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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME Microsoft is a big and serious company, with a lot of work to do to fix Windows. It needs to act like a big and serious company |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Choco-Banana Shake Hang: Is this what's wrong with Microsoft?Oct. 1, 2000 Leave Microsoft alone and stop glorifying Apple, reader says By Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers Microsoft's straight-laced tech experts want you to know that "Selecting Blendolini Causes Choco-Banana Shake Hang." No, I'm not making this up. "Selecting Blendolini Causes Choco-Banana Shake Hang" is exactly what you'll find by looking at Microsoft technical document number Q157668. The tongue twister is in big, bold type at the top of the Web page that Microsoft created to help people who were having trouble with -- well, with Choco-Banana Shake Hang. The Web document was written in an attempt to help people who bought "Someone's in the Kitchen," a Dreamworks Interactive recipe and cooking program for Windows. There's a bug in the program, so Microsoft wanted to tell us how to get around the bug. "Your computer may randomly stop responding (hang) in the Choco-Banana shake recipe if you wait more than 10 seconds to select the blender after you receive the 'Time to Blend' prompt," Microsoft's document says. "After adding the last ingredient to create the Choco-Banana shake, the Chef's Assistant prompts you to choose the blender. If you wait approximately 12-15.4 seconds before choosing the blender, the recipe stops responding." The document was originally stored at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q157/6/68.asp. But Microsoft pulled it off the Web site as soon as people started laughing. I found a copy of the page using the Google search engine (at http://www.google.com). Google saves a copy of every Web page it finds. Here's what the page looked like in my Linux Web browser. I'm pleased that Microsoft wants to help everyone who experienced a Choco-Banana shake hang, but I'm not happy with what this Web document tells me in other ways. First, it tells me that Microsoft needs to look at the documents it puts on its Web sites. Microsoft is a big and serious company, with a lot of work to do to fix Windows. It needs to act like a big and serious company. Second, it tells me that Microsoft does not know how to act when it makes a mistake. If I mess up or you pull a real boner, we both know the best way to handle a goof: You look a little sheepish, grin a lot and fix the problem. Microsoft didn't do any of those things. It tried to bury the "evidence" as if it had made some sort of grave mistake. All it really did was act silly by allowing one of its nameless functionaries to create such a foolish Web page. But by pulling the Web page off its site it acted worse than silly. It acted dumb. It tried to cover up the silly evidence. How foolish. When you're caught doing something silly you laugh about it and fix it. But the page is gone from Microsoft's site. It wasn't fixed. It was just removed. That's called Revisionism. If you don't like history, you rewrite it. How foolish. It's time for Microsoft to grow up and act like an adult. Hiding your head in the sand because you're embarrassed is not the way to do business. In case you think this doesn't matter, in case you think it's just one more example of someone picking on Microsoft, I'll remind you that Microsoft holds an illegal monopoly on computer operating systems for PCs. That monopoly has left Microsoft with a misimpression about how Americans feel. Microsoft believes we don't care. It thinks it can do what it wants. It believes revising history, even for something as silly as a Choco-Banana Shake Hang, is how we do things in America. But we do care. We don't do things that way. Apple's Macintosh computers are selling at a furious pace. They're not Windows PCs. They don't suffer from the frailties of Windows and they're immune to the viruses that plague Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. And look at Linux: The volunteer-based Linux operating system is the fastest-growing phenomenon in all of computing, and it's even outselling Windows in some locations. It, too, is immune to Windows problems. These are messages that tell Microsoft it's wrong. They say we do care. If Microsoft doesn't get the message soon, we'll have yet another version of Windows that allows viruses to sail straight into our PCs and that locks up when we're trying to get real work done. Microsoft needs to assure us that we count. It can only do that by getting serious -- and by getting to work on a version of Windows that works. Choco-Banana Shake Hang or not, we deserve better, and it's time we started to demand it. |
