My Changing Relationship with MS

If you watch my tweets, you would have noticed that a couple weeks ago I was getting frustrated trying to reinstall Office 2007 after my primary hard drive failed.  As you may have guessed, the problem was with product activation.  I called tech support and gave my activation code to the automated system and when it was supposed to transfer me to a person, it just disconnected.  When I got to a person - wait, I bet you can guess - Reboot and reinstall.  Ok yep, did that about a dozen times now.  I went through a few disconnections and one woman who accused me of software piracy before I finally got to "Kumar" (that isn't what he goes by, but it was part of his name - and yes, all but 2 people had the out-sourced tech support accent).  He was great, even remote connected to my computer and tried the install again, had me re-download the software in case there was file corruption (which wasn't fun since we were already throttled down to dialup speed).  It finally came down to the retailer on WindowsMarketplace.com had deactivated my purchase a year after I placed the order.  The automated email response listed several reasons why they might have done that, but didn't give me any specifics and as far as I could tell never tried to contact me about any trouble.  Turns out I was never charged for the purchase afterall.

During this frustrating process, I was venting to a friend who remarked "welcome to 1996" as if Windows 95 was the turning point when I should have started disliking MS.  But the truth is, in 1996 I was working for Microsoft supporting Windows 95 (technically - working for one of the centers they contracted with for support.  This was before all those jobs were sent overseas).  I liked the software and found it easy use and easy to troubleshoot.  I continued liking it as my job descriptions changed from help-desk to web developer to server and network administration.  I've viewed each new OS from Microsoft like a new toy.

My viewpoint is changing now that it's not part of my job.  When it turned out that I hadn't officially purchased Office, I questioned if I still wanted to.  I really wasn't that thrilled with the new Office interface, but I could get used to it.  I was unhappy that they'd taken Outlook out of the Home and Student edition.  I ended up downloading a trial version of Professional so I could transfer my old emails from a .pst to the Windows Live Mail format.  I thought that I really liked the new One Note application - but then I thought 'What if they take that out of a future release?' which led to 'Am I willing to keep buying a new version of Office every 5 years or so just to be able to keep my documents?'  The answer was 'No'.

Open Office is available as shareware and I could collect all the files that were in the 2007 format and save them back to earlier Office versions that were readable to Open Office.  The Google Pack even includes Star Office for free (I'm not completely familiar, but Star seems to be a version of Open that's been spiffed up a bit by Sun and is sold to businesses).  Now that I was thinking about it - what format should I save my files in to keep them readable into the future?  Open and Star have an "open document format" which sounded good on the surface, but MS doesn't support it so it wouldn't work for sharing to others (MS plans to support ODF with an update sometime next year).  I could probably save most as simply rich text format (rtf) or comma separated values (csv).

Then I started thinking about IE.  Lately, even with my new install, IE has had a habit of taking naps (going unresponsive for periods of time).  A friend of mine (who has the same problem) thinks he's narrowed it down to Adobe.  I used to disable the pdf plug in for IE, but now that Adobe has gobbled up Flash and Shockwave as well, it's harder to keep them separate.  I've used Firefox fairly often but didn't think it was that much better than IE that I  would switch completely.  A couple days ago, while cleaning up my garbage "favorites" I found Flock.  Yahoo customized Firefox and tied it into several of the most popular networking sites (primarily yahoo and google oriented).  The browser is fast and takes Firefox add ons like CoComment, etc.  It allows you to import search engines so that you can search Amazon, Youtube, etc without going to the site in your browser first.  They support Yahoo, Gmail, and with the next beta, AOL mail, much like Windows Live Mail lets you bring several email accounts into one interface.

I haven't completely turned away from MS.  I find OneCare(1) a very convenient way to do backups, patches, and regular maintenance.  So far, Live Writer is my preferred blog editor.  It's just in many areas they don't seem to share nicely with others or they require you use their service (passport or IE) in order to access content.  I know, I know - they always been like that.  When work required that I have them anyway, it didn't matter; now it does.

(1) OneCare doesn't like the most recent version of Ad-Aware, calling it an interfering program.  However, OneCare doesn't detect tracking cookies as a problem (and you might not either, but I don't like them).  Here is a copy of my host file that shows the sites I've blocked (so far).