Singing the Praises of Microsoft?!
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under Rants and Not-So-Rants
It’s not all that often I have anything great to say about Microsoft… but today brought a particularly good experience. Given that I’m pretty quick to jump on the soap box and start complaining when something is wrong, it seems only fair to sing praises when something is right.
Today, I was forced to install Service Pack 1 to the Vista machine on which I do most of my development work. I typically don’t install service packs unless it’s absolutely necessary (SP installs usually = downtime fixing things), but since SP1 is a requirement for Adobe CS4 (I’ll complain about that later), installing the service pack became necessary evil.
My first attempt at installing was the failure I expected… Windows made it to stage 3 of the installation, and then stalled at about 75%. Life was bad, and I had visions of never being able to use that machine again (I’m being dramatic there… one can always reformat and start over).
I went to the Microsoft site looking for help, and after going through all of the KB articles and not finding the fix, I submitted a support request. Quite honestly, I was expecting to find that support would be an endless chain of emails with people who didn’t understand the problem. To my surprise (and to my pleasure), I was immediately directed into a chat session with a real, live support person. Even more to my surprise, the support tech initiated an “Easy Care” session, jumped on to my desktop, and fixed the problem for me. Really… no fooling… the guy just fixed it, and his manager called me half an hour later to make sure everything was working.
I am simply floored by the experience. Whoever is running the show at MS support is really on their game today.
I thought I’d never say this, but it appears that Adobe could learn a few things from Microsoft. Seems a bit backward when I can get immediate, one-to-one support with a well qualified tech for a $300 operating system, but I can’t even get an email response to support requests for $4500 server software.