Episode II - For the Love of Microsoft
I have been in and around Information Technology for a fairly long
time, maybe 25 years, and in that time I have seen most of the big tech
companies grow into the titans they now are. Many outfits were lost
along the way, some are still running in different forms and some
flourished into the hyper-giants. There has always been a bunch of
familiar names in the techosphere, the bedrocks of corporate tech,
Apple, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle to name a few in different sectors. In
some future post I will ramble on about IBM, for this beloved company
made the first really serious, really big sexy machine that I ever
worked on and holds a special place in my silicon heart.
For now, I want to talk about Microsoft (MS). I want to laugh, I want to cry and I want to rant for no single company has given me so much, so little, wasted so much time, increased so much productivity and had me pulling what little hair I have out than Bill Gates’s baby.
I have found that there’s generally a few distinct tribes in tech, like the groups we had at school. All generally do the same kind of stuff but the outfits are a bit different and some have funny hair. In my secondary school we had the high-achieving academic ‘not very good at sports’ posse who make me think of the mainframe / midrange / server farm people of today. Very serious, very hardworking and …. a bit boring if not with an impressive workrate. Then we had the (for want of a better description) Hippie Crew, they mostly kept themselves to themselves, looked like they were homeless and smelled of Oil of Patchouli. For me these guys grew up to be the Linux / Open Source / run-Ubuntu-on-anything sector of tech society. Always rebellious, always quietly fighting the tide and always talking in some strange language entirely of their own. Other than that there was the school middle class who didn’t really have any distinct group, a bit good at everything but not very good at anything, not trying to change the world just live in it. These were and now are the Microsoft desktop crowd.
I’m not including the beautiful, very fashionable, rich silver spoon crowd in this. The gang who had girls we all crushed on and boys that had our female classmates giggling. Those who had perfect clothes and only communicated the the plebs when they really had to. At some point in the future I will discuss Apple.
My first school computer was a Research Machines 380z. This CPM running giant of my childhood really was one hell of an impressive beast, full text display, 56k of RAM and a good BASIC interpreter. All in all what more could an enthusiastic spotty oink want?
From this leviathan of computational muscle we progressed to the BBC Micro. For those of a similar vintage to myself this will be a name that conjures fond memories of the ‘BBC Basic…’ prompt, long hazy summer days wrestling with pointless assembler programs and Elite, still one of the best computer games ever devised and perhaps the birth of the free roaming environment. And I don’t care what anyone says, it was far better than Jet Pack Willy on the awful Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Micro really was a work of genius, so very easy to use and learn it was the lauchpad for an interest in tech for so many of the industry leaders of today. Just flick the switch and up it came. That fine machine was a good and faithful companion and I am still indebted to my Dad for spending far too much money to buy me one of my own.
Fast forward a few years. About 4ish, and we find ourselves in my first company, sat in front of an IBM PC (with the all new 3.5″ floppy drive) running Windows 3.something and a long lost program called DBase. This was used to create a sales reporting database with hoards of data downloaded from an IBM System/38 (or maybe 36 I can’t remember the architecture but we used both). Something was wrong, something was horribly wrong. Each time I opened the DBase file the machine would hang a bit and then crash. If this wasn’t bad enough we later found that the DBase DB file had been corrupted and lots of complicated data buggery had been flushed down the loo. This particular machine was used by a rather scary, chain smoking Welshman who was not too fond of dealing with us ‘Data Processing’ types and boy, was he pissed. Lots of “—- this”, “—- you” and “what the —- am I going to do now???” comments were passionately made as my colleagues and I gently introduced him to the idea of starting again and making sure he “saved it more often on to a floppy disk”. Windows now was not a thing of wonder, it was a monumental pain in the ass.
As I, my employers and the tech we used evolved we moved into Windows in a server environment. Windows NT. Remember that? Oh yeah, I can feel the flicker of recognition, the slight tremble of the hand and tick in the eyebrow. For me, working on these systems was the first introduction to the dreaded Blue Screen phenomenon, the plague of all IT departments running Microsoft. When that bad boy hit the screen you could feel the eyes of the IBM AS/400 operator on the back of your neck and the ripeness of his smug git grin. If you are an IT person you will know this horror intimately, if you are a user you will have suffered some form of disruption as a result of it.
