What Will It Take For Microsoft To Get It Right?
A fair question, right? What will it take for a huge company like Microsoft to collectively get their act together and fix their software? You might be asking what I’m talking about exactly. Some of you are likely think Internet Explorer, bingo on that one. But I have one more big one! Windows Media Player.
What’s wrong with Windows Media Player? Microsoft just released WMP 10, it’s an upgrade from WMP 9, it must be good. Incorrect!?! Windows Media Player 10 is a rushed piece of software that should still be in beta. In a number of products these days, Microsoft wants to push out the finished products months early, this happens for different reasons. WMP 10 was released for two reasons: MSN Music and Portable Media Center’s. Make the free product trash and try and get people to purchase other products in which you are making money off of. That is plain stupid. Even now that Portable Media Centers are shipping, problems are doing reported that link right back to bugs in WMP! So, you have you customers spend $500 on a portable device, and then they find out they must use WMP to sync with it, and they can’t have it work the say it should? Smart business, I think not!
There are so many little bugs in WMP 10 you will be shocked once I get the final list down. Correct I have around 60 bugs in WMP 10. I had asked in a post before about bugs in WMP 10, however only 3 or so of the posts I got really have to do with bugs in WMP. The rest is problems with third party software that WMP uses. My list of 60 bugs does not include the dozens of Media Library bugs that are featured in WMP 10.
You might be asking yourself “Why so many bugs?” That’s a good question. Did the beta testers do a poor job? Did Microsoft just screwed up? Answer: Microsoft just screwed up. During the Private Beta period there were a number of bugs presented to the team that did not get fixes. Some of these are still standing from WMP 9! The Technical Beta was a complete and total joke. Other then losing WMP users, the Technical Beta showed the public that Microsoft did not care about their user’s opinions and fixing bugs presented by the WMP users. What’s Microsoft response? I never really got one from them, basically showing me they didn’t even care when the topic was brought on by people at Microsoft!
A number of you might be reading this after I flamed you in the WMP Newsgroup backing WMP. And I still do! That’s because 90% of the “bugs” that are reported by the people who want to trash Microsoft, are not bugs in WMP. You can’t trash a company when you don’t know what you are talking about, that’s a rule of mine. Now, when you find a real bug, and others can repro it, I have no problem backing you about Microsoft screwing up.
Now, there are a number of people on the WMP Team who work their asses off creating this, and I don’t blame them. I do blame the people that ignore their customers input on a product and the ones who do not correctly address problems when they are their. Microsoft needs to get the point that their users have many other choices when it comes to just about every product they make now. The numbers still show Microsoft leading in many categories, but that will change if they can not figure out how to take their mistakes and improve on them. I’m just about sick of seeing the same bugs from versions of WMP that are years old still in current versions. There is zero excuse for that, zero. Yet, this is the case with WMP.