Unusual Reader E-mails

It's rare -- very rare -- that we do this sort of thing, but we're going to run a couple of atypical e-mails this week. First of all, there's one from David (more on him in a minute), whose thoughts we ran in a post about browsers not long ago. We had to cut David's post for length (no, we don't have completely unlimited space), and David took the time to complete his thoughts on the blog post itself. Thank you for that, David.

But, in an RCPU first, David also contacted us requesting that we run the rest of his e-mail and reveal his name and contact information. Now, as a rule, we only identify e-mailers by first name, and we'll continue to do that as standard practice. Anybody who wants full attribution, though, is welcome to it -- just drop a note about that in your e-mail to [email protected].

Now, as a reward for his persistence and faithful readership, here is the conclusion of the e-mail sent to us by David Doyle James, whose CV -- with a contact link included -- is available here. (To read the first part of his e-mail, you'll just have to click here. Yeah, we could use the hits.)

"So do you see the problem yet? It is financial. The folks in Redmond are forcing us to upgrade (across the board) before the thing is even amortized, and I say, why? This PC is happily taking care of business running on 12-year-old technology and using less than 32MB of memory. The client is happy because we saved them so much money through the years. 

"Microsoft is losing favor because they are forcing change on the user that the market is not demanding and removing options that would allow the consumer to continue building upon their legacy. For example: When Office 2007 came out, they pulled Office 2003 off the shelf, and there was no way to keep the old interface in Office 2007. This has been a common practice with every release of Office -- to pull the old versions, thus forcing users to shop on eBay if they want to maintain a standard in their offices.

"If Microsoft lets developers control W3C and they monitored it rather than trying to own it, I believe there would be more support for their CLR. Then, perhaps, there would be true legacy support for ASP code in ASP.NET, which Microsoft has touted. If we had a VBC, the IT world would be a very different place.

"The fact is they have no watch dog, not even in the ranks of journalism. It is a pure dictatorship, wherein the emperor has no clothes."

Strongly stated, David. We walk a fine line here between being a watchdog for Microsoft and advocating for Microsoft partners (who quite like the company, mostly), so we tend to pick our battles in terms of criticism. But we're glad to have readers like you come out and speak your mind. Thanks for your persistence.

In another unusual move, we're going to run an e-mail about something that, to our memory, has never appeared in RCPU. From Clinton, we have what sounds like a pretty serious beef about Microsoft Expression Suite. Remember, this all comes from Clinton, not from RCPU:

"Why aren't you covering the fact that there is an inhumane and cruel rogue group inside of Microsoft that has imposed visual impairment into the Expression Suite product line with their all black/grey user interface, which is literally unreadable and has unemployed a number of people already because we cannot literally see and read the UI no matter what goofy configuration?

"This matter was settled long ago by those of us who cut our teeth on CAD, as we used a black background then. We continue to use black background now; HOWEVER, it's not for the user interface, which is used to access commands and operate the software. If this stupid arrogant [junk] that has put people like me out of business was a good idea and actually rational, Autodesk and all of the other CAD vendors would have adopted all black/grey user interfaces long ago.

"Where is your character? This has been going on for three releases now, and I can't presume you do not know about it."

Well, Clinton, to be honest, we didn't know about it (Expression Suite hasn't ever been a big topic here), but we do now. And so does Microsoft, hopefully. We'll see.

Have any other rants, raves or rational renderings? Send them to [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on September 10, 2009