What is your favorite Microsoft Gaffe? (tm)

[Deja Q]

So far, to my recollection but remember that MS has 25+ years under its bloated belt...

* MS released a webdings font; where certain letters placed next to each other made a nasty iconic representation of an airplane, WTC building, Star of David, and skull'n'crossbones. Uh-oh.

* MS Word's clip art search tool, when typing in the word "monkey", not only returns monkey bar gyms and monkeys, it also returned images of African Americans. Whoops.

* Another MS font, introduced in Office 2003, featured swaztikas. A "patch" fixes this bug. (the "patch" being a replacement font, whoodpie-doo.)

* When Microsoft released Windows 2000, they told everybody (even with pictures in some cases) that Windows 95 was buggy and crash-prone. (anybody else dissing their own predecessor would go out of business and/or get sued!)

* When Microsoft released Windows XP, they told us all it was how Windows 2000 was supposed to be. (so why did they then charge astronomical sums of money for it?)

* Windows Longhorn - now renamed Vista for some bizarre reason - has had so many lofty ambitions whittled away (chiefly a new type of file systems that Unix has had for many years already, but there were others) that "Vista" seems to be just another lie; many of whose new 'features' (a new GUI and little more) won't work unless you have a top-of-the-line system; otherwise it'll look just like Windows 2000's user interface (likely XP's cruddy Luna tinkertoy interface).

* Bill Gates is on record stating that nobody would ever need more than 640Kb. Whoops.


What else? I'm sure there are many!

[Hugin]

1. *MS hired Reed (Founder of the so-called Christian Coal.) as a PR rep.

Recently.

[baldguy]

2. I've got a Windows 2000 T-shirt

It says "Ready Or Not...Here It Comes"

That always sounded like a threat to me.

[miss_kitty]

3. IE

followed by SP2

[Crazy Guggenheim]

5. What problems have you had with SP2?

[miss_kitty]

9. I never installed it

The risk to my ultra-sensitive crash-o-matic Profile 4/XP Pro combo is too great for me to even try. That coupled with the fact that is a huge patch that has holes on top of holes in it, pretty much leaves me as an SP1 kinda gal. If I ever have to reload, I'll try it then.

[Crazy Guggenheim]

4. Windows ME before the Services Packs came out. BTW, Longhorn

was the "internal" or "prerelease" name for Vista, that's all.

[Left_Winger]

6. Naming the company after Bill Gate's college nickname

[Deja Q]

8. Wouldn't that be

"micro" and "soft"?

:rofl:

[DS1]

7. I think there was a version of MS Word that had a spellchecker

which would replace something like "I hate Bill Gates" to "We do too"

[ghostsofgiants]

10. Blocking the transfer of MP3 and other media files in MSN Messenger 7...

With Windows Security claiming they're potentially hazardous to your system and NOT giving you the option to say "No, I know what I'm doing, open the fucking file."