Welcome to my blog!

Hi,

Using this blog, I can finally sound off about stuff and make it unofficial! It is hard to try to contain one’s self sometimes, and I wish I could say things publicly that I could not always do in my line of work. Doing it here in my personal blog will give me better freedom to post my thoughts on things that may not be ready for becoming official Flight1 content.

As some of you may or may not know, I am the president of Flight One Software, and there are many hats I have to put on during the day… from web and ecommerce technology, product testing, customer service, and many other things.

One of my biggest gripes are all the “hoops” that we have to go through to “try” to make software compatible on the 1000’s of different operating systems out there. We have the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. And out of the box, Vista installs itself with huge restrictions on parts of the computer (not really a bad thing in some ways), but they do not give users an easy installation option that provides the user easy system access out of the box. And then there are all the security products on top of that with over-designed or poorly thought out features that so often causes interference. And finally, you have the customers who do not understand all this and it escelates into long support tickets costing both development time and money, customer frustration, as well as lost time for the customer to enjoy their computer.

You say 1000’s of operating systems? Isn’t there just Vista and XP now? Well not really. With XP there were maybe 10’s. But with Vista, there are 1000’s? Why? Because no Vista is a vanilla Vista. So much has been altered from one installation to another. So to say “Vista compatible”, we should really say instead:

“Vista is compatible with many products as long as you install Vista on a freshly formatted system and not as a Windows XP upgrade,  and you do not install any overly aggressive or unnecessary security addins, and you setup Vista with proper permissions and have User Account Control disabled, and you understand completely how to use and configure Vista.”

So, if the above was said, then I would say that we would be 99.9% compatible with every Vista installation.

But the public may not fully see or understand what customer service folks have to go through. Do I say that Vista itself has some poorly designed and not fully thought out features? I would say yes and yes.

Do I say that end users indiscriminately install security related programs without fully knowing what they do? Yes!

Do customers try to blame us for the condition of their computers? Yes again.

So the bottom line is that it is just frustrating in the current computer environment. We are always trying to find ways to make things easier for everyone. Just please try to understand that it is not our fault if we can’t always have easy installations on your system. To make it easier for us, get to know Vista and how to fully control it… do not install this or that security product because it is free, or just because you saw a 5 star rating on it. Install the security product that gives you full control of what you want it to do. That will make it easier for everyone!

Thank you for reading!