scott wrote:
>> how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily complicated, poorly 
>> documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so forth.
> 
> TBH I've found MS products to be really well documents, in fact I would 
> say better than any other software I've used.  Really, even if you have 
> a complicated thing you want to do in Excel, the documentation usually 
> has the answer.
> 
Seriously, in my experience, the programs, if it even ships with one, 
has a manual with nothing in it at all, and all the troubleshooting 
things are, "Are you a complete moron? Yes/No", variety. "Real" problems 
usually require going online and googling for fixes from forums, written 
by people that "use" the software, not the people that wrote it. The 
help files with the programs are... marginally better, but not by much, 
and their trouble shooting usually jumps from "Yes, I checked all that 
fracking stuff!", to, "Well, gosh, we don't have a clue what the problem 
is then!" If its something a decent user could figure out without it, or 
a simple command lookup, its great. If something goes wrong that isn't 
"simple" user error, or where you want even moderately non-default 
behavior, you are hosed. And.. There online documentation on the site is 
almost as bad, with pages referring to examples that don't explain 
anything different than the incoherent text did, examples that are 
missing, code that was removed 10 years earlier, because it was for 
something they no longer support, even though the same "problem" is one 
that you need to fix in the new stuff too. And.. in some cases you can't 
even find "current" documentation, even using the links in the software 
you are trying to find the documentations for, either due to it being 
moved, deleted, changes in some obscure way that makes their DB return 
the wrong thing, or just plain never being updated.

In other words, its as bad, in most cases, as other people's products, 
in that it doesn't account for the most common "unusual" problems, and 
"worse" than theirs, in that even when documented, you can't find the 
document explaining where to find the documents, never mind the document 
itself, some times. Which is, imho, worse than stating, "Sorry, we 
didn't bother writing one."

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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