Why Does Microsoft Hate Me? And How You Can Learn From Their Mistakes
Monday, May 12th, 2008
Posted by Jenn Lowther
I don’t hate Microsoft or at least I don’t currently - that may change with the user experience that I’ve had as of late. I have plenty of friends that curse Microsoft and every move they make. And I am beginning to understand why. There are a multitude of reasons to hate microsoft - Vista, Zune, their corporate anti-trust
issues to name just a couple.
Hotmail is my personal email carrier. This has more to do with the fact that I’ve had this email address since 2000 than my actual email preference. I would forward this address to a gmail account, but I can’t seem to find an easy way to do this. They let me forward the email, but it seems that it has to be to another Microsoft email property. I can live with this. It’s super annoying since hotmail is not supported by my iPhone, but if this is the only real issue I have with it, I can overlook this transgression.
Having said this, for my personal IM client, I use Windows Live Messanger. In order to sync my work email chat client with my personal IM, I use pidgin. I find that this works wonders (props to the open source community for this - I love you guys). This is great when I’m at work, but when I’m at home, I just use MSN.
I am a bit of an internet junkie. I am addicted to checking my email, twitter, facebook, digg, you get the idea. When I find something I particularly like, I share it. I’ll add it to my FaceBook, twitter feed, etc. This is also true for funny youtube videos. This is why what happened next really bothered me. I was MSNing with a friend this weekend and wanted to share a youtube video that I found particularly amusing. I send him the link and what do you know, the link wouldn’t work.
A quick search on Google and a trip to digg found that I wasn’t the only person experiencing this problem - an entire forum thread had been devoted to this new issue with 110 entries at the time of writing this post. My upset over this really rather trivial issue gets me to the point of this post. Below is just a couple of the comments left on the digg post.
- Welcome to the world of CENSORSHIP! So who’s up for a horde of angry emails to Microsoft? I’m writing one now :D”
- URL for complaints: https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey= … Digg! Unite! Complain!
- not just youtube. Deviantart.com, googlepages.com and xanga are also affected. -_- Anyone found other urls?
- I’m about to boycott MSN and start using AIM. I suggest people to do the same.
- Wow, I usually stand by Microsoft, but this is unprecedented censorship. Unbelievable, time to change clients.
- http://www.betadaily.com/2008/05/10/microsoft-star …”This block seems to be related to the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries which allows for sharing video clips from MSN Video on messenger.”This is why it isn’t affecting me in the UK and many other countries.
This is just a couple of the hundreds of comments you can find on this issue. But, they get the point across. A company really needs to consider and understand why its consumer uses its services. Microsoft by changing the way people can use their product are upsetting their customer and alienating their core user base. And absent of any announced reason for the issue, the users are coming up with their own reason for the issue. It is actions like this, that will drive people from using a companies product straight into the arms of their competitors.
The next time I have a choice between using a Microsoft product or that of one of their competitors, I will remember the extremely poor user experience I’ve had with their apparent censorship and will more than likely choose that of their competitor. So keep this in mind when you are changing the way that your product works on your consumer…or it may come back to haunt you.
**Update:
It appears that the issue has been fixed, but the damage has already been done.