After a good few years of this I moved out of the technical field and managed some great teams who would be my hands on, day to day fixers for these and many other issues. Recently, I had another brush with Microsoft in the form of Office/365. Please, dear Reader, don’t think I have a general downer with MS, because I don’t. A running 365 environment really is a thing of beauty, some much rich functionality that makes it really easy for users to get into the ‘cloud’ thing without suffering culture shock. After the appalling debacle of Windows 10 and the disappearing Start button the new Office apps really are a pleasure to use. Intuitive, logical, well organised and just plain beautiful.
A friend asked to me setup a small business for him and always being up for a challenge I dived in. I organised some yummy MacBooks, printers, created logos, letterheads, a funky website and some other good stuff. Being a techy at heart I really wanted to get this new venture into the cloud, kill IT (something I will also talk about at length in future posts) and let the business focus on core activities and not have the huge expense of a formal IT structure.
After spending many hours reading marketing fluff, blogs, articles and anything else from which I could form an educated opinion again that rose tinted sky came into view and I started to plan Office 365 with a fully cloud based mail and storage infrastructure. Happy days. Oh Microsoft, once again you broke my heart and just a few short calls and payments later I was back to listening to “—- this”, “—- you” and “what the —- am I going to do now???”. Things started to go awry soon after registering and trying to start the setup. I am not an exceptional intellect, I am not the mentally quickest person to have tried to deal with MS but I am far from stupid. Microsoft’s Volume Licensing Centre is an absolute mystery to me, so much so that my reseller said that it might be an idea to get some training from MS in order to be able to use it effectively. I’m sorry. You mean I need to be trained to make sure that I am licensing my application software? Really?
I’ll not go into the long, foul mouthed version of the whole tale of woe but basically it appeared that the logon used for the VLC (Volume Licensing Centre) could not be used for registration of the 365 licenses, upon trying I would receive one of many downright silly and ultimately unhelpful messages.
If memory serves this went on for about 3 or 4 days until I
eventually handed over all my logon details to my wonderful reseller
contact who created a new, and different, logon for 365 using a
different domain name and at last I was able to download apps, setup
storage and sharing structure and all is happy. From what I read on
various blogs and what my reseller told me this was and is a ‘global
problem’ with either VLC or 365. Who knows? Meanwhile I was apologising
constantly to my friend and trying to reassure him that this really was a
good idea. Now the problem is fixed they all love 365 and the new
office apps, the cloud storage is like magic “I can see the same thing
on my phone? Wow!” and after some therapy I too will be back to normal.
What I think MS has to understand is one simple, basic point. Technology now does not belong to a select group of (usually abnormally attractive) people who have an office in the basement and talk in a weird language. Everyone is in IT, they just don’t know it. I began to notice this with the ever popular iPhone, there is absolutely no need at all to understand the underlying technology in order to use (maybe) 90% of the functionality and for the VAST majority of the time there are no errors. It just works. During my problem with 365 I was told by various sources that I had to connect this to that, or use some domain thing or other, that it was a global problem, my Live ID was wrong etc. etc. blah blah blah. A whole hoard of reasons that I neither have the time or the interest to understand. I bought my stuff, give it to me.
The whole VLC – 365 online connection thing is shoddy, complicated and nonsensical, the help system is laughable (I clicked feedback at one point and got taken to a Forums page). Intuitive is NOT the new fragrance by Dior.
We can all accept hardware failing, we can all accept that sometimes a system can be complicated, we can all even see that specialised skills are required to achieve some aims. But the level at which we need to ‘get technical’ is fast changing. A bod in the new company office wanted to print from their Windows laptop and with a little faffing I started to download the 300 Mgb driver and utility pack. I have a MacBook and was printing in 7 seconds (yes, I really did time it).
