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TMFBent (99.84)

Why Everyone Hates Microsoft

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April 09, 2008 – Comments (10) | RELATED TICKERS: MSFT , AAPL

Reason # 4,546,987,213

Stuff that should be one click either takes all day, or doesn't work at all.

To wit: bluetooth connections between my windows mobile smartphone and either of the windows machines I use at work. I am the kind of guy who can troubleshoot just about any windows problem (ask me about my workaround for Vista, OneNote2007, and SharePoint Services servers that are old and not well-kept, securitywise...), but this is absolutely baffling, and web search after web search shows no fixes.

No matter what I do, no matter how many drivers I update, not matter where I look, the simple bluetooth pair 'n' go process DOES NOT WORK between windows mobile BlackJack and windows XP or Vista.

Does anyone think Apple would settle for a non-functional and unfixable wireless synchronization solution between its portable devices and PCs?

Redmond -- pull your heads out of your... wherever you've got them stuffed. This stuff needs to work flawlessly, out of the box. Or people will continue to laugh and buy competing products.

10 Comments – Post Your Own

#1) On April 09, 2008 at 4:09 PM, MikeMark (30.48) wrote:

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha (lol)

So, why not buy a Mac? 

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#2) On April 09, 2008 at 4:48 PM, leohaas (93.17) wrote:

MSFT has cornered the market. OK, there are some Mac fans around, as well as a few LINUX freaks. But other than that, there is no competition. That's what allows them to put out cr@p. What are the chances of the Supreme Court or the DoJ helping us out here, like they did with Standard Oil and Ma Bell? Or do we have to wait for the Europeans to take action?

Anyway, as long as MSFT is a de facto monopoly, I will own some...

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#3) On April 09, 2008 at 4:51 PM, TMFBent (99.84) wrote:

1) I have real work to do. Macs don't handle the gazillion add-ons and other software I use every day. Emulating windows on a Mac would only multiply my headaches.

2) Apple does not make a tablet PC, and I use mine a ton.

3) Apple does not support the many legacy products I use to make photographs.

4) Apple machines use lousy LCD screens, which are tough to profile, and the images change depending on where you sit. A trust CRT on an XP machine is much cheaper and more reliable.

5) Windows mobile might suck-diddly-uck, but the Macs I've been forced to use at work have been worse than most XP machines.

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#4) On April 09, 2008 at 4:57 PM, FoolishChemist (98.08) wrote:

I've always found wireless to be more trouble than it's worth.  I still plug things in the old fashioned way, at least I know where the signal is going.

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#5) On April 09, 2008 at 5:04 PM, TMFBent (99.84) wrote:

No kidding. Windows mobile is great for services and breadth of capabilities, but it is ugly, clunky, and funky with bluetooth. On top of that, Samsung's bluetooth is infamously bad. (Can't set up bluetooth headsets for voice dialing, for instance, nor set up a bluetooth PAN.) Then throw in broadcom's funky drivers, and well, three kinds of bad don't work well together.

I like the bluetooth sync when it works because I keep the tower on the floor in the boonies, so cables can be a pain. Luckily for me, after about 15 reinstalls, it finally decided to work. Have no idea what was different about no. 15.

But that's the problem with MSFT (and Samsung, and Cisco, and many others...) they'll ship product that isn't foolproof, and it really ticks people off. Most people would have quick 2 hours before I did, and probably resolved never to buy a product from the company again. They'd rather get something from Apple for more money with fewer features because the perception is that it works without screwing around.

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#6) On April 09, 2008 at 5:41 PM, ByrneShill (79.45) wrote:

Are you sure the problem isn't just yout "smartphone". If you can't set up a PAN, maybe the thing is faulty (or just crap...). Remember a chain is as strong as its weakest link, so if the phone blows, no software will fix your problem.

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#7) On April 09, 2008 at 6:23 PM, MikeMark (30.48) wrote:

1) I have real work to do. Macs don't handle the gazillion add-ons and other software I use every day. Emulating windows on a Mac would only multiply my headaches.

