I use and install a lot of software each month, and for some reason Microsoft tends to annoy me the most. Why is that you may ask? Well, let me share two things that happened this week to me. First off, I was trying to login at my Microsoft Live account while using Firefox as my browser. During login the page had a secure address of https://login.live.com/, however the login form was sending my credentials insecurely which means that a bad guy could read my login info and take over my account. Here’s what the security warning looks like with Firefox:
I had expected a large company like Microsoft to have their security act together and not use a broken login page like this.
Secondly, I wanted to install a trial version of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 to use Publisher to migrate a document to JPG format. During the installation process Microsoft insists that I close two non-Microsoft products: Firefox and Google Chrome.
Why in the world does Microsoft care if two other web browsers are running? I cannot recall any other software vendor that forces me to close other apps, just to install their app.
The business world continues to buy and use Microsoft products, and I make sure that my client web sites look good and work well with Internet Explorer, however I stopped using Microsoft apps in favor of all things Google, free, open source or cloud-based instead.
