I Just Feel So Dirty

Virtualizing operating systems is certainly one of the most obvious benefits of Apple switching to Intel CPUs. Those of us who choose to use Macs in our personal life can now use them for business purposes that were heretofore unavailable due to little incompatibilities, simply by installing Parallels or VMWare, or even Boot Camp, although rebooting just to open a spreadsheet or run IE sounds like a bit of a pain.

It just so happens I have to open and interpret a couple of fairly complex spreadsheets, with lots of formulas and macros, for some work I’m doing. Since Mac Office dropped VB support in the latest version, I needed to run it on Windows, which runs rather well under VMWare Fusion.

I figured that, being one of Microsoft’s flagship products (the other being “Microsoft Bob”, of course), it would be fairly easy to purchase or demo a copy of MS Office for Windows.

Microsoft, being a pure software company (not counting the keyboards and mice, which I believe are outsourced, and the XBox, which is essentially a cheap PC running stripped-down Windows, and certainly not counting the Zune, which is a rebadged Toshiba mp3 player, and hardly counts as a product) makes the overwhelming majority of their profits by selling countless copies of Windows and Office, which, after a certain point, are pure profit. You’d think they’d make it as smooth as possible. You’d also think you’d be able to move an empty text file to the Recycle bin in under four minutes. In both cases, you’d be wrong.

Once you find the Trial Download page, you need to jump through a few hoops about creating a Windows Live account (why would I want that? I just want a copy of Office) and giving them all of your pertinent information (I’m certainly not giving them a valid phone number for this) before you get to the actual download page.

OK, so you’ve finally made it. You have a Download button and are ready to go. Well, not quite:

Impressive – that one bullet point contains two sentences, and two lies.

• There is no “Download Now” button, and there are certainly not two “Download Now” buttons.
• You do not need to click both buttons to download the product, which I will get to in a moment.

Assuming you need to click both Download buttons, which do you suppose you should click first?

If you guessed “Download 1″, you might think you made some sort of mistake by the dialog that pops up:

I still have no idea what that’s for, even after encountering it three times.

But the important question is: If it automatically does the second download for you when you click “OK”, why does it need to yell at you in the first place?

I know that picking on Microsoft user interfaces is like shooting blind, comatose, fat fish in a barrel with an IED, and the barrel is wrapped with TNT, but with all the money they spend on pushing their products, you’d think they would catch these high-profile gaffes that are right in their profit stream.

Rule number 1 of commerce (e- or brick & mortar): Do not confuse your customers when they’re trying to give you money*.

*Actually, since this was the free trial site, I wasn’t actually trying to give them money, but I probably will after the 60 days is up, as I’ll need to keep using it.