Reason #26917 to despise Microsoft

Understand that I generally see a lot of promise in open source software, zits and High Priesthood elitism and all. Grant you, it won't save the world. But anyone who underestimates the power of passionate folks to change the world by moonlighting in a world of craftsmanship and meritocracy--which they d--n sho' don't get from the suits at work--is a Grade A moron.

I had an a revelation at work today, namely why I so deeply loathe Microsoft. Bottom line: I resent black boxes for software that's as elementary as a web server and script processor. Alas, my company is not doing a very good job of getting the classic ASP monkey off its back. Current example: Rather than "waste" programmer time hand-coding our own solution, we instead serially waste three programmers' time trying to get a prima-donna IIS plug-in up and running for IIS 6. And, as you might have guessed, I'm the latest programmer to inherit this bit of infuriating scut-work.

What particularly chaps my pastey-white dimpled backside is:

1. When you're paying for the coin for so-called "Enterprise" software, the installer should do the messy work of "hacking" itself into IIS. Commercial software should never, EVER require manual registry edits.
2. (More to the point...) We wouldn't have to install this craptastic piece of gwano if ASP classic had any decent support for file uploads (or combined file/form POSTing) to start with.

Even more frustrating is IIS's utterly mulish behavior. I tried adding an extension to the list of file types handled. The first field in that form has you designate the DLL/EXE handler for the extension. The second has you specify the file extension. But apparently you need to specify the extension (with a leading period) and THEN browse for the DLL/EXE. Or the "OK" button is greyed out. Effin' brilliant user interface design there, hey? Just knowing that the incompetent twit who wrote that code (and the still more incompetent twit who allowed it through quality-checking) brings in more bling than I do--probably in stock options alone--just makes the steam curl from my ears.

Small wonder that Microsoft has to resort to mafia-esque thuggery to prevent someone more competent and user-attuned from eating their lunch. That's bad enough. But the less obvious result is that, in defending their own shoddy work against all comers, they have spawned whole cottage industries devoted to writing lame accretions to an already-lame codebase. All because Microsoft has apparently forgotten what made them the 800-lb gorilla in the first place: Namely, they made it easy to develop for the DOS and early Windows platforms. Nowadays, even a config. file for IIS is too much to ask for. Unacceptable.

And so, like open source folks the world over, I'll be happily parked in front of my Linux home workstation tonight, plinking away on non-proprietary software on a non-proprietary platform. Is it a perfect world there? By no means. But if my work draws one other person away from the clutches of a company that has the same attitude towards its customers that the Bush Regime has toward law-abiding taxpaying citizens, I'm happy be yet another stitch in the Evil Empire's winding-sheet.