So bad, I want revenge

Today I experienced something out of the ordinary wich made me think for a moment, about something I take for granted more or less every day.

A Google search failed on me. Horribly.

I was, for some obscure reason in need of a quick fix for a urgent need for a throwaway WYSIWYG editor on a windows box.

As I did not have a clear preference I selected one of the top 4 links that looked promising (everybody does that 90% of the time), and that particular link sent me over to a software offering that turned out to be completely unfit for the task.

It's not so much the mediocrity of the software, whose selling points was that it was free, cross-platform and, well, an WYSIWYG-editor. Because it was. But it was clearly not something that would do the job I wanted. It did not have support for editing external bloody style sheets, and holy Spaghettimonster, that is something that's something of an dealbreaker for me. The non-intuitive UI was horrible, but nothing extraordinary (I'm getting used to that feeling after several encounters with Office 2007).

What was most offensive, was the fact that they had the balls to put "all your Internet needs in one application" on their web-page and the fact that Google served up that particular url as one of their top recommendations for my exact search words. This caused med to not drop this app as the steaming pile of crap, but spend several more minutes trying to figure out what the fuck I was missing out, since I was finding my Internet needs NOT getting particularly satisfied.

I'm still at a loss for words to describe my level of dissatisfaction. All I want right now is 20 minutes of my life wasted on by a websearch that failed me completely. I think Google really, really would benefit from a feedback-system with 'Kill, with fire' as an option. Because that is about how bad I feel about this particular misfire, right now.

Microsoft: "IE7 's good". The web: "not impressed"

I put up a comment on a brief article on MSDN IEBlog noting the 1-year anniversary of the IE7 release. The main thing that impresses me, is the sheer volume of negative energy they're met with.

From the post:

Your arguments about volume of adoption are nothing remarkable, all they show is that people use windows (this also seems to be your main strategy in IE development: "they'll use it anyway, so let's not bother too much..").

I cannot for the life of me come to understand how the current (embrace-and-extend + institutionalized arrogace)-strategy on web technologies are going to be a net asset to your company when it spawns so intense dislike.

What really strikes me, is that Microsoft is acting very in a very, at least to me, counter-intuitive way. The discussions about Microsoft's complete lack of, shall we call it.. tact, regarding web standards, is why I feel Google's motto, Don't be Evil is squarely aimed at their Redmond competitors.

One thing that would help Microsoft out of thist mess is to adopt a new and fresh strategy; "Don't be Microsoft"