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After almost 20 years in the industry I have really had it up to here and fear I'm losing my love of technology. It used to be so great in the 90's and 00's, but now I am so fed up with dumbed-down crap from operating system manufacturers (Microsoft!) whereby idiotic and unhelpful features are released (I'm sorry, but pinning items to a start menu so the icons can intermingle with running apps is totally fucking useless and confusing) and anything useful is hidden and taken away because, hey, the developers didn't think it was necessary and everyone should adhere to their whims, even if it means rearranging menus constantly for no apparent reason and actually to the detriment of the end user.
New start buttons with missing features, pointless kiddie crap like a clock on the desktop taking the place of helpful programs, and the endless, incessant, asshole prompts "Are you sure you want to keep breathing? Are you really sure? Are you positively certain? Are you really, really, absolutely and completely, positively sure?" that always come up when you are trying to use the system to do some work, and not be nagged by an overbearing, condescending nanny hell-bent on stalking you to death. Infinite security bullshit that prevents you from doing anything meaningful without being harassed but yet still never seems to keep out the malware or other problems. Yes, I am talking about Windows 7, which to me is a misbegotten piece of human waste. There is absolutely not a single compelling reason to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, and in fact many reasons NOT to use that bloated garbage, but we are being herded into upgrade by a company that seems to think we're too stupid to organize our own files and some totalitarian measures are what people want to do things the corporate way.
I am not here to just pick on OS manufacturers. I am sick and tired of garbage third party products that don't work as advertised; the vendor site so happy to take your credit card number after you've evaluated their shit in a small, microscopic scope (since that's all the trial software allows) - then you run it in a production environment and find it doesn't do fuck-all, tech support and documentation is as useless as ever, and getting your money back involves a screaming court battle and threats of public defamation.
New browsers that just lead to more security headaches and things refusing to work right (and this is not necessarily Microsoft's fault - Firefox has devolved into something almost entirely unusable now). It's gotten so that any new application, add-in or OS just prompts an immediate knee-jerk thought on my part: "What kind of broken-out-of-the-box bullshit is this going to be, that even if by some miracle it works it will be needlessly complex, abysmally documented, and completely unusable in a day-to-day environment?" I used to love new releases, now I just sneer at them and refuse to go near them if possible. IE 9 - I steer clear of it like the plague. Just more unhelpful bullshit crammed down our throats; no reason to upgrade to this crap. Firefox 5 came out today, big fucking whoop! Mozilla will never, ever, NEVER fix the memory leak problem that pushes this shit browser over 200 or 300 Mb of RAM with one tab open, but will instead just give us another moronic menu rearrangement which we have to install an add-on to correct. It's a free browser so don't use? No problem, except many of my users do, since they've been convinced that it's somehow preferable to any of the other shit browsers out there, and so when they can't find what they need I get called, because - fuck you very much, Mozilla - the lovely programmers decided once again that anything useful had to go in favor of more idiocy.
Next we have mobile devices allegedly for business that yet promote all sorts of stupid, irrelevant features and so the core functions of which are never there for you in a pinch. They lock up, hang on software updates, and keep on pushing unwanted components when what you want and need is communication, email, and documents. Period. Love Blackberry Desktop 6, which actually took away the good stuff from version 5. I especially love when software manufacturers carefully expunge all links to prior software versions which ACTUALLY WORKED so that all you can download is the most recent defective shit.
Then we have websites that are so counter-intuitive to get to what you want is like swimming against the tide. Knowledgebases you search for specific error messages from a vendor, and always either get "no results found" or crap like "this was fixed in ." When all else fails, gotta love the knee-jerk morons screaming you must have a DNS problem when their software update fails with a useless hexadecimal code string, and nary a symptom of DNS problems in sight elsewhere. Support technicians so fucking clueless - once you jump through the endless hoops required to talk to them - that I'm amazed they can pull up their pants after wiping. The list goes on and on. Apple is the answer, you say? Sorry, I have seen for myself that Macs do crash and have the same endless, nagging, moronic error messages that PCs do (the endless whining to update such-and-such program is legion across operating systems; Firefox/Adobe are most guilty of this, but the guilt spans everywhere) - and furthermore, I'll never have Apple telling me what I can do with my data and how I can access it. Period. Perhaps the Linux realm is the only avenue left - I just have zero respect for any other vendor or manufacturer, as they all seem to be pushing variations of the same junk.
Sorry if I'm just ranting away but this is years of frustration built up. The technology industry is advancing on some levels, perhaps, but is so rapidly (and frighteningly) sliding backwards in other respects that it's been like watching a beloved house crumble. I try to be philosophical, to figure that one can always be a tech guru to teach the users how to operate this stuff, but when the stuff doesn't operate per expectations, documentation, or assurances from the vendor - Microsoft's products are now borderline fraudulent ripoffs to me and every day I work with their defective garbage I become convinced they couldn't buy a clue if their lives depended on it - then I see the whole industry going down the tubes and a decent livelihood withering away.
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