Microsoft, a love-hate relationship

Solstice · Post by **Solstice** » Thu Oct 04, 2001 12:09 am

OK, so I tend to do a lot Microsoft bashing. And righfully so, they have us by the balls and they just keep on squeezing harder.

However, today I contacted Microsoft about a problem with my Natural Keyboard Pro (left-shift key sticks). The tech dude just asked for my address and said a new keyboard is on the way. Knowing them it will be here by the time I'm done typing this post.

dadx2mj · Post by **dadx2mj** » Thu Oct 04, 2001 1:03 am

When it comes to hardware you can't beat MS. My kids finally managed to beat up the Intelli Explorer mouse I put on their computer a little over a year ago. The replacement is already on the way. So far they have replaced 2 mice and one joystick and in all honesty it was user abuse that was the problem not quality of product. None the less they replace it pretty much no questions asked except where to ship it to.

Slugbait · Post by **Slugbait** » Sat Oct 06, 2001 2:20 am

Hell, I can remember when I got my shiny new IBM PS/1 386, which had a whopping 80 meg drive and 2 megs of RAM. I couldn't print a Word 2.0 document, and called MS...they immediately realized I needed a printer driver, and mailed one to me on a floppy, free of charge (no one had coined the buzz word "world wide web" at that time...heck, most people didn't know what to do with those 2400 baud modems...today it's so simple to just download what we need)

Most people will either never know, or never admit, how far MS bends over backward to please customers. MS will do for their customers things that other companies have written policies of which to never do, because it would cost them money. It's good to know some people appreciate MS every once in awhile.

tyler_durden · Post by **tyler_durden** » Sun Oct 07, 2001 9:21 pm

slugbait, i am not so sure i agree with you.
i have to say that MS hardware department is AWSOME.

however, the customer support on the software site is a little shakey. i have spent hours on the phone with ms tech support only to be told the reason that two computers wont share files with a cross over cable is that i am not running it through a hub. turns out there was some problem that was fixed by win 98 SE.

FuNPoLiCe001 · Post by **FuNPoLiCe001** » Sun Oct 07, 2001 9:26 pm

never called MS tech support for software, but their hardware guys are awesome. My old intellimouse explorer died, called them up and they sent one right away. Got it 2 days later.

Postumus · Post by **Postumus** » Mon Oct 08, 2001 1:40 am

interesting 1 of the feet fell off my natural keyboard, perhaps I should call them up, any north american wide tech number?

LikeLinus · Post by **LikeLinus** » Mon Oct 08, 2001 7:10 am

Heres something you also have to consider. With the millions upon millions of people, corporations, and organizations that run MS OS, applications and games....how hard do you think it is to stock their CS with knowledgable people? I mean really, with the call volume that they have it would be impossible for them to find that many people that want to work for that kind of money that know the in's and out's of MS products. They have to train these people very quickly and without much indepth knowledge. Thats why their hardware rocks (thats the easy part), but their CS is a little shakey. I'm sure they try their best, but with the shear number of calls they receive for the various products it's impossible to solve everyones problems with the number of different problems there are, and number of different solutions there are for that problem.

poop · Post by **poop** » Mon Oct 08, 2001 10:56 am

You can get good support, if you pay through the nose.

They had a line that cost $90 a call at Lexmark. The driver developer guys had to use it every now and then. 1/2 the time the response was "It is a konwn bug". When they would aks for some source code so they could fix it, MS would just say "Nope, wait for a service pack or work around it." Wahoo, $90 down the drain.