Dear Software Companies,
What is so fascinating about including all kinds of bells and whistles of useless software when a basic package with drivers is sufficient and mostly likely to have the most successful install and utilization? When I shell out the bucks for new hardware, why do I have to spend over 2 hours researching, uninstalling crap and rebooting for known common problems.
For instance, Google taskbar and search: I work for approximately the 27th largest company in the US with 30-some thousand employees, and they forbid both because they don't play nicely with business apps. I just did the recommended automatic install last night and all things IE related crashed. Two uninstalls and one reboot later IE is working again. Given that I already have problems with IE and Google that are so unfixable that my 1 week old laptop has to be replaced, I'm a tad cranky. Neither of these apps have anything to do at all with the actual operation of your hardware. They are just frills. Please don't go on Happy Hour binges with Google sales people any longer, m'kay?
Next I have a delightful morning wrestling with another app for the same hardware. I signed into the work network and BOOM! everything freezes. I can't even get the task manager to pop. WTF? 3 hard reboots later, I give up and use a personal computer to research the problem only to find that one of these stupid non-essential software apps is known to not play nicey, nicey with Cisco VPN. You think this could have been detected during install? Your product is titled "Office Edition." Let me think. Two people working from home in this household and 100% of us use Cisco VPN for either the aforementioned gigantic company or for another public employer who would be the 6th (or 5th?) largest economy in the world if it seceded from the US of A. Gosh, what are the chances that your product will be loaded to an office computer using Cisco VPN? Even I, a non-statistician, can figure that one out. The fix there only took 2 more re-boots to clear. And I’m still left with another SW app that I have to research getting it to not automatically start with each boot.
Oh wait a minute. I just figured out why you do it. It is so you can go giggle with Google during happy hour with all that time you’ve saved by not providing user manuals that cover all these apps.
K.I.S.S. and make your customers happy.



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