A softer, gentler hate

John recently asked if I still hate Microsoft after getting my Xbox 360. Well, yes. But it's a softer, gentler hate.

I'm not a big gamer. I like games, sure, but I'm not the type to put in the number of hours to justify owning a $400 piece of "ultimate" gaming equipment. The trick about the 360 is that it is a bit more than just gaming, it's more "entertainment" equipment. They advertise that connected to a Windows Media Center PC, the Xbox 360 can access your photos, videos, and music from the computer and play it on your TV. Cool. That was the selling point for me. Not to mention the fact I could get a "free" 360 by doing a bunch of online offers. I'll save the details of the so-called free offer debacle for another post, but suffice it to say that I got my 360 and it was reasonably priced.

Now, here's where the softer, gentler hate comes in. The 360 doesn't come with any games. So, you have to fork over another $60 to buy one if you actually want to use it for its primary intended purpose. Cha-ching. I didn't care too much since I just wanted to connect to our family media and be able to browse all the family vids I had edited, listen to our whopping music collection, etc. while at the TV. I connected the USB wireless adaptor and... nothing happened. You see, they forgot to mention that to connect your PC to the 360 you either have to wind an ethernet cable through all the rooms of the house to connect the two, or BUY a Microsoft proprietary wireless adaptor. My perfectly good, high quality Linksys adaptor would not work. Price for a MS adaptor: $100. Cha-ching.

To avoid the cost of games and ridiculous proprietary MS peripherals, I rented a game from Blockbuster ($8 for 2 days--and people DO this?) and wound the obligatory 60 feet of cable through my house. I installed the necessary software and it worked without problems. I happily sat on my couch and accessed photos and music from the computer. However, when I went for my family videos the 360 reported that it could not play the video because the appropriate codec was not installed. AVI is not an obscure video format. In fact, I believe Microsoft made the format in an early version of Windows. Regardless, after a quick fact-finding trip on the Internet I found that indeed the only videos my 360 would play are MPEG (but not MPEG 4) and WMV--Microsoft's proprietary licensed format that uses digital rights management.

WHAT? Unbelievable! Further, using the 360 controller to control playback of DVD's or music is a little tricky. But don't worry, you can buy a handy-dandy Microsoft Xbox remote control at Walmart for only $30. Cha-ching. The fact we HAVE a handy-dandy Microsoft WMC remote control is moot. It won't work.

Hence, the hate.

But, please understand, this is not the vitriolic bitter hate I usually reserve for Microsoft, this is a mild hate tempered by the fact that I really like the games I've played so far, I like being able to download demos, access my music and other stuff. Basically, once you get the full story on what the costs and abilities will be, the 360 does it what it does really well.

A Couple of Things I Like

It's nice when products deliver what they say they do. For instance, don't you hate it when you pick up a bag of tortilla chips that says, "Restaurant Style!" but they are not at all that way? They're not thin and crispy, like those freshly fried at your favorite Mexican eatery. Well, Super Mario and I have found some that live up to the claim! Unfortunately for the rest of the world, they're only made in our neck of the woods. They're called Nuevo Laredo, are only $1.00 a bag, and they are outstanding! It's as if someone brought them to us in a paper-lined basket with a little bowl of salsa. I don't know how many bags we've gone through, but each time we eat them, we say, "Wow! I cannot believe how much these taste JUST LIKE the ones you get in the restaurant!" I hope they make it to your neck of the woods very soon.

Also, it's nice when a company delivers what it says it does. Not like our old garbage company. My kudos go now to Netflix! Super Mario and I LOVE Netflix! I like it so much because you can get any movie in the world there, or so it seems. For instance, once the LDS missionaries let me borrow the movie Charley. I loved it. It tugged at my heartstrings. I thought that it would be great to see more movies like that, but where in the heck am I going to find them? Should I go hunting around my new town, trying to find some more missionaries, just to roll down my window and ask, "Hey, do you have some Charley-esque movies that I might borrow?" But after doing some research, guess where I found a bunch of them? Netflix! Not to mention other things that my local vidoe store doesn't carry. Things like documentaries on all kinds of things, especially historical things, which is what I like so much. Or television series. Or, for Super Mario, WWF Allstars 1985 (or something like that). Netflix is amazing! And we get the movies so fast. If you don't have Netflix, you should try it! Really. It is great.

After our trash service fiasco, it's nice to have something to sing about!

I HATE Microsoft

Time after time they have betrayed me. Most recently, we needed to restore our computer to its original factory settings because a bunch of programs refused to work anymore. Neither reinstallation, tech support, nor system restore could do anything for the situation. So, I went to the ol' Microsoft "settings and transfer" wizard to make the restoration easier.

Trash. Turns out, it didn't back up both profiles, just one. And it didn't back up all our programs, just Microsoft's. For example, we prefer Firefox for our browser. It dutifully backed up IE's settings and ignored Firefox's and Opera's. Well, I should have expected that, right? Well, I specifically went to their website trying to find out if it would get all the profiles and programs and I found NOTHING. Their help files are absolutely ludicrous and have been since the advent of Windows.

Trying to restore Outlook was an even greater joy. I put phrase after phrase into the help box and it would constantly access the internet to pull to the "latest" information and bring back absolutley nothing of relevance or use.

Restarting Media Player reminded me of one of my pet peeves about all software vendors--they all put shortcuts in every conceivable location across your hard drive and change your program associations so if you open any kind of media remotely associated with their software (even if it was CREATED in different software) it will open in Media Player. Some companies go so far as having a "check all" button for file associations but requiring you to uncheck every box manually rather than providing a "check none" button.

Reinstalling Microsoft Money is the kind of tribulation I can only hope builds character, because it sure didn't help my blood pressure. They make it difficult to figure out during installation how to avoid installing the half-gig of video and audio files to show you how to use the program. Did they consider people may actually already know and want to bypass their bloat? No! In fact, despite my going to the trouble of disabling the audio and video installation, I find every time I open a feature for the first time, there's that grating voice telling me in the most obvious terms how to do what I've done for years.

Did I mention I hate Microsoft?

Windows Media Center software? Trash. I paid extra money for a remote control that would supposedly control audio and video on the computer. Well, it does if you only intend to use 2 of the 65 buttons. Stop and play usually work. Rewind, fast forward, and the other buttons: not so much. But my biggest gripe is that when you put in an audio CD it cheerily offers to rip it to your hard drive, but only using Windows Media Audio format. You have to pay extra for the mpeg codec--despite that we have the mpeg encoder installed on our operating system from other software. Microsoft, apparently will have nothing to do with my legally owned existing codecs--I have to buy it from THEM.

You may have heard all the hype about Vista, the next Windows version. Well, I certainly hope they get around to fixing the problem I had while using Windows Explorer the other day. I was deleting folders in the left panel while the right panel showed the contents. It deleted all the contents first, but then gave me an error message because the folder was not empty--apparently unable to delete the hidden thumbnail index file because it was a protected OS file. They've had HOW many years to fix the most basic aspects of the operating system? I don't care if Windows Vista makes my computer stand up and do a gig, I don't want more of the same crap if I can't delete a folder without their technology having a breakdown.

Internet explorer has a new beta version out--from what I understand it just steals all the innovations from Firefox and sets your browser search to MSN automatically not giving you the specific option during setup to choose another provider--say, Google, the most popular search engine in the world. Well, if you can't beat 'em, bully them, I guess. Seems to be the long standing MS mantra.

This is one of the largest and richest companies in the world right? How can they consistently and bitterly disappoint me with nearly everything they do? And their stock has been going down... I wonder why?