Upgrades, upgrades, who needs upgrades? They always sound great, until they don’t work and something goes wrong. Warning: when you decide to upgrade, you are taking your sanity in your hands. When the upgrade doesn’t work well, it often creates new problems. All you want is a quick solution. You just want to work. But not knowing who to call is aggravating. This lasts for weeks, even months until they get enough complaints and then come up with a solution on their own.
That’s where many of us are stuck right now… in the jaws of technology hell. I am using a MacBook and Microsoft (MSFT) Office for Mac for Word and OneNote. Updates generally work well. Not this time. Once in a while they don’t and this is a major problem.
Within the last couple weeks, I downloaded two updates. One for Microsoft Office for Mac and the other for the iOS from Apple for the MacBook. Suddenly there are problems that are costing time, aggravation and money. And there is no solution in sight. And I have heard this same thing from others.
Some are Apple (AAPL) centric problems like the keyboard not being in sight when texting, or the video playback now having the location bar at the bottom instead of at the top where it was easier to operate. Or that new sounding Siri, yuk! Why change things around? There is no benefit other than to satisfy bored developers.
If companies like Apple get bored with the older outline, they should simply create new outlines and let the user choose the one they want, like the background graphics. That would solve the problem. But we never see this from Apple or any tech company. Too bad.
Is Problem with Microsoft Office for Mac or Apple iOS?
There are also problems with Microsoft Office for Mac. I don’t really know where the problem is coming from. Is it coming from Microsoft or Apple or both?
All I know is there should be an easy place to report this problem to so it can be fixed quickly. There’s not. A button to click. I tried to report this online and had problems doing so. Now, I sit here steaming mad at both Apple and Microsoft for getting in the way of me being able to do my daily work.
And there are countless other users who are climbing the wall themselves looking for a solution.
One problem seems to come from Microsoft OneNote, a program which lets you keep notes. I was always able to copy notes from Word or the Web and paste them into OneNote. Now it freezes. You can enter text, but not paste text. The other is, OneNote no longer syncs between the iPhone and MacBook.
When customers depend on these features, they don’t like these changes that force them to learn new ways of doing the same thing. Hey Apple, why are you putting customers through that kind of hell?
Bottom Line is Take Care of Customers, Don’t Abuse Them
Many users wish then never heard the word update. They were fine. Then everything got screwed up. You would think companies would make it easy to notify them when an update or upgrade fails or goes wrong. There should be a pull-down button to push to report the problem. It should be up front and obvious.
After all, the bottom line is the customer. Keep the customer happy and you keep the customer. Do companies want to fix problems quickly and take good care of the customer? Or are they not as interested in all that warm and fuzzy stuff?
It depends how quickly both Apple and Microsoft solve this very annoying problem. It has been a couple weeks and so far, they are not doing a great job. Oh crap… it froze again.
Jeff Kagan is an Equities.com columnist. Kagan is a Wireless Analyst, Telecom Analyst, Industry Analyst, speaker and consultant. He follows wireless, wire line, telecom, Internet, cable TV, IPTV, Cloud, Mobile Pay, FinTech and communications technology. Email him at [email protected] His web site is www.jeffKAGAN.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeffkagan.
