So I was reading about Apple’s surprising 2nd quarter earnings, which led me to market analysis and prediction, which led to reading about Microsoft. Windows 7 is set to relieve Vista of its resource taxing and user frustrating duties late this year or early next year. I read an entire article about 7 and was slightly curious so I went to the Windows 7 page on the Microsoft site.
The page sure did look pretty at a quick glance. I’m a typical web site viewer/user, so I scan a page rather than read at first. I dragged my cursor over the headline that read “Take a Look”. Hmm, it’s not a hyperlink. Then over the magnifying glass graphic, hmm, not a hyperlink. I started to giggle. I found the tiny text below the headline and blurb that redundantly says “See what’s new”. Oh, there’s the hyperlink! Were they trying to force me to read the blurb first? No such luck, however, they did annoy and then amuse me by breaking what is by now a well established web design pattern. This is expected boo-boo #1.
So I click on the link and it takes me to a page that apparently (apparently is my favorite word of late) lists the improvements of the OS over its predecessors. There’s a nice graphic to illustrate a supposedly superior taskbar in the middle of the page. My eyesight isn’t always so great anymore, so I drag my cursor over the pic hoping to click to a larger view, but no such luck. I start to laugh out loud, as this is boo-boo #2, but I decide to give M the great Softie one more try.
I click back to the main page. There’s a video at the top, it has a large play-me button right smack in the middle, just beckoning. I think, oh, I’ll just watch the little video. I click on it, but you see, I’m a sinner. I’m using a mac laptop and surfing with Firefox. Firefox gives me a yellow pop-up warning. I’m informed that the video can’t be viewed without downloading a plugin. I’m thinking, no, they’re using Silverlight for this, proprietary, exclusive, Silverlight that will not run on a Mac? Boo-boo#3! What idiot thought of that, aren’t they trying to redeem themselves, to win back some of Apple’s recent market share increases? Turns out it’s some other bit of software I’ve never heard of, “Flip4mac”. Not as bad, but still, I’m NOT downloading and installing software to watch an advertisement. So my thoughts went thus: how on this green-grey earth do they expect to compete with Mac when… no how do they expect to sell a product by making users work to, no, how in**** could they ever design an efficient and usable OS when they can’t design a user friendly website? Then I laughed for a really long time, until I remembered how much money they’ve made and probably will make, regardless.
Comments are closed.