I was helping a friend with her computer the other day and she went into Microsoft Word to show me something. Across the top of the screen was a message in dark red on light red background saying (more or less) “your version of Word is no longer supported. You should upgrade to avoid important security problems.”
First of all, that’s B.S. Second of all… well, it’s really B.S.
It’s a licensed copy of Office. It runs fine. (More or less, Microsoft Office has so many bugs in it, a family of Aardvarks and all their friends could feast on it for years and years.)
What Microsoft calls “a security fix” is actually just a Bug Fix. It goes back to 1) bad design, 2) bad programming, 3) their utter inability and unwillingness to fix items 1 and 2.
I sighed when I saw the message, told her to ignore it, explained it was just their attempt to get her to upgrade and started writing this article (in my head).
It’s fear-based marketing. Microsoft (and most of the computer industry) has turned “security fixes” into an explanation that covers over the bald fact that it’s flawed software and these are BUG FIXES, these constant updates.
I am going to generalize a rule here: when ever you see a message on your computer, phone, tablet, etc, that inspires a moment of panic, it is almost certainly a message designed to do nothing more than to get you to buy something, upgrade something, spend some money — in the worst cases, get you to surrender your credit card numbers, social security data and in fact your entire identity.
If the only way you can sell something is through
fear then forget it! Find a different job. Fast.
I want the Old Visionaries back in charge of the computer industry. These “Harvard Business Types” have sucked all the air out of the room and continue to do so, pawning inferior merchandise on a public that has been taught to not know any better.
Windows XP ran with far fewer bugs, problems, unexpected moments than does “the latest version of Windows with all the ‘updated security.'” That “updated security” — the excuse for retiring XP, by the way — is truly just a marketing ploy(1).
Design it right, at the start, and those security holes won’t be there. Hire the best people, keep your programmers longer(2), don’t fret over new features until ALL priority 1 bugs are fixed. Etc. You know… the way the computer industry used to run things, back in its glory days.
I can believe (barely) that Those In Charge do not actually understand how much fear, anxiety and panic these sorts of messages cause people. The utter Emotional Abuse they are subjecting their own Customers to. In fact, I have to believe they don’t know, because the alternative is that they are knowing abusing their own customers, and that’s is NOT why a business (any business) exists.
A business exists to Serve the Customer. If you can’t serve the customer — you know, make his life Better? — then get another job where you can do so.
I mean, these are Terrorist / Scammer / Faker techniques. The people who write Malware / Viruses stoop to such tactics. Why should we have to tolerate such behavior from a Major Corporation? Al Capone would shake his head — and probably start taking notes.
Why do we tolerate it?
Stop pushing Fear. As in the above example, the message was causing my friend some anxiety, when in fact what you might have said, “this version has reached the end of its support life. It will continue to function, but you won’t receive any new features(3) or Bug Fixes from this point on. If you’d like to upgrade, click here.” Much friendlier and more complete service to your Customer. Something about getting more with molasses than with a stick. Dig?
So there…
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(1) The real problem with XP *may* have been that it too nearly perfect, too close to an OS that just did what it was supposed to do, without any built-in Market Portals, advertising streams and without any need to buy new computers because the new version of What-Ever-It-Is just came out and needs a new(er) computer. XP did what it was supposed to do. Mostly. It definitely could have used some tweaking, and some Loving Care. It’s core could have been updated in serval ways, but without inconveniencing the users at all. Problem is this: if a major software manufacturer announced that it’s software was now “nearly perfect” and no new versions were expected any time soon, just the occasional minor tweak… well their Stock Value would almost certainly crash, employee layoffs would have to commence as — in the view of the investing public — there is no longer any need for 10’s of thousands of employees, and the income stream would almost certainly fall off to nearly nothing. As with certain prominent diseases, Big Corporate makes more money from not fixing the problem than from fixing it. That’s the problem with Stock Values, and with an investor-driven Corporate Mindset. The Consumer becomes a slave to the Investor, via the shady practices of the Corporation.
(2) It takes about 16 years of 60+ hours a week after college to create a Master Programmer — the computer industry has gotten into a pattern now of declaring any one over 35 (more or less) as “too old to program” which means there are no Master Programmers in the important positions, which is why software the last 15 – 25 years or so looks the way it does, and works as badly as it does these days. Or, to put it another way, that’s why Windows XP was a more solid and stable product than is Windows 10 today. Old School Professionalism has been retired. (There are reasons why “they” think this is the way to do things; these are false reasoning, however. They are also outside the scope of this posting, though I think I’ve mentioned them in other postings already, though.) I have actually seen programmer want-ads that say “no more than 3 years out of college.” Faulty, faulty, faulty… All your software will look like an exercise put together by the under-graduate class.
(3) Even that is stretching the point, because “new features” almost never come within the “support life” of a product. New features usually are saved for a new major version. Sometimes Microsoft does that with Windows, but I can’t recall an instance of it with Office. And… frankly… the “new features” added to Office in the last several years were nothing of the sort; more just rearranging the UI so that the same old features are now hard to find. Occasionally some small tweak or improvement, but… for example, there was recently (in the last couple years) a change made to the Old Old Window program Paint where if you hold down an arrow key to move a selected bit of picture around, it gradually moves faster and faster, as long as you are holding down that arrow key. Probably sounded nice at the discussion table, but in practice it’s a pain in the a**. But what also happened is that the home and end keys stopped doing what they used to do when editing text in a text box. One tiny, questionable feature introduced a pretty serious UI bug. That’s Microsoft now. And stop blaming Bill Gates, all of you who do that — he left the company a long time ago. That’s part of the problem. I want the Visionaries back!!