Microsoft's New Mantra: 'It Just Works'

Microsoft needs a lot of good PR, but this? This is like Hitler walking out of the bunker in order to become an emergency medical technician. No one's buying it. No one on God's green earth would possibly swallow the notion that Microsoft software "just works". There is an enormous history of patches, problems, incompatible upgrades, and "critical issues" in Microsoft's most popular products, and three little words are not going to make everything go away.

I gave some consideration to why the company would choose such a slogan, and it has led me to a couple different outcomes. Microsoft isn't really hoping to combat the creeping threat of Linux with this new move, which surprises me. The general consensus of the home of "it just works" technology is Apple, which is far too trendy to actually consider that a marketing point.

I mean, think about it. How bad does your software have to be that you need to start telling people that it "just works"? Shouldn't all software work? Well, yeah. It should. And yet we have apparently reached a point in history where people now consider software to be so horribly unreliable that software does not, in fact, "just work".

If your software doesn't work, I suggest you get different software.

Now, I could name a certain company whose overwhelmingly vast marketshare would serve, in terms of common sense, as the foundation of this concept. But I won't. The past is the past, so we have to look at where the software we're going to be using tomorrow will come from. Of course it's going to have to "just work", but if this new God awful marketing idea from Redmond is any indication, maybe the company's software will finally "just work" without numerous security flaws being discovered every month.

This idea made me worried that the entire ad campaign was based around the newly on-by-default firewall found in XPSP2. The firewall keeps bad guys from getting into your system. When you stop worrying about intrusion, it's amazing what you can do to your software that negatively impacts your system's ability to resist intrusion. Then I considered that "it just works" means that Microsoft has publicly committed itself to substantially easier setup and configuration guidelines.

Think about it: an Exchange server that a moron can install. A SQL database that a mother could use. All of these are forthcoming from Redmond, and the MS knowledge base is going to pretty much atrophy from neglect: software that "just works" doesn't need a hundred KB articles written about it that describe its undocumented or unexpected behaviors.

Yeah, I don't believe it for a second, either.

So we're pretty much right back to where we started. We're being asked to believe the company that made "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" a mantra for two generations of tech support staff is now poised to make hassle-free, knows-just-what-to-do programs for everyone. And I'm not alone when I say that it's a hard pill to swallow. And I'm sure that I'm going to read a bunch of whining on Microsoft employee blogs about the flak the company is getting over this new campaign. There's too much dangerous/buggy/sloppy/legacy code still tucked deep within Microsoft's major software offerings to think that slapping an "it just works" ad on it could possibly make things better. As a marketing campaign, it is like any other: lies, damned lies, and someone in a suit trying to sucker you out of some money. Marketing campaigns are the devil, and I don't believe this one any more than I believed Apple's "Switch" or Sun's "Solaris can fight space aliens".

On the other hand, Microsoft has committed itself to this idea: "it just works". I feel sorry for them. I really do. Because "it just works" means that Redmond has a shitload of HCI work to do, and it doesn't look like they're doing it. Tiger is hitting shelves a year ahead of Longhorn and the iPod is really changing the way people approach control panels.

Ironically, neither Microsoft or Apple has made the best software that "just works". If you want software that "just works", try installing dnscache, from D. J. Bernstein's djbdns-1.05 package. Now that is software that just works. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't crash — ever. It does its job. It doesn't need security patches every month. It just works. Marvelously.