Sometimes, The Littlest Things Kill

Just like those tiny ocean creatures that can kill you within minutes, and there never seems to be a hospital handy in the middle of the ocean, Microsoft seems to have forgotten that people are upgrading and expecting there to be something at the other end of the upgrade.

In short, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tells about many upgraders that are doing the upgrade to Windows 7, yet because they have been using Outlook Express, or in the case of Vista, Windows Mail, there is nothing coming out the other end, in the finished Windows 7 installation.

He also rightly points out that the problem is one for the many who are not what we might call ‘proficient‘ with their computers. They are the people who use them like a toaster, and as long as the toast keeps coming out golden brown, and not white or charcoal in color, they remain happy.

Microsoft should have planed for this, and I’m sure they are spending a lot of those upgrade profit dollars on phone support. It’s one of those things that should have been thought of, but somehow was not.

It would have been so easy to let WinMail pass through the upgrade – after all the program was on Vista, and the Microsoft upgrade charts show that there are many upgrade scenarios for users of Vista, many of them involving no user intervention above a few questions being answered and a disk insertion.

Easier still would have been a pop-up, at the beginning of every upgrade, stating that before doing the upgrade, the customer should add Windows Live Mail, which would upgrade either of the problem programs, in place, and then things would proceed smoothly.

It’s really a good thing that Mr. Ballmer did not do the Monkeyboy dance yesterday!

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- not a big deal, in the larger scheme of things, but if you think you’ve hosed all your love letters from that special someone, you might be a bit upset!

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Opera includes a very full featured mail program…