Windows brought us into PC era, it becomes the most widely used OS in the past 20 or so years. But unfortunately there are still many people hate Windows. Is it because we may encounter the notorious blue screen issue now and then?
People hate Microsoft Windows for the same reason they hate Comcast, United Airlines, or Paypal.
Once Microsoft gained a dominant market position, it completely and utterly took its customers for granted. It became arrogant and complacent, causing customers to feel unappreciated and victimized.
This is nothing surprising. Once a company is assured of its market position and no longer has to win its customers, it seldom treats them very well. This causes widespread resentment by customers who know they are treated badly because they have so few other choices.
From Windows 95 on, Microsoft launched a series of products that were:
- Inconsistent - XP and Windows 7 were good. ME and Vista were disasters. We couldn't trust a software company to make good software. We'd pay $99 for a new release, only to be worse off the next day.
- Not secure - for a full decade a Windows user had to buy 3rd party software, patch constantly, and still deal with major security breaches.
- Confusing - the UI was a cluttered, inconsistent mess for years. Bill Gates himself said it best: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/
- Slow to innovate - quick, name the top 5 innovations between Windows 95 and Windows 7. Between Office 95 and Office 2011?
- Resource hogs - want a OS upgrade? Buy a new computer.
- Ran on poor hardware - for decades you received Windows in a form of a crappy plastic box you got from Dell or HP, probably at Best Buy from a clueless sales rep trained only to upsell you crap you didn't need.
- Full of crapware - those same partners loaded the desktop with crapware aimed at upselling grandpa on useless crap by scaring him to death.
- Increasingly irrelevant - Microsoft missed search, touch screens, tablets, media players, saas, cloud, modern browsers, and virtually every major technology shift in the last 10 years.
This leads to a lot of pent-up anger. Over the years, the hundreds of hours of wasted time and hassle add up. Consumers have long memories and will dump a company that abuses them like this at the first chance they get.
And then, the fog started to lift:
- People discovered iPods, iPhones, iPads, Android Phones and Kindles. They said, "hey it just works"
- They discovered Chrome and Firefox. "Hey, it just works."
- They discovered GMail, Google Apps, Dropbox. "Hey it just works."
- They tried out Mac OS. "Hey it just works."
- Ex-Windows developers ran the next generation of apps on Amazon Web Services. "Hey, it just works."
Microsoft is now acting like the lover who took his partner for granted for years and got dumped as a result. "I can change!" He pleads.
They have scrambled to support mobile and tablet touchscreens, have added more cloud services, have improved Internet Explorer, and are gaining more control over their hardware and retail ecosystem.
And the new products are very good, but it doesn't matter. It is no longer about products. It is about trust. The damage has been done, and a reconciliation is unlikely.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
About author :
Michael Wolfe : CEO and founder of Pipewise. This article is from one of his answers on Quora.
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