In one way I kinda like Microsoft for keeping a big bunch of jobs going for desktop support and reseller expertise, for their apparent stubbornness in retaining the tech in technology. But, please, guys you have to understand that no matter how elegant the end result the basic complexity and user skills requirement of Microsoft products in general is making it look silly. I setup another venture a year ago for another friend with the same basic parameters, all on Google and I had finished by lunchtime. If Microsoft’s school middle class of people who are enthusiastic about tech but don’t want to know how it works are to be pulled from Apple, Android and maybe even Ubuntu they have to make all much simpler. Make it more like my 380z or my beeb, just press the switch and it works.
I look forward to that day.
For now, I want to talk about Microsoft (MS). I want to laugh, I want to cry and I want to rant for no single company has given me so much, so little, wasted so much time, increased so much productivity and had me pulling what little hair I have out than Bill Gates’s baby.
I have found that there’s generally a few distinct tribes in tech, like the groups we had at school. All generally do the same kind of stuff but the outfits are a bit different and some have funny hair. In my secondary school we had the high-achieving academic ‘not very good at sports’ posse who make me think of the mainframe / midrange / server farm people of today. Very serious, very hardworking and …. a bit boring if not with an impressive workrate. Then we had the (for want of a better description) Hippie Crew, they mostly kept themselves to themselves, looked like they were homeless and smelled of Oil of Patchouli. For me these guys grew up to be the Linux / Open Source / run-Ubuntu-on-anything sector of tech society. Always rebellious, always quietly fighting the tide and always talking in some strange language entirely of their own. Other than that there was the school middle class who didn’t really have any distinct group, a bit good at everything but not very good at anything, not trying to change the world just live in it. These were and now are the Microsoft desktop crowd.
I’m not including the beautiful, very fashionable, rich silver spoon crowd in this. The gang who had girls we all crushed on and boys that had our female classmates giggling. Those who had perfect clothes and only communicated the the plebs when they really had to. At some point in the future I will discuss Apple.
My first school computer was a Research Machines 380z. This CPM running giant of my childhood really was one hell of an impressive beast, full text display, 56k of RAM and a good BASIC interpreter. All in all what more could an enthusiastic spotty oink want?
 |
| Like something from a Buck Rodgers Movie….. |
From this leviathan of computational muscle we progressed to the BBC Micro. For those of a similar vintage to myself this will be a name that conjures fond memories of the ‘BBC Basic…’ prompt, long hazy summer days wrestling with pointless assembler programs and Elite, still one of the best computer games ever devised and perhaps the birth of the free roaming environment. And I don’t care what anyone says, it was far better than Jet Pack Willy on the awful Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Micro really was a work of genius, so very easy to use and learn it was the lauchpad for an interest in tech for so many of the industry leaders of today. Just flick the switch and up it came. That fine machine was a good and faithful companion and I am still indebted to my Dad for spending far too much money to buy me one of my own.
 |
| Still brings a tear to my eye. Miss you beeb. :-* |
Fast forward a few years. About 4ish, and we find ourselves in my first company, sat in front of an IBM PC (with the all new 3.5″ floppy drive) running Windows 3.something and a long lost program called DBase. This was used to create a sales reporting database with hoards of data downloaded from an IBM System/38 (or maybe 36 I can’t remember the architecture but we used both). Something was wrong, something was horribly wrong. Each time I opened the DBase file the machine would hang a bit and then crash. If this wasn’t bad enough we later found that the DBase DB file had been corrupted and lots of complicated data buggery had been flushed down the loo. This particular machine was used by a rather scary, chain smoking Welshman who was not too fond of dealing with us ‘Data Processing’ types and boy, was he pissed. Lots of “—- this”, “—- you” and “what the —- am I going to do now???” comments were passionately made as my colleagues and I gently introduced him to the idea of starting again and making sure he “saved it more often on to a floppy disk”. Windows now was not a thing of wonder, it was a monumental pain in the ass.
As I, my employers and the tech we used evolved we moved into Windows in a server environment. Windows NT. Remember that? Oh yeah, I can feel the flicker of recognition, the slight tremble of the hand and tick in the eyebrow. For me, working on these systems was the first introduction to the dreaded Blue Screen phenomenon, the plague of all IT departments running Microsoft. When that bad boy hit the screen you could feel the eyes of the IBM AS/400 operator on the back of your neck and the ripeness of his smug git grin. If you are an IT person you will know this horror intimately, if you are a user you will have suffered some form of disruption as a result of it.
