Sunday, May 01, 2011

Another One Bites the Dust

Despite the huge weight of advice to the contrary, and indeed despite knowing that other products are better, I still make heavy use of Microsoft software. Truth is, the products are still just about good enough to dissuade me from getting to know the alternatives.

But as time goes on, it gets increasingly difficult to do that.

Of course, it's well known that Windows Vista is just awful. Sadly, my current PC can't take an upgrade to Windows 7. And Windows is the one area where Microsoft still have the edge - I'm not ready to make the jump to Macland, and Linux just isn't for me.

Office, on the other hand, has been almost unusable since they brought in the "ribbon interface" in 2007. It's hard to express just how awful that interface is. Sure, the old interface wasn't exactly great, but at least I was able to use it. The ribbon... not so much.

And so, it has been very clear for a long time that my next PC (probably bought in 2012) will be installed with Windows 7 and OpenOffice.

But until this week, I hadn't really given any great thought to my choice of browser. Once again, I'd concluded that Internet Exploder was just about good enough for my purposes.

This week, Microsoft elected to 'upgrade' to IE9, with the consequence that Blogger doesn't work. The "Publish Post" button doesn't actually do anything.

Good work, guys! Thanks to your marvellous upgrade, I've just switched to Firefox!

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