Microsoft touted its new and improved Office 2011 for the Mac. It showed videos of programmers showing off all the cool new features. Apple touted its new and improved OS X Lion. It showed over 250 cool new features.
For me, the only cool thing about Office 2011 was that Microsoft put back in Excel the macro capability it took out in Office 2008. It was not so cool that some very simple macros wouldn't work, macros that had worked in Office 2004.
For me, the only cool thing about OS X Lion is that one now drags up to scroll up. It is taking a bit of getting used to, but if you think about it that is how you move paper. It was not cool because a couple of things stopped working.
I don't know what the relation between Office and Lion is, but after I installed Lion, all my tasks in Outlook disappeared. They are not gone because some will in Office Reminders. I was able to find a topic in Microsoft Support that brought this up, but the only answer didn't work. I added a reply, but I can't check if anybody added anything because…
I downloaded Lion at home with my nominal 7Mbps connection. Now I'm at our cabin with our 24kbps connection, and I can't get online. OS X Lion considers an Apple USB modem unsupported. What? It was supported in many previous versions. Am I supposed to drive 50+ miles from the cabin to buy a different modem?
OK, I gave Apple's 800 number a try, and had a pleasant but unfruitful talk with Jennifer in Apple Care. Lion is a 64-bit operating system and the USB modem has 32-bit firmware. Nobody seemed to think it was worth it making it work; after all, the only way you can get Lion currently is with a high-speed connection. In her enthusiasm to be helpful, Jennifer thought I should get online to look for a compatible modem. Oops, I can't get online. She also suggested having my ISP come to give me a hand. I pointed out that they are over 200 miles away and I am in the woods. She did do her best to make lemonade out of the lemon the developers gave her and me.
I'm glad that I didn't come to the cabin to do some big bucks work. That really would have ruined my weekend.
When we design complex systems, be they nuclear plants, computer operating systems, or legislation, we will never think of everything. A simple decision to put something in or take something out can have far greater consequences than we expect. Murphy's Law will always hold.
When I got back to Duluth and my DSL connection, I found that Apple had sent me email asking me to take a survey about my Apple Care Support Center Call. I normally don't take surveys, but I thought I could at least vent about product compatibility decisions. Jennifer did a great job with the tools given her; Apple did a lousy job of providing "seamless" migration to a new system.
My feedback was:
It's not what the Advisor could have done or not done. It's Apple's decision to unilaterally discontinue support in Lion of the Apple USB modem. I would not have purchased Lion at this time had I been able to easily find out that I would not be able to access the web from the dial-up at our cabin.
If I'd known that Lion would have cost me, not $29.99, but $79.99 or $129.99 or more (the difference being the cost of a new modem), I would have waited until 10.7.1 or whatever version Apple decided to be backwards compatible for many of its users.
One thing the Apple Care support person was not able to tell me was what USB modems are compatible with Lion.
