How Not to Run a Business

I'm angry. It's 1:00 AM and I'm angry. I can't sleep, and the cause? The big three. It amazes me that I get so angry. It also amazes me the ways in which a company will spite its valued consumers.

First up, we have a pair of companies who have formed what might as well be known as an unholy alliance. I expect the wall of flame any day. I am, of course, talking about Apple and AT&T, and the infamous iPhone. With the 3G iPhones, AT&T is now not providing ANY text messages. First of all, providing text messages costs next to nothing. Second, with an iPhone specific data plan, which previously provided 200 text messages for the 2G iPhone, consumers must now pay $10/month more and sacrifice their text messages. Why?!?!? It's arbitrary. I know AT&T is now taking a hit on the iPhone due to subsidy. However, if they want to regain the costs, they might actually consider making THEIR CONSUMERS HAPPY, and maintaining that income. Even Microsoft wouldn't sacrifice this kind of backward compatibility. Apple probably also has something to do with it behind the scenes. You've seen the way they do business...

And then, as usual, there's Microsoft, which rounds out a bad evening. I was fuming from my iPhone/AT&T fiasco earlier this evening, and was looking forward to relaxing and taking out my frustrations on a bunch of zombies. So, I booted Windows 7, and suddenly my microphone no longer worked. Why? It worked before! The short answer is that I don't know, and what always seems to be the quickest solution is to reinstall Windows. I now have the release candidate installed. Let's hope that solves something. We'll see sometime soon.

We return to now. It's 1:00 AM, and I'm angry. Where does this leave me? I don't know. How do you resolve issues like these. I can solve the Microsoft problem, and it's the least of the three. I've installed Windows so many times that I'm numb to the experience now. But how do I obtain what I want from AT&T and Apple? How can you convince a huge company with a lot of customers that they should be treating their customers better? I leave you with this probably unsolvable conundrum, calmer somewhat now that I've shot frickin' lightning bolts from my hands.

A Whole Lotta Somethin'

Amazingly, not a whole lot goes on for awhile, and then the cosmos just piles it on. Well, consider it piled. All sorts of wonders have happened recently...

The girl has finally been introduced to the mechanical wonder that is the manual transmission. Yesterday, Sunday, was pretty close to perfect. I started learning Objective C in the morning, we got lunch with Ken and Amanda at Panera, and then Amanda started teaching said girl about driving a stick. The deal was that I wasn't allowed to be there, and I wasn't. Ken and I sat in Panera, pondering how we might be able to play Battleship between both of our laptops. Yes, Battleship. Having to laptops across from one another is the perfect environment for doing that, don't you think? "You sank my battleship! And my laptop doesn't respond well to water, damnit!"

So, the girl drove. She stalled. She jerked around a bit. But she's still alive, my car is in one piece, and she made it successfully from Ames to Ollie's, and parked very nicely on an end spot, for a grand total distance of roughly 1000 feet. I'm proud of her. More driving to come :-)

Then, today happened. I'm going to gloss over most of the details of today because it sucked. You don't need to hear me whine about crap that really, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't mean much of anything. So, we'll skip to the only humorous part, which happened post-frustration. A woman in my new office is having a baby. She's concerned because she doesn't know what to name him. The corollary to this story is that I work with a bunch of geek-type people. So, we quickly degraded to providing her ways to name her baby. I eventually came to seeding a random number generator with the due date, and then reducing the output to printable ascii. We then proceeded to do this. Would you like to name your child Biq? She didn't either. But I contend that the theory is sound...

Oh, there's one more thing. The Girl's new occupation should definitely be extension cord assassin. Some assassins use knives. Some use rifles or pistols. And apparently, some use lawnmowers. She has bladed yet another extension cord to death. I'm sure more cords will fall under the blade before she's finished mowing lawns.
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Quick Follow-up

Following the NYTimes article about Windows sucking, ZDNet has a follow-up that talks about Midori, a potential Windows rewrite (refactor :-) ) related to another research project they have going on called Singularity.

Singularity is the research into a microkernel version of Windows. Microsoft says this will never see the commercial/consumer world ever. The author of the ZDNet article, Mary Jo Foley, however, thinks that Midori is a related project with a lot of MS big-wig weight behind it. I wonder if Microsoft could have a much less bloated version of their OS with the security advancements of Vista. I wonder even more, however, if it would be the complex, convoluted, mess of a bunch of settings that Vista has become. I don't know where everything is anymore. I hope very seriously that they have learned from their past mistakes (I'm looking at you, NT, Vista, Millenium, et al) and organized things a bit better, and maybe moved to a better user interface that people can understand.

This all assumes, however, that Midori is even what she believes it is. Will we see? I wonder, personally, how much it would take to topple the bureaucracy that Microsoft has probably become to result in a usable operating system, a usable website, and software that doesn't always tell me what it thinks I should do, but rather does what I ask it to do.