You should at least try one. I've been doing real work on a Mac since oh 1988. We have used Macs for Architecture CAD, Structural Design, writing, calculation, sales & marketing, email, video editing, web design, catalog layout, video conferencing and many other things. Most of the time there are fewer headaches than Windows systems. This I know due to my experience designing hard drives for computer systems. During that part of my career we nearly exclusively used PCs with or without Windows.

By the way, Windows is a take-off of the Mac user interface from back in 1986. Different development path, but the same basic ideas. Most things done on Windows were done on a Mac first. (Ever hear of visicalc? and The mouse originated on a Mac.)

2) Apple does not make a tablet PC, and I use mine a ton.

Wow. I exclusively use a tablet by Wacom for (see above). 

3) Apple does not support the many legacy products I use to make photographs.

Like what? Adobe began on Apple. What else is worth using?

4) Apple machines use lousy LCD screens, which are tough to profile, and the images change depending on where you sit. A trust CRT on an XP machine is much cheaper and more reliable.

My colors seem to come out right on. 

5) Windows mobile might suck-diddly-uck, but the Macs I've been forced to use at work have been worse than most XP machines.

Wow my experience has been very different from yours. I'll admit that when I worked desiging hard drive systems for computers in the '90s, Macs were nowhere near the systems that they are today, but they still were great at most things writing, color, and layup related. Fortunately they brought Steve Jobs back for a better future.

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#8) On April 09, 2008 at 6:27 PM, MikeMark (30.48) wrote:

Oh, Bent, I miss-understood. You said tabletPC I read "tablet". You are right. I'm wrong. You are good. I am bad.

 Apple doesn't make a tablet PC. But there are tablets available for their systems.

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#9) On April 10, 2008 at 9:17 AM, TMFBent (99.84) wrote:

Actually, most of the famous Mac "innovations" were taken from others. Mice from Xerox, for instance.

I use old adobe software, all of which would have to be replaced if I went to a Mac. I use other older imaging software and hardware (profilers, etc.) that won't work on new Macs. They broke all that stuff and never looked back. Most of it still works on Vista, and all of it has survived iterations of XP. Replacing all this stuff would add about $6-7000 thousand bucks to the price of switching. And then I'd have a machine that couldn't be used for the rest of my work. That makes no sense.

And, for reference, several Mac-fan colleagues of mine here at the fool ended up buying a PC to do their work. The hassles of emulation and boot camp are too many to be worth it for them.

Color profiling in photography is something most people don't pay much attention to, and the latest versions of Macs I used did a terrible job with it. I used to work for a workshop that got brand new Mac products, straight out of the box, and I had to do the color correction that mattered on a Sam's Club, windows XP laptop attached to an old CRT -- which I could at least profile with a cheap package and sensor. (This was a couple years back, so maybe they fixed these problems since?)

The way-expensive cinema displays had different color casts from the same files, same profile setups. I set them up right next to each other to confirm this. I was dumbfounded. When I cornered the Mac-o-phile photojournalists at the conference and asked them how they dealt with this at their home newspapers and magazines (the biggest in the country) they said they had purchased some expensive 3-rd party stuff to take care of it. It was a shame, really. I ended up handing the multi-core big macs to people for page layout (and they were constantly swearing about not getting WYSIWYG output from the printers anyway...) and use the cheap windows machines for

So, I guess one could go the direction that everyone says is best, but in my experience has been terrible, or I could stick with a plug-and-play windows system that works and is already paid for.

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#10) On April 10, 2008 at 11:07 AM, MikeMark (30.48) wrote:

That all makes sense to me. I've dealt with some of the issues you have had problems with. We like to do extensive research and testing before we buy a product to work with. And that is due to exactly what you are saying. The Mac works great for a lot of things right out of the box, but when they changed direction Apple burnt the bridge and didn't look back. Because of that, we do still have some legacy systems here that run Mac OS 8 (believe it or not)!

The latest Macs do have better displays and there is a product named Parallels that allows Windows to run as a process within the Mac OS unix core and displayed in a window. But as you say- why futz around for a higher tool cost?

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