More pain…
I own MSFT as an investment, so some would say I am at cross-purposes with this post, but one has to wonder at some of the moronic things happening in Redmond. Like this…
Today Jan and I decided that (once again) we would input all of our investment data, etc., etc., into the PC and get a better feel for where our financials are. We used to be very good about this, but the move to Japan made everything multicurrency (Actually, some of our investments before the move with in JPY as well…), and our version of Quicken didn’t handle them. It turns out that the current version of MS Money does, and with aplomb, so today we went to www.microsoft.com and purchased MS Money 2007 Premium. Note that we purchased it directly from Microsoft.
It turns out that Digital River handles online purchase/download transactions for Microsoft. So far, so good — I’ve used DR before. Money also has a rebate going, so even better. The purchase goes through and we get to the final download page. Money (The software, not the real thing, unfortunately…) is coming down the pipes and I go to download the rebate when I get this little spitball in the face. The boldface italics below are mine to make it easier to find.
Order Information
Order Date: 8/13/2006
Order Number: 3*******3
Order Total: $79.99
The charge(s) will appear on your credit card as “DR*Microsoft Money”.You will be sent an email with your order details at the address provided.
| Product Name | Qty | Microsoft® Money 2007 PremiumÂ
|
1 | Rebate form for Microsoft® MoneyÂ
|
|---|
So, if I don’t want to be on their spam list, I can’t download what I just purchased? This seems more than enough justification to call out “Foul!” in a loud voice. DR disappoints me, as does MSFT. This is just plain blackmail of the lowest order. One more reason to support open source. Did I mention that I have an employee now who although running on XP is using Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox, Sunbird, and Ghostscript? It’s an experiment to see how many problems he has, (He’s pretty good on computers, so if he has problems, everyone will…), and none to late.
< UPDATE>
Thunderbird and Firefox are still a go (No surprise — It’s what I have been using at home for the last two years. Thunderbird routinely munches up Japanese filenames when they are placed as attachments and gives them names such as “AT00090.doc” instead of “è°äº‹éŒ².doc,” but I knew that. Sunbird is still pretty useless because you can’t easily share the information, but it’s still alpha software, so I knew that as well. Ghostscript works great, but so do a thousand other freeware PDF creation programs (Although the commercial Fineprint/PDF Factory products are still by far — by far! — the best. I have an ancient version from years ago and it blows even the real-deal Adobe products away. It’s been one of the best productivity software purchases I’ve ever made — They even responded the same day and sent a software update several days later to an e-mail I sent them about a formatting problem on a PDF file I created that had a Japanese font embedded in a WMF in the footer of an English language DOC file. Adobe Acrobat Elements still can’t get that to appear correctly, BTW…).
But here’s the kicker: $70 NFR (Not for retail.) MS Office 2003 Standard, available at multiple, reputable sites. (See Surplus Computers, #9Software,, etc.). That’s less than an hour of my staff’s time, so the first time that I avoid OpenOffice’s crappy compatibility with PowerPoint, I’m ahead of the game. And that’s what it’s all about in business. I’ll use 7zip, Shareaza, or FileZilla because they work well and work seamlessly with my other software. I’ll also use OpenOffice at home, but it’s not ready for he workplace yet.
Uff Da!
