Dear Microsoft,
The Surface Book is a beautiful piece of hardware. The ability to function as a tablet and a laptop is marvelous and the hinge that allows me to use the extra battery in tablet mode is great. The beauty of the hardware tempted me to go back on a decision I made five years ago, but like the Damsel without Pity, your beauty hid a fatal flaw.
This is my story.
Five years ago when I said “good-bye” to you, because of software that had me on a constant quest for drivers and an inability to work with printers without invoking strange gods, I thought nothing could tempt me to return. I became a Mac evangelist, because Microsoft made Windows 8 and most of my streaming video died. I left Microsoft, your pomp, and all your works.
I turned on you and entered the world of Apple where equipment just works and software chugs along mostly in the background. Then Steve Jobs died and with him innovation. Like all sane people, an upgrade to the appearance of the icons on my screen do not cry out change and the cost is always high in the world of Apple.
And so like a man lulled by good times into forgetting the bad old days, I was seduced by NFL commercials and the innovative Microsoft arc mouse. Would the Packer coaching staff use a Surface if a Surface did not work? (Rodgers to Nelson! Touchdown! I bet Microsoft helped! Computers are changing the game!) So I fell for the oldest lie this side of cut rate online education: a Microsoft computer can play a game.
Like a beautiful couch that turns out to be impossible to sit on, you are impossible to use for your function and all the good parts are in unboxing the machine. You work, but only with more effort than the relationship is worth.
At first, I was dazzled by Windows 10. It works like a tablet or a PC! The fact that the Applications Store was like a K-Mart a year after a Walmart opened in town, bare of anything anyone wanted, was fine. I use my computer to work and if games must be played, my wife had an iPad.
I even bought a Windows phone (cheap!), but it turned out my iPhone worked better with my Windows computer. That should have warned me.
My wife’s aging iPad kept working and my troubles began with the trophy OS. First, my computer began to be unable to talk to itself. Some of your own applications did not like other applications you built. Hope’s Mac version of Outlook, a Microsoft product, worked better on her iPad than on my laptop from Microsoft.
The good news is that customer support has vastly improved from the bad old days when “Sean” would tell me to reboot my computer and then begin a long list of things I had already done before telling me that there was a driver problem that would be fixed someday . . . meanwhile I should cease trying to print and listen to music at the same time.
Now customer service can take control of my computer, this is not a bit creepy, and fix my problems and I got to see this miracle several times. The first time was impressive, the second time good, the third time. . . annoying. Of course, when my system failed, you sent my a new one (free!) and I reinstalled everything, but then there was a problem and the technical person had to wipe everything out to fix it. I installed everything again and each time things were better until I had to begin again. This was good for my soul as the trying of my patience worked righteous in me, but soon patience produced wisdom and I began to worry about your support strategy and my time.
It appears tech support likes to burn a village to save it. There is truth in the fact that one can build a new village now on the scorched earth and that the village may even be nicer than the one that was there, but the time? The time is gone forever.
None of that might have bothered me if the computer could print. I realize that printing is not always necessary. In my office, my actual need to print occurs only two or three times a day and even then, given my role, I can beg my co-workers who own Macs to print for me.
They do not ridicule my Windows machine too severely, they pity the software too much for that, but they do mock me for choosing it. What is to be said to that just accusation of folly? Like a man sending money to Creflo Dollar, I have chosen badly.
One day I thought I had printed only to find that Jon had printed from his Mac. I had been fooled once again by that printer sound into having hope that I had printed, but no, my job had disappeared again into the ether. Hell hath no fury like a man who cannot print, fooled by the sound of a printer running. Still God can use even the small things to work patience in us, though I also began to wonder if this lesson was not being overdone because I had chosen badly.
The good news is that after weeks of trying many things, I fixed my printing problem. It turned out that my use of “install printer” on Windows 10 appeared to work, but sadly prevented my computer from ever printing. The printer was there, a driver was there, but the printer was always “out of paper” even when I filled the printer with enough paper to print War and Peace in seven languages. Later I learned that (silly me) one could not use the “install printer” feature on Windows, but had to get a special install program from the manufacturer.
Were we using a Knock Off Printer By An Unknown Firm? We were using a Canon and HP printer and neither would work consistently. This is the fault, I am told, of the printer companies, though my Mac friends were merely writing great novels, making art, and correcting Death Star plans (Star Wars nerds in our office!) and merrily printing them all without problems.
For hate’s sake, I shook my fist at the printer and cursed Canon, but then I began to suspect the problem was not every printer company on Earth, but you. You were beautiful and the printer was not, but you were a fraud, a jade, and I was strumpet’s fool.
And then I recalled: driver problems, printer problems, unexpected crashes, updates that went on forever, video that went in and out on a second screen. This was familiar, like skinning one’s knee at fifty-three and recalling why you quit falling down. It hurts, but in a way that causes nearly Platonic recollection: Microsoft writes lousy software. These were the self-same problems I had had with Microsoft since the X-Files was cool.
And so I am returning to a used Mac. I cannot afford better, but because I need to just work and my school doesn’t need to pay for a computer just now- better used and battered than new and useless.
My entire life is based on the notion that working is better than grand appearances that do not work, so good-bye to you Microsoft.
This first world problem may not matter to you, Microsoft. It does not even matter that much in my life. I work for the greatest school and college in America. My family is fantastic and my awesome friends here in Texas and California love me.
Breaking up with a company is not so hard to do, but I will say this: every day I do not use my Surface Book I will look at it and think: you are so beautiful, if only you ran the Mac OS.
Maybe somebody could answer this letter at Microsoft and explain why you can build your own beautiful computer and yet your own software does not do the most basic tasks as well as an older computer by your chief competitor.
I would be open to talk, but please do not send anyone named “Sean.”
Not at all bitter,
John Mark N Reynolds PhD
President
The Saint Constantine School
(Now Mostly Microsoft Free)
Senior Fellow in the Humanities
The King’s College
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