The Website of Jeremy D. Frens
Rants
Keep in mind that this is a rant. I'm not interested in being fair and impartial.
One of the things that annoys me about Microsoft are their fanatics, people who think Microsoft is the end-all and be-all of computer programs. These people read and believe the pitches for the software and (favorable) magazine reviews. When the product is released and all of its bugs are revealed, they are full of excuses.
I'm not trying to argue that all Microsoft products are bad. In fact, most (if not all) are good. It's just that they aren't the best out there, and they have (in my view) no reason to change.
Don't get me wrong. Yes, I am a strong proponent of open source software. (See my open source rant.) I will freely acknowledge that open source software has plenty of bugs as well. Open source software also has its share of fanatics that operate the same way as Microsoft fanatics.
In my experience, though, Microsoft fanatics seem to have only explored Microsoft products. Rarely do they know about any alternatives. And they seem to be more fanatical.
Another way Microsoft annoys me is in the ways it has made its software "helpful". I hate that paper clip thing, but that's because it's annoying. Some things I hate because they're wrong.
For example, in PowerPoint, I'd use the keyboard to select text to the end of the current line (Shift-End), it would select the whole bullet point. Uh, excuse me, I just asked to select from my current position to the end of the line. It's all I had to delete, and I'm a power user who uses the keyboard faster than the mouse. To move my hand over to the mouse would have taken time and more important forced my mind to shift gears. (A rant against GUIs is already brewing in my mind.)
Then there are "simple" things like boldface and italics. It never seems to turn off exactly where I want it to. Some of my non-CS students have had problems with this as well. I guess I've always figured that I was trying to double guess the system, so I wasn't using it properly. But I'd expect my students, the very users whom Microsoft is trying to "help", to be using it the way Microsoft anticipates it.
Here's something interesting to try: if you meet someone who used WordPerfect but is now using Word, ask him what he misses most. More often than not the answer I get is "reveal codes". WordPerfect has this special mode that would show your text and the formatting codes in your text. You could tell exactly where formmating changes were made. Word tries to be intelligent (or something) with the fomatting changes, and more often than not it's wrong for me. It always hides these codes to "help" us from being confused by them.
In fact, I usually don't ask people what they miss. They volunteer this information. Reveal codes is that important to them.