A while ago I installed Office 2007 on Windows XP (in a Parallels disk image so I can run Windows word on my MacBook Pro, but that’s a different story) thinking I’d need to use it eventually and that I’d install it and have it ready for that day. I spent like an hour or more getting my XP install all ready to go with Office and a few other things. The day has come when I needed to use it. I assumed it would be ready to go. My. Mistake.

It’s taken me about ten minutes to actually get Word 2007 to launch. Here’s the quick story: it’s Father’s day and I have a very limited amount of time to work on a couple of documents for work that I’m a bit late delivering. I’m in Paso Robles visiting B’s family. B is going to Target in an epic quest for Laundry detergent. Or something like that.

In the meantime, I’m sitting Starbucks, cursing my slow connection, and I start up Windows Word by double clicking the document I want to edit. Did I mention that I have a specific amount of work to get done in the specific, and small, amount of time I have?

So a giant window pops up. What the hell? Something about “Installing blah blah blah”. It changed after a while to “Installing other stuff, blah blah blah”. After a while, another alert popped up “something really important isn’t installed, should we install it?” Um. Hello? This is just goddamned mind boggling. Like I’d choose anything else. There might as well be only one button: “Yes you would, stupid user.”

So I click it. What I am doing to do, choose no? Choosing no is like an old western where the hero is tied up and blindfolded in a saloon with a barrel of TNT. The black hats light the fuse, run out, jump on their horses and gallop away in a cloud of dust firing their guns in the air and screaming “yipee-kie-aye!”. The hero hears the fuse hissing. He’s tied to a player piano. The barrel is gonna blow. He doesn’t know when. Just that it will.

So for the love god, don’t let your mouse finger slip and choose no. There will just be smoking crater left and you’ll have to repave your machine and any machine within wifi range.

Meanwhile I’m sitting here inventing new obscene combinations of curse words.

This took about ten minutes.

I think Microsoft is a great company. But stuff like this blows my mind. I just can’t understand why anyone would think this is acceptable.

My guess is that the installer was taking too long to run and that this is the fix. The installer runs for ten less minutes. Let’s just fix this by deferring everything we can until the user launches the application. There’s probably a ginourmous “first run” spec. I can just visualize how this happened.

The thing that remains obvious to me is that the customer experience was not THE top priority. Something else was.

For the love of God, why?