Why isn’t there value any more in getting software right before it is released?  It’s not as though Microsoft is fighting upstarts  and has to be the first to market to survive. We have truly joined a culture where as Henty David Thoreau said more than 150 years ago that “men have become the tools of their tools”.

 As purchasers and as end users, we deserve decent products.  We pay substantially for them. Operating systems and office suites are the life blood of companies large and small. Other programs like the ones I sell are heavily dependent on their interface with such programs. Small companies take flaws very seriously and do all they can to correct them. Often they have limited numbers of programming forces to deal with them.  In contrast, Microsoft has thousands

Perhaps it is the very “bigness”of Microsoft that blinds it to the impact that problems with their software can cause for cottage industry end users like myself. But they are still creating and making things, just as artisans have done for thousands of years. A constant reminder that there is always an end user who depends on them to get it right – accountability, quality, service – like the posted notice that I saw yesterday on the shop floor of a small mailing house – would help. 

© Norah Bolton

April, 2004

BrainWave is written by Norah Bolton. You may copy the contents in whole or in part, but please acknowledge the source and the author.