Rant: Microsoft

[jim]

Ok, I see what you are saying. I guess I can buy that. But the solutions we build aren't intended for programmer types to use - our end customers typically are fairly technical but we put alot of thought into the ease of use. But, it's not something the average Joe is going to install and use, so point taken.

What I don't like is this trend to cookie cutter solutions for everything - for example someone decided here to buy SharePoint. Now we HAVE to use it, even if it isn't the right solution. We end buying expensive general purpose solutions (alot of it now is SaaS - cloud based) that are so general purpose that everything is starting to look like a hammer. And when you need a saw, it's really hard to make that hammer cut wood very well. And - this is partly a societal issue - people are just getting used to sloppy solutions because they are everywhere. So the bar is so low now that I just feel like everything we use is just crap.

And we shove everything into these little boxes because our management creates committees like the Enterprise Architecture Board - a nightmare of business buzzwords and bureaucracy, that creates one line sweeping directions like "Thou shalt use X". What happens is we buy these general purpose tools for one task, and end up using it in a million different ways. Someone on here I know is a ServiceNow developer - we got this system for our incident/change/release management. It sucks, it's a nightmare of an interface and you can't find anything, but it doesn't suck so bad that you can't use it for the purpose we bought it. BUt - people have come up with all sorts of interesting ways to use it. It's become our toilet, and we are a bunch of little kids throwing things in it and flushing and seeing what goes down and what plugs it up. AND - the real kicker is - you start doing more than putting data in. You start using it to build business process and then ..... price hike. We have just been informed in 2 years that our initial "discount' which I guess we didn't realize was a discount expires, and the prices are going to go up to a point where I don't see how we can afford it. If all we had was data - fine. Take it out, put it somewhere else. But we have more than data, we have automated many of our process stuff from moving material to buying stuff from our stock room to account creation to logging error messages in that.

It's heroin. We aren't going to be able to do anything but figure out a way to pay the price.

Software should be free.

[jim]

BTW ad, Linux is pretty simple to use. If you dont' believe me, Steve will tell you:

[Jocephus]

is that like clippy?

[jim]

I don't know what clippy means.

[Jocephus]