PublicIssue, Microsoft's never ready for users, software.

I've been in the computer business for over 10 years, I still remember the initial days when I used to push Microsoft's Windows 3.0 to customers over IBM's OS2 or OS1 whatever it was, because I believed in Microsoft. Well, I would like to formally apologies to all of those that believed in me and choose Microsoft over IBM. Since those early days, Microsoft's products have easily wasted more of people's valuable time then any other activity, project or duty. To this day, Microsoft continues to create half-assed products, with great wrappers, then provides outstanding ads, only to deliver more crap that really isn't ready for users to work with. Customers spend more time, installing, un-installing, upgrading, deleting, re-configuring, calling technical support, asking millions of questions to hundreds of others that are just a confused as we are, until finally; a year or two later, Microsoft puts out a patch or upgrade, and there we go again.

So, what lit my fire this evening you say? It's Microsoft's plug and play, combined with their ridiculous installation wizard. How can they sell this junk? I simply place a USB 2.0 PCI card in my computer, then turned it on. After waiting for about 4 minutes, Windows XP tells me it found new hardware. Well instead of simply asking for the installation diskette, Windows kept flashing back and forth between to separate boxes that it found new hardware. Then when it finally got around to asking for the location, da... then it couldn't find the E drive until I pressed "cancel" then it restarted and found it. Is this really a "wizard?" When it finished, I no longer had a wireless Bluetooth network and I had to re-install the stupid ioGear software again, so what happened to the other drivers that were installed? The Wizard got them!

Either way, I'm sorry to all of you out there for helping us all get stuck with the idiots at Microsoft. By the way, where is Microsoft's help line?

John Turcott, Kalamazoo, Michigan