How much time in your life has Microsoft cost you personally? I went through some mental gymnastics yesterday and figured out that company has probably wasted a full year of my life and unmeasurable resources of the companies I've worked for.

Mind you that I'm a 20 year computer programmer who's had to tweak programs every time MS has decided to upgrade their operating system. Part of the problem is that much of my earlier programming was in the xBase language of Clipper which bypassed much of the complications of Windows and worked in its own little environment. You'd think that would've insulated me from the changes but it simply made my programs a target.

The Clipper programs were wonderful tools for our company. They were procedural instead of open-ended like the later Windows stuff so they were built to exactly emulate business practices. Users were given a path to go down one step at a time that matched the manual processes we were replacing. Coding was fast and it was easy to tie together processes so that functions in all sections of the company were integrated fully. When you compiled a program that did nothing more than put a single line of text on the screen, that program automatically contained all the code it needed to do complex database operations. No other add-ons, dll's, external programs, or complicated installs on the workstations were needed.

Data access was fast across wide area networks. Before Windows became the standard on workstations, a simple menuing system gave users just the choices of programs they required to do their job.

The first versions of Windows embraced the ability for people to use their DOS programs and made it relatively easy for the two systems to coexist but MS soon realized that there was no profit in it for them because people weren't replacing their older and stable applications so, with each new version of their OS, they started trying to remove the DOS world.

First it was printers. The day our company switched over to I believe it was the second service pack to Windows 95, the whole concept of assigning a printer to an LPT port went away. Suddenly, without warning, all reports within our applications stopped working since they sent their output to an LPT port directly. The only option was to now work through the Windows printing system. Luckily, there were libraries for Clipper built by enterprising people that knew how to still communicate to the printers. Weeks of intense fixes got our users back up and running. Eventually all printing had to go out to an external application through a custom library and all the code had to be redone again.

Newer versions of Windows treat DOS boxes as unimportant tasks and relegate them to very low priority compared to standard Windows applications and drivers. There's one critical legacy app at my last job that handles huge amounts of data each day and, when processing through that data, users often insert a paper clip into their keyboard to hold down one of the arrow keys so that the DOS box doesn't lose focus and slow down to a crawl. I experimented for weeks trying to find some way within the program to push that priority up but to no avail.

Now of course all my programming wasn't confined to the DOS world. Visual Basic had the real potential to be a great development environment but one quickly discovered that an application was never truly done there either. Each version brought new COM changes with huge potential to crash things to a halt. Of course you found out about the crash through one of MS's infamous error messages - "Error XYZ1237654930$%^&^%% has occurred. Your computer will now reboot and corrupt your OS. Would you like to send an error report to MS?". Luckily for them there is was no ability for that error report to be packaged in a letter bomb.

A year or so back, MS decided that VB6, which finally seemed stable, would no longer be supported and they would move on to the .NET world. Any programmer that thought the transition would be made simple quickly found out that if your application had any functionality to it at all, especially data access, it would have to be completely rewritten in order to work in the new environment. From now on all business applications would be assimilated to the this new cryptic way of doing things so that your app would be Net ready even if you had no need for this functionality. And that wasn't the end to it of course. There would be .NET 1.X, .NET 2.X, .NET 3.X and just to confuse you, they wouldn't necessarily be compatible with one another.

MS just recently released their newest version of Flight Simulator and quickly turned off users when they found out that their huge catalog of add-ons for FS-2004 wouldn't necessarily be compatible and that the new version ran like a dog unless you had a $5000 gamer deluxe machine, Vista, and a DX10 graphics card. Oh, but their water looks better.

I want my year back. Do you think Bill Gates would agree to reimbursing me for it?

Art