Alex Nichols

Why I hate Microsoft.

Today at work, I was setting up a few Windows machines. One of the windows product keys didn’t work. After checking thoroughly to make sure there were no typos, I decided to call Microsoft Support.

After a few minutes of waiting, I was greeted by an Indian man with such a heavy accent that I could barely understand him over the phone. He introduced himself as “Philliam” (pronounced Phil-Yum). I assumed that he had came up with the name by mixing “Phil” with “William”. I got a good chuckle out of it. After all, Microsoft support people in India always choose funky names. For example, I have been on the phone with people who have named themselves Elvis and St. John. After about 5 minutes of explaining my problem to Philliam, he decided to transfer me to Activation support. Once I explained the problem again to activation support, they told me that they could not help me and transferred me back to the main support line. When a new representative answered the phone, I explained my problem yet again. She decided to transfer me to activation support, even though the problem I was having had absolutely nothing to do with activation. This time, instead of going along with the transfer, I asked to speak to her supervisor. She told me that I shouldn’t talk to the supervisor. When I asked again, she refused to transfer me. After a few more tries, she finally transferred me. After 15 minutes on hold waiting for the supervisor, she finally picks up the phone. She introduced herself as April, and asked what my problem is. I told her that my genuine windows XP license key is not working. She informed me that I have to pay $60 to talk to a technical support rep about my problem. I pointed out that that is ridiculous for them to charge me $60 because their licensing system is screwed up. She then restated that I needed to pay $60 to talk to a rep about my licensing problem. I told her that there was no way I would pay $60 because they didn’t correctly activate the license key on my software. She then asked me for my license id. After I gave her that, she asked for my CD id. This continued for 20 minutes. She asked for every single code on both the CD and the packaging. When I asked why she wanted them, she refused to answer.  After 20 minutes on hold while she was “verifying” my license key, she picked up the phone. She said that I needed to pay the $60 for a tech support person. I told her that that was ridiculous. I bought the software online from Microsoft. She then insisted that Microsoft does not sell software online. After I told her that I definitely bought it from microsoft.com, she accused me of lying and that she is sure that Microsoft doesn’t sell software online. I started looking around in my desk for the receipt that I printed out. I found it and gave her my order number. She then said “Oh”, and restated that I had to pay $60 for tech support. I asked to speak to her supervisor. She transferred me to her supervisor. After 20 minutes of waiting, a man picked up and introduced himself as James. James asked what my problem was. I told him about my problem with the product key. He told me that I need to pay the $60 for help. I asked him to generate me a new license key. He refused to help me until I paid the $60. I threatened to complain to Microsoft corporate unless he helped. After 20 more minutes of giving product id’s and CD keys, he finally generated me a new license key.

Microsoft has one worst support teams I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. What would have taken 5 minutes with applecare or another decent support line took over 1 hour and 45 minutes. I hope I never have to deal with the inept customer support agents at Microsoft again.

Tweetie 2 upgrade price.

I have heard a lot of people complaining about the $2.99 upgrade price for Tweetie 2. It is foolish that people think tweetie’s developer, Loren Brichter, has time to rewrite the entire app and include a ton of new features without charging anything. The fact of the matter is that he is only asking for $2.99 from you in return for the hours of work he has put into making a kick-ass app! I have been testing out the app for a while now and I can assure you that it is well worth the upgrade price.

There are a ton of new features in 2.0 that no other iphone twitter clients offer such as “In-app rich-text email, refresh all on launch, save drafts to birdhouse, autocomplete recent searches, autcomplete go-to-user, threaded conversations, short url previewing, and much more.” Nobody should be complaining about paying $2.99 for a major update. For some reason, people seem to have it in their minds that all iPhone application updates should be free. iPhone applications take just as much effort and time to write as mac applications and there is no reason that people are entitled to free updates.

People are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a CS4 update with “many new features”. Why do people have such a problem with paying a measly $2.99 for an awesome update? Loren didn’t just add a few features, change the interface, and name it 2.0. He rewrote the entire app from scratch. As he said in an email, “It [Tweetie 2.0] doesn’t share a *single* line of code with the original Tweetie for iPhone.”

In Conclusion: Tweetie 2.0 has been completely rewritten and a ton of new features have been added. There is absolutely no reason to complain about meager $2.99 for a amazing update to a wonderful application.

A bit of obvious perspective

mrgan:

In 1983, an Atari 2600 game such as Galaxian cost $32.99. If that sounds like a lot, remember that in 2009 dollars that’s more than $70.

The system itself retailed at $199, which is about $700 in 2009 dollars. The market was almost 20 million units strong, which is something like 25 million consoles in 2009 (adjusting for population growth).

So, also in 2009, when someone makes an awesome 3D game you can play on the phone you pull out of your pocket, some nerdwad somewhere will complain that $1.99 is way too much; should be 99c MAX.