The Scatterbrained Side of Microsoft
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As someone who uses, and recommends, the Windows Live Essentials, I really get excited when news of changes comes. I am always anxious to see what has been changed, because with this stuff, unlike the operating systems, they always appear to be headed in the right direction.
There have been a few fitful missteps however, like the time about a year ago when I tried to do an upgrade in place for the Live Essentials, and the system would get to about 92% done, and then tell me that the process could not continue, rolling back the system to the previous versions. After trying that twice, on three different machines, to make sure that it was not architecture specific, I then removed the programs, and each time, on each machine, the install went swimmingly.
Someone at Microsoft saw that one, and asked me to relate my circumstances, and I did. The next update worked without problems, and without having to remove the previous versions.
Now, yesterday, I got a message in my inbox, telling me that it was time to upgrade, to the latest version of Live Messenger. I used the handy, provided link, to download the web version of the installer, which tries to get you to download all the programs.
Since I have everything, save for the Family Safety app, the installer simply sat there, waiting for me to quit, as if to say,”these are already installed, and once again, I am too brain-dead to figure out that an update is being performed“.
So, next I looked around, using my best friend when trying to find things at Microsoft, Google. (I even deigned to using Bing! with no change in luck) I was looking around for a lone Messenger installer, since that was what I was being asked to do, and there is no built in way, within Messenger, to ask if an update is available.
I then looked within Live Writer, as it does have a way to ask that question. No, there are no updates of that available. When trying the Live Mail application, it snubbed my use of Opera, with a terse explanation that I needed to use at least Internet Exploder 5 to access the site, and better still, I should have automatic updates enabled. (Good luck on that one! I learned my lesson about automatic updates when they thrashed 3 of my machines on the same update cycle, to varying degrees.)
The Live Photo Gallery application, like Live Messenger, has no built in way for an update check from within the program.
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Now, thinking about this – It seems that there should be a few changes.
1] There should be a way, within each program, to check for updates.
2] The update mechanism should be consistent, with no messages saying that I needed Internet Exploder in one, and the other one simply saying that no update was available. Is not a consistent interface what Windows was originally about? (that was the line that Microsoft was selling back then, otherwise, we all should have simply stayed with DesqView, because it did a much better job of multitasking than anything Microsoft put out until Windows 98)
3] Is the average person going to do all this looking around, when confronted with this problem? I don’t think so. This leads to what we, in the people business refer to as ‘customer dissatisfaction’.
4] I just removed Live Messenger, used the full installer to re-install the application, and compared revision levels. Exactly the same. At this point, I’m somewhat upset, as I have wasted almost an hour of my time, along with having to re-install Messenger Plus, and make my choices to modify that, as they are all lost with the removal of Live Messenger.
All because some pinhead at Microsoft sent me this message:
It’s time to update Windows Live Messenger
(and before you say anything, it was not a spoofed address – it was indeed from Microsoft...)
There were pictures also, but I’ve omitted them for brevity. This is the sort of thing that makes people (and especially me) very mad. It is waste of time.
How hard would it have been to give the version available, and allow the person to check the version installed, to see if the removal, and then re-install is needed.
Flying blind is something no one likes, and I like it less than most. This sort of thing is inexcusable for a company that makes software as its main thrust. It is the type of bungling that you expect from a shareware writer, not Microsoft.
[and they still think I should have updates set to automatic!]
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Quote of the day:
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson
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