After a good few years of this I moved out of the technical field and managed some great teams who would be my hands on, day to day fixers for these and many other issues. Recently, I had another brush with Microsoft in the form of Office/365. Please, dear Reader, don’t think I have a general downer with MS, because I don’t. A running 365 environment really is a thing of beauty, some much rich functionality that makes it really easy for users to get into the ‘cloud’ thing without suffering culture shock. After the appalling debacle of Windows 10 and the disappearing Start button the new Office apps really are a pleasure to use. Intuitive, logical, well organised and just plain beautiful.
A friend asked to me setup a small business for him and always being up for a challenge I dived in. I organised some yummy MacBooks, printers, created logos, letterheads, a funky website and some other good stuff. Being a techy at heart I really wanted to get this new venture into the cloud, kill IT (something I will also talk about at length in future posts) and let the business focus on core activities and not have the huge expense of a formal IT structure.
After spending many hours reading marketing fluff, blogs, articles and anything else from which I could form an educated opinion again that rose tinted sky came into view and I started to plan Office 365 with a fully cloud based mail and storage infrastructure. Happy days. Oh Microsoft, once again you broke my heart and just a few short calls and payments later I was back to listening to “—- this”, “—- you” and “what the —- am I going to do now???”. Things started to go awry soon after registering and trying to start the setup. I am not an exceptional intellect, I am not the mentally quickest person to have tried to deal with MS but I am far from stupid. Microsoft’s Volume Licensing Centre is an absolute mystery to me, so much so that my reseller said that it might be an idea to get some training from MS in order to be able to use it effectively. I’m sorry. You mean I need to be trained to make sure that I am licensing my application software? Really?
I’ll not go into the long, foul mouthed version of the whole tale of woe but basically it appeared that the logon used for the VLC (Volume Licensing Centre) could not be used for registration of the 365 licenses, upon trying I would receive one of many downright silly and ultimately unhelpful messages.
 |
| What you can try…try again. |
What I think MS has to understand is one simple, basic point. Technology now does not belong to a select group of (usually abnormally attractive) people who have an office in the basement and talk in a weird language. Everyone is in IT, they just don’t know it. I began to notice this with the ever popular iPhone, there is absolutely no need at all to understand the underlying technology in order to use (maybe) 90% of the functionality and for the VAST majority of the time there are no errors. It just works. During my problem with 365 I was told by various sources that I had to connect this to that, or use some domain thing or other, that it was a global problem, my Live ID was wrong etc. etc. blah blah blah. A whole hoard of reasons that I neither have the time or the interest to understand. I bought my stuff, give it to me.
The whole VLC – 365 online connection thing is shoddy, complicated and nonsensical, the help system is laughable (I clicked feedback at one point and got taken to a Forums page). Intuitive is NOT the new fragrance by Dior.
We can all accept hardware failing, we can all accept that sometimes a system can be complicated, we can all even see that specialised skills are required to achieve some aims. But the level at which we need to ‘get technical’ is fast changing. A bod in the new company office wanted to print from their Windows laptop and with a little faffing I started to download the 300 Mgb driver and utility pack. I have a MacBook and was printing in 7 seconds (yes, I really did time it).
In one way I kinda like Microsoft for keeping a big bunch of jobs going for desktop support and reseller expertise, for their apparent stubbornness in retaining the tech in technology. But, please, guys you have to understand that no matter how elegant the end result the basic complexity and user skills requirement of Microsoft products in general is making it look silly. I setup another venture a year ago for another friend with the same basic parameters, all on Google and I had finished by lunchtime. If Microsoft’s school middle class of people who are enthusiastic about tech but don’t want to know how it works are to be pulled from Apple, Android and maybe even Ubuntu they have to make all much simpler. Make it more like my 380z or my beeb, just press the switch and it works.
I look forward to that day.
 |
| “I am one of those people who are quite happy to wear cotton, but have no idea how it works.” |