Every time this O/S is reinstalled, it takes hours to add back in all the various third-party programs I'm in the habit of having, and getting everything happy with each other in there, and able to work smoothly doing a job together.
What am I talking about? Well, for example, I like to have Paint.NET for its huge plug-ins collection. It needs the .NET Framework 3.5, with that one's prior incarnations including Framework 2.0. Then there's Microsoft Research's great panorama making program 'I.C.E.' (Image Composite Editor), and it requires Silverlight plus Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable and its ancestors like the 2008 version, and all their security updates. And I prefer as a graphics editor an older version of Arcsoft's PhotoStudio, but Windows throws up a pop-up telling me it has 'compatibility problems'. I choose to select 'Run it Anyway' because it's my firm belief the 'compatibility problems' are in Redmond, Washington, not here on my desktop computer. We had this discussion back in 2007 or 2008, me and a couple of folks in the Technical Support section at Microsoft, and they asked me what my problem was, and I told them - in about four pages! The short version being that even though we of the semi-literate unwashed masses couldn't write computer code to save our lives, nevertheless we're the boobs who are showering Microsoft with our sweat-stained cash for their too-often-frustrating product, which they like to pretend comes to us as a gift from God Almighty. Periodically, someone has to step up and tell them to get over themselves and get on with it. Been there and done that, Kiddies. I thought it worked when I saw how wonderfully well Windows 7 performs. But now that I've got my nerves once more frazzle-assed with this latest creation for the young and horny and desperate who babble endlessly on their portable devices saying nothing, but making the phone companies obscenely rich, I'm just not sure Mighty Microsoft got the word. Or does success go to their heads, and let them get sloppy every second operating system they work on? Do they need to shoot themselves in the wallet regularly in order to regain their focus on the object of that whole exercise? There's evidence to suggest they do, and I wish I knew why.
These guys, collectively, have enough brainpower to reach from here to the moon, if we stacked them up head-to-head or cheek-to-cheek, yet they too often give us something that's simply not yet ready for prime time, yet they've got their fingers on the pulse of cyberspace and ought to know for sure what will fly and what will crash and burn, without floating a lot of hyped-up trial balloons over our heads and through our living rooms. They claim to want our opinions, but if we get brutally honest with them, then they'll get all angry and defensive and say we just don't understand the marketplace. Hell's Bells! We ARE that marketplace. I can't write HTML5, but I know for sure what I want to spend my next thousand bucks on, and so do you I betcha, and if Microsoft wants some of it, they have to show me something I'm really excited about - something that I just can't live without. Something that will rival sex as the national sport!
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