Betalogue

MacFixIt reports that all the technical support services associated with Virtual PC have been removed from the Connectix web site and users are now referred to Microsoft’s own technical support. (Microsoft purchased the Virtual PC line of products from Connectix a few months ago.)

If, as an ordinary Mac user, you’ve ever tried to get technical support from Microsoft, you know that this is very bad news. (As I was writing this, I saw that Connectix had actually restored the “Forums” section of their support services, so at least we still have that.)

Over the past 2 or 3 years, I have used Connectix’s tech support a few times, always by email, and the response from Connectix was satisfactory. I cannot say the same about Microsoft. To me, Microsoft tech support equals no tech support. I suppose that big corporations have a better chance of getting decent support. But ordinary users are going to have to rely on their peers for help. Given the underlying complexity of a product such as Virtual PC, I don’t think that will be sufficient.

In fact, given the underlying complexity of Virtual PC, I am very concerned about what will happen with the product line. I simply do not see the sloppy engineers/developers at Microsoft actually improving the product. They already had a hard enough time just trying to get Office applications to run adequately under Mac OS X. (We are still waiting for support for long file names, and Word X is still plagued by annoying, unacceptable stalls, even on fast machines such as my dual 1.25 GHz G4.)

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, August 11th, 2003 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.