A Letter to Microsoft

Dear Microsoft,


Hi. My name is Waldo, and I'm a frequent user of your products. I know sometimes you get a bad rap, what with your domination of the marketplace and vastly over-hyped and underperforming OS. But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about your Office Suite 2003, and particularly, Powerpoint.

Let me tell you, I know something about Powerpoint. I have spent the last 10 days creating, collating, formatting, animating, and in general, owning slides. I've edited, re-edited, and then changed the edits, causing the whole process to start over again. And I've come to this conclusion:

Powerpoint will eat your soul.

Powerpoint is like some giant black hole of happiness and job satisfaction. I don't know why you would make something like that, unless it's that you need souls to power your MSN stuff because Google is "pwning" you left and right. That seems to be the only explanation, because I can say without a doubt, I have less soul now than I did when I started using Powerpoint. And although I wholeheartedly support our capitalist system, I don't think that having your applications suck up souls to feed Bill Gates' Nosferatu-esque appetite is all that ethical.

Also, since we're here, why would you make another edition, and then force me to get a text converter, and then not allow me to edit effectively? Office 2007 looks flashy and great, but if I'm using 2003, I can't really do anything with the 2007 stuff, now, can I? And why in the name of all that's holy would you comPLETEly change the menus? Why?

Maybe it's a way to make me lose my soul faster. I don't know. But I do know this-- my soul isn't doing you much good. You can't be getting quality souls out of people using your product, because they're all so bitter and angry.

A great thing to do, if you want my opinion, would be to give all the souls back, and instead suck up every slideshow with fancy graphics and animation, and make everything else look like butcher-board or overhead projector slides. You know, black and white, pen or marker, and NO ANIMATION.

That's just me, though.

Yours,

W.