Microsoft: hate hate hate

There are plenty of ways to disparage Microsoft. The most recent things they've done to annoy me include such things as paying corporations to force their employees to use Windows Live Search rather than their personal preference, bribing influential bloggers with free laptops, and most egregiously: wasting a generous amount of my time.

This latter offence was in the form of xbox 360 support. When our xbox broke and we sent it in to be repaired, we weren't in any frantic need of getting it back immediately. Microsoft thought that it would be better to send us a replacement machine than to make us wait for them to fix ours. Nice thought, but completely ridiculous in execution. Their security for online accounts restricts the games you play to the xbox you initially downloaded them to, which means none of the games worked on the new machine--the games we had paid cold hard cash for. What's worse, they knew all about this issue but waited for me to figure it out on my own and make a phone call to technical support, wait through the cheery automated menu diabolically hellbent on obstructing my access to anyone who could help me, speak to a tech who took all my details through an extended and painfully slow interview, and be escalated to the highest ranking technician available only to find that the billing people (the only ones who can help) are at a different calling center, use a different customer support database, and are completely inaccessible to me, the customer. All I could do is wait for these mysterious higher support beings to get around to reviewing my case. When I called back, I got to wait, wait, and wait again talking respectively to the machine, the tech, and the escalation tech only to be told the people who can really accomplish what I needed are inaccessible even to them... perhaps magically in Oz. The icing on the cake was when I had to fax them my packing slip to prove that THEY had shipped this xbox back to me and that the previous week's service issue had even happened. This company designs the world's databases? We are in serious trouble, folks.

Okay, the real reason for this anti-Microsoft rant is "automatic updates". I didn't hesitate to enable my Windows computers to go ahead and download critical updates and install them automatically. Unfortunately, the people who designed this system are seriously lacking in common sense. Recently my computer interrupted me repeatedly with an urgent message that my computer had to be immediately restarted so that a CRITICAL update could be installed. My work--my reason for a having a computer--is so completely inconsequential to my operating system. It doesn't care, apparently, whether restarting automatically in my absence will lose my saved work. It doesn't care, apparently, whether I'm actively working on my computer--it needs to save me from myself by pestering me with nagging messages that come up every 5 minutes and can't be dismissed indefinitely. You must restart NOW NOW NOW--it's for your own good!!!

When I finally opened the dialog to see what was being installed so urgently, it was none other than the Microsoft authentication tool--one designed to verify that my copy of Windows is legitimate and not ripped off.

WHAT?

They have repeatedly interrupted me, rebooted me, pestered me so that THEY can know that I'm not ripping off their product? ...Their product that I have legitimately and legally acquired? And that I have been forced to prove is authentic on multiple prior occasions?

It's just too much. I'm buying an Apple next, even if it costs twice as much. End of story.