brunetteblogger.com

OK, it’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of Microsoft Products. I went through a period where they seemed to be working for me (last half of 2004 lol) and I wasn’t as vociferous, but I feel as though I really need to warn people about Windows Vista and Office 2007. They give me daily fits and starts, and negatively affect the productivity of my business. Here are the top ten reasons why you’ll want to buy a Mac after using them, and computer maven Chris Pirillo is way ahead of me on this.

1. Office 2007: The file formats for PowerPoint, Word, and Excel aren’t compatible with earlier versions of each program. So, EVERY time you send a file to a colleague, you have to know what version they have to know what file to send, and you’ll have to save two versions of the file if they don’t have 2007.
2. Office 2007: They’ve changed ALL the menus very drastically, and used their own twisted logic to do so, not relying on the fact that we are all used to the old menus and their logic. For example, Page Layout has about half the printing options, and the other half are on some weird menu on the left side of the window, completely separate from all the other menus. You end up feeling like someone with no logic has rearranged your garage, and you can’t find any of your tools. Heaven help the person who tries to upgrade to 2007 and prepare a document without allocating twice the time they think they’ll need before a big deadline.
3. Vista: They’ve dumbed down the file explorer windows. For some reason, they think the only thing people want to do with their computers is to view photos (the recent Mojave commercial confirms this–btw my 4 year old camera can create a panoramic photo), so all of my file folders are geared for that…I can’t see any file suffixes (.doc, .xls etc.) I’m sure there is a way to change it…but see my next item to see why this is problematic. You say “shouldn’t the colorful file icons point you in the right direction?” but look at #1 on this list…the Office 2007 files look almost identical to older versions of the files, and I’ve got a whole lot of these “duplicates” on my system. Why Microsoft software had so much potential for business, and now they are saying that your computer is simply a tool for manipulating photos, is beyond me. And btw, if this is your “position” as we say in marketing, I’m sorry to tell you that Macintosh computers are WAAAAAY better than you at things like this.
4. Vista: Control panel has been dumbed down way too much. I can’t for the life of me find how to change things like the display, reproducibly. You can switch to the old control panel view, but for some reason this is still different, and I can’t find it.
5. Vista: OS hangs and is too slow. Even though they’ve changed everything around to the point that you start to think that there must be some significant improvement in performance, the system is actually slower now. You often see programs hanging when you try to save files, etc. I estimate that Vista wastes about 20 minutes a day for me, translating to 3 weeks a year!!! I think they strove for an OS that looks good, making fancy icons for everything and making the borders of the windows partially transparent, and this slows things down. Kind of like a Corvair, looks nice but is unsafe at any speed. Microsoft, please don’t make us test drive your Corvair!
6. Office 2007: They got rid of forms in Word. This used to be really cool, you could make a form that someone could fill out and print or send back to you. Don’t even try it with the new version–it’s a pain, doesn’t work 10% as well as the old forms, and put on top of that the different file formats, and that you can’t send a form to anyone without Office 2007, I can almost guarantee it will be a frustrating experience. Again, we’re assuming that the new file formats/back end will bring us BENEFITS not DETRIMENTS…please don’t treat the consumers as beta testers!
7. Vista: They’ve set up ridiculous safeguards to combat malicious programs that end up actually interfering with your work. Every time I try to start an executable (e.g., install a program), the whole screen goes blank and it asks me if I really want to do it. It’s so dramatic that you think something is wrong (as we’re all hypersensitive to the blue screen of death with Windows). Meanwhile, the computer will sometimes REBOOT ITSELF WHEN PUT IN HIBERNATION!! Obviously I’m not OK’ing this action, even though I may lose documents in the process, but I have to OK everything else–makes no sense. Feel free to track my reboots via twitter.
8. Office 2007: They’ve retrograded the html viewing in Outlook, causing anyone who sends html email to have problems, and also resulting in fewer features for the end user (e.g., any email that has anything more than just text). Why, why, why retrograde?
9. Getting help in general: OK, like most people, I’ve learned that the best source of help (for Microsoft products, and in general) is to type questions directly into Google. This Microsoft help page for “wrapping text” in PowerPoint proves my point that their help is lame (and why on earth can’t PowerPoint truly wrap text around an image?). Anyway, since people are flocking AWAY from Vista and 2007, this means there is a paucity of help out there for those of us who are trapped. I’ve fallen into the Vista Vortex and I can’t get out!
10. After all this time and advances in technology (my current computer has a ridiculous amount of memory, and is somehow slower than my old machine), there has GOT to be a better solution. Microsoft has fallen behind because they are the market leader, unfortunately, and I think this commercial says it all.

What is the better solution? Well, Macs now can run windows (XP!) AND their own OS, and they have a unix back end, which likely makes them more stable. I haven’t used a Mac in quite awhile, but I’m certainly looking into it more and more these days.

We all know what really happened at the end of the Windows Mojave Experiment. I feel like they’re trying to simultaneously dumb everything down, but expect us to be very technically savvy to deal with all of the problems that Vista and Office 2007 pose. Microsoft, stop treating us like “idiot savants” who will be oo’ed and ahh’d by the looks of Vista and Office 2007, and just come up with something that works, because we’re trying to do work here!