In "Quote of the day - Ease of use"
I berated Steve Jobs and Apple about his quote "Everything syncs without us having to think about it" because calendars in Microsoft Outlook, Apple's iCal, and my iPod were not synching properly.
Well, the problem was far worse than a few duplicated events. I had dozens and dozens that were duplicated over 100 times and one possibly over 500 times. That's a lot of shift-clicks followed by a delete. I've spent over a week now cleaning up at least three months a day.
Why delete duplicates from nine years ago? Because each item takes up space. For every three months cleaned up, I would back up the calendar. For 2004 it could take well over five minutes to backup. When I cleaned up into 2010, it started backing up in a minute. When I cleaned up into 2011, it backed up in less than a minute.
I also spent lots and lots of time looking at Microsoft's support pages. Hoo, boy! There ain't much praise there! Message after message complains about this and similar problems. The only posted responses are from MVPs (whatever that stands for), volunteers who try to direct users to relevant support pages.
Microsoft put out an update last week that I downloaded and installed. However, despite people complaining about sync problems since April 6, there was no mention of them in the notes for the update.
I wonder how much Microsoft is even screening any of these comments. I posted two comments on June 13, and they are still marked "Your comment is awaiting moderation."
This whole situation has the earmarks of upper management declaring something should be done by such and such date, middle management trying to figure out how to assign the work to too few people, and the programmers trying valiantly to put round pegs in square holes.
Shades of Dilbert!
Shades of the bad old days of mainframes! We felt lucky to get out a new system that crashed a few minutes less frequently than the previous version.
