Microsoft is slowly starting to piss me off.

Little by little, but yeah, they're getting there. First, it was Visual Web Developer being a piece of shit -- freezing constantly, dragging the system to its heels every time I try to save a page, the visual designer actually inserting *BAD HTML* that fucked up the document when I switched from design to source view then back again.

Now it's fucking around with Windows Vista.

First, Internet Explorer is suddenly "broken" and ActiveX just doesn't work with it anymore. At all. So that means I can't use the ActiveX Akamai downloader for Vista beta 2. So what do I do? I try to download it manually, via GetRight. Except that the server I connect to DOES NOT SUPPORT RESUME, which I didn't notice until, cleverly, my connection dropped and the download suddenly started over from 0. Oh, but the kicker is I was at 3.0 gigs when the connection dropped, two hours into the download. Thanks.

So, annoyed, I spin up Firefox, deciding that I'll use the Java Akamai downloader, right? Except that when I log in and try to get to the download page, all of the sudden its telling me that I ran out of product keys, so I can't download Windows Vista anymore. What the hell do product keys have to do with downloading Windows Vista? Why can't you just say you can't give me any more product keys and let me grab Vista. Why don't you even tell me where I can find out how many product keys I already have and what they are?

So, finally, after having to SEARCH THROUGH MY BROWSERS HISTORY PANE like a freaking internet savage, I find the download link. I pop it into Firefox, the system freezes as Java lumbers into memory, and then, finally, the Akamai Java download manager is up and running.

Except its broken. Because the directory browser doesn't work, at all, unless I use the default 'My Documents' location. Thanks, Akamai. Or Sun. I'd like to think its a combination of both and just a sprinkle of poor design.

So, what happens after I finally quit meddling with trying to pick my download location and just start the download?

NOTHING HAPPENS.

Frankly, I'm just going to give the "manual" download link another shot. If it doesn't work, I'm just not going to bother with Vista, at all, until it comes with my next desktop.

It feels like every element of Microsoft is just slowly falling apart. I was really hoping that Vista would be the turning point, a corner stone in the foundation of more robust software development, but they can't even get the software to me without fucking it up six ways from Sunday.

God, you guys suck.

technorati tags:microsoft, windows, vista, activeX

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