Windows 7 Annoyances

Why Am I Annoyed?

They say no one should see how sausage or laws get made, and I feel the same is true for software.

Imagine a windowless room in a nondescript office building. Inoffensive tan carpet lines the floors, fluorescent lights hum softly overhead, and 20 seated Microsoft employees flank a rectangular folding table in the center of the room. On the table rests a Windows PC, and at its helm, a slack-jawed cipher punches blindly at the controls in a vain attempt to carry out a task requested by the team leader.

“OK, here’s the next exercise: transfer a photo from this digital camera to the PC and then upload it to the Internet,” says the leader.

The observers—members of Microsoft’s User Research Group—diligently note each click, key press, and hesitation, hoping they’ll learn the answer to the industry’s big secret: why do so many people find computers difficult to use?

With this system, Microsoft has uncovered many startling facts about PC users over the years, and the software you use has been changed accordingly. For instance, people new to computers apparently have a hard time with the concept of overlapping windows. (Did I say “startling?” I meant “idiotic.”) So now we have the Glass interface with translucent borders that sort of show stuff underneath, AeroSnap, which pulls windows to the edges of your screen as you drag them around, and a new Alt-Tab window which makes all your windows vanish if you hesitate too long. Of course, most people new to PCs figure out the concept of stacking windows after about 10 minutes of fiddling, so are these gizmos effective solutions to a genuine usability problem, or just glitzy affectations included to give those still using XP a compelling reason to upgrade?

Another common problem is that people have a hard time finding their stuff, which is why every Windows Explorer window has a search box in the upper-right. But the search tool in Windows 7 doesn’t work particularly well—it’s slow, the search results are often incomplete, and the interface is clumsy—so what exactly have we gained here?

Here’s another one: lots of people seem to get lost searching through long menus for the tools they need, so once again, Microsoft snapped into action. The team’s first attempt was “personalized menus”—a user-interface disaster included in earlier versions of Windows (including XP) and Microsoft Office—which caused about half the items in a menu to vanish so nobody could find them. Subsequently, Microsoft took a different tack and removed the menus altogether. At least you’ll no longer get lost in menus; of course, you won’t be able to find anything, either.

Hundreds of design decisions are made this way, and if that’s all we had to worry about, Windows would be annoying enough. Now consider the “Strategy Tax,” the concept that a company like Microsoft has so many strategies to juggle that its products suffer as a result. For instance, the Strategy Tax is why Windows still doesn’t include an antivirus program, why Internet Explorer is still unsafe at any speed, and why there are six different editions of Windows 7.

Take content protection, Windows 7’s copy-protection initiative for so-called premium content like high-definition movies from Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs. According to Microsoft’s standards, software and hardware manufacturers are supposed to disable “premium content” across all interfaces that don’t provide copy protection. One such interface is the S/PDIF digital audio port—usually in the form of a TOSlink optical plug—that comes on most high-end audio cards. Since S/PDIF doesn’t support copy protection—meaning that you could theoretically plug it into another PC and rip the soundtrack off an HD movie—Windows 7 requires that your TOSlink plug be disabled whenever you play back that HD movie on your PC. As a result, you’ll only be able to use your analog audio outputs when watching HD content, and that expensive sound card you just bought is now trash. Why would Microsoft hobble an important feature? For you, the consumer? Of course not. Windows 7’s content-protection feature is intended to appease piracy-wary movie studios, so Microsoft won’t be left behind as the home theater industry finds new ways to rake in cash. And ironically, Microsoft boasts content protection as a feature of Windows 7.

Would Microsoft be making decisions like these if it weren’t so beholden to its corporate strategy? After Europe’s second-highest court upheld a ruling that Microsoft had abused its market power and stifled innovation, Neelie Kroes, the European Union competition commissioner, stated that “the court has confirmed the commission’s view that consumers are suffering at the hands of Microsoft.”

So that leaves us lowly Windows 7 users with a choice: do we continue to suffer with the shortcomings of Windows, or take matters into our own hands?