- Why is Microsoft to the infinitely complex, but not the simple? – Tek.no

Microsoft! I have a little bone to pick with you.

The company is for us consumers primarily two things: Windows and Office. Many of you will probably want to add both XBox, Surface and Lumia, and that’s okay too. But historically, the two pieces of software have been the company’s products, and it still is.

I have always used Windows. I’ve experimented me in tow with Linux distros, and I can manage the act fine in OS X as well, although I prefer the environment I know best. I try to never be “fanboy” of any particular product or manufacturers. Having gradually killed two computers respectively from Dell and HP, I found that I had to have something which could withstand travel. So after seeing my colleagues travel habitual Macer see kliss new out, the choice fell on a MacBook Pro for a couple of years ago. It runs Windows most of the time.

There may almost seem as if it was about to do to win the world championship in long menus. Additionally, Microsoft has found it necessary to add a menu with advanced settings. Personalize your account settings? They can be of course not in any of these places. What about the display settings? It’s a completely different menu. Who won really vinlotteriet in Seattle by coming in at that structure? Photo: Finn Jarle Kvalheim Tek.no

I like it that way. Although I in the sea of ​​shining apples feel eyes in the back every time I visit an Apple launch. If nothing else, I’m at least a kind of entertainment. There you go.

products all copy

And here there is a small parallel I will follow. Apple’s iPhone was a product everyone to copy. I use the term loosely. I also joked about fruit company many noticeable wacky patents and legal victories with very vague descriptions of what a phone is. We’re not talking necessarily about blueprints. To be copied, within reasonable limits, all the usually about admiration for a job well done. And a good portion of earnings and market mechanisms.

Apple iPod, iPhone and, shortly after the launch of the first phone, App Store has been a huge part of why the company can giggle all the way to the bank . It is justified giggling, for it is good, albeit expensive cars, products.

But Apple is not alone anymore. Finally it is Microsoft being copied. Surface tablets confused first buyers with two Windows versions for most practical purposes was only cosmetic equal. But then acted all about Surface Pro. Absolutely everything. So much that Pro now is the name everyone scatters around them.

Samsung now has a Surface competitor, and that Huawei has also. It’s been spring is perhaps that Apple has also, albeit in their small distinctive way with iOS operating systems.

Healthier impetus than in years, but …

Now it feels at times as if Microsoft has a new impetus. When the company launched the AR glasses HoloLens simultaneously with latest version of Windows last year was the headline in The Verge following; “Microsoft is ready to be loved again.” It hardly needs any translation.

When Microsoft now feels healthier and more wind than in a long time, it is somewhat strange that the e-mail reader Outlook constantly feels like to dress wearing a Cinet PC from 1993. Or , with the flood of information flying by on just email today, it feels worse than that. But to say that it’s like dressing a Tiki 100 is perhaps in excess. Every time I get irritated and moan about this, I get friendly reminders from people who claim to still use Lotus. Digressions.

What annoys me is that a company which gets to make fine operating system does not get to make a good e-mail client. Search functionality. Design. The many bugs and that it is now Windows that takes care of correcting my language across applications I run. Irritant everything together.

Where the # $ % # $ % email?

Let me start with my main object of hate; I can search for an email I received the same day. I can even see it in the list in my window. If I neatly enter individual characters of the subject line of the email I look at and press search will often find it absolutely nothing. Message I just saw on being replaced by an empty result. Or crazy results.

It does not always happen, but it happens often at the worst possible time. Why it happens? Not good to say. Why some feel they get more out of it than others, I know not. Here in the office we both camps represented. The result is that whatever the email that it is important to locate in an instant, and where security is not so terribly important, forwarded to Gmail my mailbox. I simply do not have time to argue with Exchange when I’ll find my reservation number before I’m sticking to the airport in the morning.

my Gmail inbox may after all conjure up ten year old messages based on only a vague idea about what the email contained. There is a vast difference between the two search solutions.

Setup menus in Outlook 2016 is still the nineties type. The kind one time to be a rocket scientist to master in its entirety. I know a lot of what I need, but when I encounter something new must often be searched online.

Perhaps the explanation lies somewhere inside here when something does not work? It is well possible. Maybe even probable. But if so, how?

