Dear Microsoft: Go fuck yourself.
Seriously: go take a long walk off a short pier. Better yet, how about taking a running leap off a rocky cliff into a huge, gaping void and on the way down, shoving whatever loose, dangling appendage happens to be handy up your greedy, corporate ass? Because really, you should feel as much pain on the way to your ultimate demise as you do when you reach the terminus.
Whither this rancor? I'll tell you, dickheads.
I've been using Microsoft products since 1996, when I grudgingly dumped the superior WordPerfect upon rejoining corporate America buying a LEGAL copy of your product each time to use at home.
I have refused to put illegal copies of Office on other people's computers, even though I question how much you people play by the rules when it comes to corporate 'fairness."
I've continued to support Microsoft even as your buggy templates and bloated programs ate away at my hard drive and terminally crippled my data.
I've even defended you to the Microsoft haters, that ever-growing contingent of the righteously indignant, because of the remarkably almost-perfect mail client, Entourage.
But today, I couldn't launch Word to work on a document.
I couldn't launch Word because I had my almost-perfect mail client open on my 12" PowerBook, which sits two feet from my PowerMac G5 desktop, which I use, HOLD THE PRESSES, HERE, in tandem.
That's right: I have the audacity to want to have my mail client open on one networked computer as I work on a Word document on the other, which is, apparently, a violation of my license agreement, a practice which makes me the electronic equivalent of crackheads who slit throats for a fix or bearded, gold-earringed, parrot-toting seamen of old who say "Yarrrr!" a lot.
So you know what I'm going to do when I get out of this work hole I'm in right now?
I'm finally going to download that copy of Open Office I've been meaning to check out.
I'm finally going to move my email into Mail.
I'm finally going to switch all of my non-essential work documents to text, like the hardcore geeks do.
And then I'm done with your tired, mistrustful, greedy, no-support-giving, distrustful, disrespectful assholes.
Yes, the corporate world will continue to use your shitty output and yes, I'll probably have to keep using it, too, at least for the time being. I do PowerPoint presentations, yes. I'm forced to deal with Word and Excel and the rest of your buggy, shitty, unsupported-for-mac output.
But I promise you this: for every time I actually use one of your products, I will tell two people not to. I will turn them onto open source and Mac-based alternatives. And yeah, my blog only gets 150 unique visitors per day (now) and yeah, I only know a couple of thousand people anyway (now), but you know what? I'm one of those mavens old Malcolm Gladwell's been yakking about.
And besides, even though my own hit count isn't great, it's still better than your products. And something tells me I'm not alone in my dissatisfaction with the Microsoft ethos. I have a feeling if I tag the hell out of this post, and if I tag it with enough popular (yet salient) search terms, and if I link the shit out of everything in the body of the post, it might just get picked up. It might just go wide on the interweb. And who knows, maybe my insignificant flash of anger will be the tipping point (thanks again, Mr. Gladwell) that pushes you off that cliff, following crappy Suitcase and crappy Quark and all the other greedy, distrusting, software leviathans that are surely (oh, sweet baby jesus, let it be true) in freefall right now.
Because it's time to put customers first again.
Because it's time to put corporate greed behind us.
But mostly, because you and the majority of your products suck some serious ass.
Oh, yeah...one more thing:
xxx c No image courtesy of the evil empire's stringent copyright enforcement.