love your employees, hate your semifunctional products

[ironymaiden]

after more than three hours of effort, i was finally able to get the audiobook mentioned previously to work by deleting my entire WMP DRM folder.

i just want to point out that i get paid to write instructions for using audio files with DRM. you would think it might have taken me slightly less effort to figure out how to deal with the recurring error messages.

a large chunk of that time was spent figuring out how to access *any* of the settings for WMP 11. because you need to know the secret handshake to see the menu bar. you know, the one with Tools>Options, or even Help. Help, where you go when you can't figure out how to do something with your new software. fortunately, i thought of seeing if the F1 button would open Help. which it did, where i learned how to bring up the menu bar. (right-click on the top edge of the window, if you must know.) because every confused and frustrated n00b knows to click F1.

i still don't know what caused the problem. the SDK essentially says i had a bad license. the error message text encouraged me to call Windows Support. (which costs money by the minute? WTF? evilevilevil.)

EDITED TO ADD: and it turns out "Windows Security Upgrade" has nothing to do with updating the software or adding codecs. it's logging your machine id.

Comments

a goat-pleasuring son of a one-eyed whore

[buhrger]

nobody ever got fired for buying an Evil Microsoft™ product

[mysticalforest.livejournal.com]

i learned how to bring up the menu bar. (right-click on the top edge of the window, if you must know.)

Holy hell. That's the worst interface ever.

because every confused and frustrated n00b knows to click F1.

What? What about F1 = Help? How would anyone know to even try that? How did you know?

[the-monkey-king.livejournal.com]

D00d, everyone knows. Except n00bs. Which means.... ;)

[mysticalforest.livejournal.com]

Oh, PC n00b, no doubt.

I do, at least, know what ctrl-alt-del means.

[ironymaiden]

i only know because i write Help. there's real debate in the user assistance community about whether newer users even know that F1 exists and if we should be providing F1 support.

i guess there's no question at M$.

[mysticalforest.livejournal.com]

You can well imagine what my perception is on the matter. ;)

[the-monkey-king.livejournal.com]

Media Player 10 makes me happy.

Media Player 11 looks like candy, but it makes me cry.

[pixxelpuss.livejournal.com]

The fact that MS charges you by the minute to report their bugs for them pisses me off. It's deeply wrong.