Slightly better email online, but …

In Outlook online is marginally better. I find often that I’m looking for there, and therefore uses web client most. But even here there are up to several different settings menus, with different designs. I can hunt for a setting in one menu, only to find out that the menu took me as far away from the starting point that I need to click me back via bookmark my. Back button? We are long out of tilbakeknappens territory. This is bat country.

In addition, quite often the solution bugger off. If I need to do something else in the client while I already have a progressive message of the editor is fortunately easy to pop out the message in a separate window. But it’s not always very easy to send it when it finished. Where the hell was really function buttons of the way?

Now Office 365 relatively new, and it appears evident that Microsoft is working with the service. Hopefully it’s improvement in wait. But again. I can still find ten years old email in my Gmail inbox. It is about twelve years old. You come late to the party, Microsoft.

Two good products to one bad

Messenger labeling and regular contacts at each other on Skype. What Kurt is the right? Photo: Finn Jarle Kvalheim Tek.no

And why, more years after the acquisition, is still my contacts in Skype chock full of duplicate contacts? Should not these be connected together and arranged automagically? And why yelling my cell phone every time it comes a message, when the message is often not visible for a long time when I open the app? Yes, depending on the platform, there are restrictions that allow push messages coming through at the moment, while the app itself must take some time to connect to. But it still feels backwards.

The acronym is IM, or “instant messaging”, ie instant messaging, or IM which is the slightly more melodious and established jargon. There is nothing that feels especially instantaneous by waiting for a message you were notified and did see a small preview of a minute ago.

I run Skype in Windows to OS interfere with sometimes unwanted correction . Centralized proof is all very well but centralized proof it is to note to find the settings I do not know if I like.

The links to Skype for Business, formerly Lync, is also difficult to understand at. I have experienced having new contacts in my list by assorted occasions. Where did you come from? Who are you? Oh, it was you I answered an email from yesterday. Not really bothersome, but what kind of magic wand that controls this has happened occasionally, it is not good to be wise on.

And why start all client automatically up with a list of recent calls instead for a overview of my contacts? It’s perfectly fine to me that the priority contacts based on recent conversations, but the window that opens displays only contacts I’ve exchanged words with recently. Contact list is somewhere else. I want to shut down the entire application must I actually log out. At least if I should follow Microsoft rules.

Fortunately, there remains the task processor where Skype can be killed in a humane manner. Especially when I get home from work, and all of today’s talks that I have long since seen and participated in the blink obsessively on display at home as well.

It ought to be as simple

Hardware I prefer with the software I prefer. Windows 10 I have become fond of, although it has the occasional oddity that too. Photo: Finn Jarle Kvalheim Tek.no

E-mail and instant messaging. They are fundamental parts of our techno everyday, and both technologies were some of the first that appeared when what would become the Internet was released a few days before the birth of Christ.

They are not only fundamental to our everyday lives. They are all pretty basic technologies. Email goes largely unencrypted and as plain text between different servers. Some of the protocols used are so simple that it is almost easier to figure out how to send a nonsense message from knoll gens address, called adressespoofing, than it is to take the exam in the Outlook menu setting.

Instant messaging? Well, it’s not weird stuff exchanged. And IRC protocol, as well as many other and far earlier solutions, has for many years proved that this is not so difficult to achieve. Here too there has historically often traded on the exchange of plain text, without large amounts of code around.

Both types of services were easier to use before, but Google’s Gmail and Facebook’s Messenger proves that this need not be so difficult . Not even in 2016.

So why was Skype and MSN Messenger separately simpler products to use than the end result? And why it feels as if time has stood still for many years in Outlook?

Microsoft stock the roaring good products also

It’s easy to be happy on Microsoft’s behalf in 2016. Despite for horse cures and layoffs in recent years, watching the ship finally appears to have not just one winner but up more. Yet it is the simplest service ends up in products that are difficult to use. What is it? We’re talking about the same company has made Windows 10, a gigantic operating system in which lines of code are counted in dullioner. An operating system which, furthermore, in most respects is terrific to use.

When Microsoft gets to the really big promises, but not the small, then creeps annoyance forward. It feels a bit like a giant shipyard that get to make a dashing aircraft carrier, but misses roughly when they will assemble a small shelf from IKEA. So, Microsoft. I bark because it’s the basics you sometimes do not get, though I know you can build “ships.”