I spent three hours online Friday with the Geek Squad’s best and brightest, attempting without success to fix two seemingly minor problems in Microsoft Outlook. The first is that Outlook has been forgetting the password every time it checks my e-mail server. This problem has been intermittent over the more than ten years I’ve used Outlook, a nettlesome glitch that has survived all versions, updates and security patches. Although there are thousands of web pages that purport to deal with the issue, and presumably tens of millions of PC users who have sought to resolve it, I’ve yet to find a fix. Although Outlook on a bad day duns users with endless “Remember this password?” prompts, it would be easier to teach an Irish Setter to remember the date of your wedding anniversary. Particularly maddening is that the prompts continue to pop up every three seconds, even when one keeps instructing Outlook to “Remember this password”. My other Outlook problem is that a feature designed to test the e-mail account settings has stopped working. Activate a test and it simply locks up Outlook so that the program becomes unusable. The only way to get past this bug – until the next time — is to reboot the computer.
At the end of Friday’s tech-support marathon, Chris, a Geek Squad expert with a five-star rating, offered the same, useless suggestion that tech support personnel have been offering PC users for decades: reinstall Windows. They do this, of course, knowing full well that it takes someone who knows his way around computers the better part of a weekend to do a complete reinstall, and the user another two or three weeks to re-install all of the third-party applications that get wiped out in the process.
A Thousand Layers of Buggy Code
I mention all of this because it buttresses a prediction I’ve repeated here many times before – that Microsoft as a company is destined for failure. The Redmond behemoth seems well along this path not merely because of management’s breathtaking ineptitude, lack of vision and obliviousness to the needs of customers, but also because Windows has accumulated layer upon layer of buggy code atop an architecture that was never meant to handle a thousand patches, updates and iterations. How bad has Windows become? So bad, in fact, that the latest version, Windows 8, has almost single-handedly killed off the PC business. With tablets on their way to becoming ubiquitous, PC and laptop sales were already falling sharply. The last thing in the world that Dell, Hewlett-Packard, ASUS, Lenovo et al. needed was a new version of Windows that almost no one wanted or needed.
There are so many gratutious changes in Windows 8’s interface, most of them geared toward touch-screen users, that system administrators and PC users have effectively boycotted the product rather than subject themselves to yet another time-wasting slog up the learning curve. Microsoft, reacting with understandably little fanfare, has promised to ameliorate the global flop of this latest release with a new version of the O/S called Windows Blue. In the meantime, Windows 8 can only continue to garner negative press and the hostility of users everywhere. It were as though General Motors had introduced a jazzy new Chevy that lacked a “traditional” steering wheel, had a radio that played only hip-hop music, and brake and accelerator pedals whose positions were reversed.
‘A Lot of Ruin in an Empire’
To be sure, it is taking GM a very long time to go out of business, and the company has been in far worse shape than Microsoft for nearly two generations. There is a lot of ruin in an empire, as the saying goes. In the case of Microsoft, with more spare cash than it knows how to deploy and an all but impregnable monopoly on PC operating systems, there is little hope that the company’s demise will come nearly as swiftly as deserved. But it seems inevitable nonetheless, since no company that does as many things – does everything – as badly as Microsoft can survive indefinitely. Perhaps they will be pushed off the cliff by some paradigm-changing application-in-the-cloud that makes the Office suite superfluous? It’s also possible that PCs will continue on a long grind toward obsolescence as tablets and other devices grow more powerful and capable. Until then, unfortunately, non-Mac users will have to grin and bear it whenever a three-hour tech support session leads, as they do more and more frequently these days, to a dead-end.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, it doesn’t have a Steve Jobs to turn the company around. Bill Gates, who couldn’t innovate his way out of a Glad bag, is ill-suited to this task, and summoning him out of retirement to “fix” Microsoft would be like calling on Jimmy Carter, or channeling the Millard Fillmore, to fix all that is wrong with America. Perhaps Steve Ballmer could not even be dislodged at this point, even by Gates. Ballmer has shown a steady hand in guiding Microsoft from one embarrassing failure to the next, and in elevating mediocrity to a civilizational pinnacle. It therefore seems fitting that he should preside over the world’s largest purveyor of software at a time when the economic system itself has very nearly been asphyxiated by businesses deemed “too big to fail.”
