A brief history of stupid Microsoft product names

A BRIEF HISTORY OF STUPID WINDOWS PRODUCT NAMES

At WehoComputerRepair.com ninety five percent of my clients use Windows including myself. But that will not stop me from complaining about them! Nothing symbolizes Microsoft's tone-deaf approach to it's customers like the history of Windows names.  Now this is the company's main product.  It has earned them billions of dollars globally. You would think that somebody, ANYBODY, could come up with better names for this OS than the ones the company picked.  The worst was called "Windows CE" or "WINCE".  Doesn't that name just make you want to ... well ... wince!???

Here then are the stupid stages of Windows names.

STAGE 1 - COMMON SENSE - NUMBERS
What could be simplier than naming your product version 1 - 2 - 3?  Easy!
WINDOWS 1
WINDOWS 2
WINDOWS 3

STAGE 2 - GETTING WEIRD - TWO LETTERS
For some reason Windows 4 was not chosen as a name. Instead Microsoft began gluing two letters to the end of the product for no particular reason.  Let the confusion begin!
WINDOWS NT
WINDOWS ME
WINDOWS XP
WINDOWS CE

STAGE 3 - THE BROKENNESS OF VISTA
Not only did Microsoft pick an out of the blue sky oddball name for this release but they also botched the product.  An overly ambitious update, Vista had problems at launch which were finally fixed. But they gave the product a terrible reputation and sales were poor.
WINDOWS VISTA

STAGE 4 - COMMON SENSE - NUMBERS
Suddenly Microsoft got common sense and started naming their products after numbers again. This is probably because 7 is considered a lucky number in English.   But don't expect too much sense making from Redmond.  They totally skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10.  What happened to 9?  Was it caught molesting children?
WINDOWS 7
WINDOWS 8
WINDOWS 10

This doesn't even take into account that each version of Windows you just read about also comes in four or five flavors of it's own.  This leads to extra-stupid naming conventions like Windows Vista Home Premium Pro Mobile. Erf!  Lots of computer users barely know if they are using Mac or Windows, much less Windows 7 Professional Ultimate Home Mobile.

You can find more good consumer advice for folks in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills at WehoComputerRepair.com. More about THIS issue with Microsoft here at How Microsoft Ignores Own Customers.

How Microsoft ignores it's own customers

HOW MICROSOFT IGNORES ITS OWN CUSTOMERS At WehoComputerRepair.com ninety five percent of my clients use Windows, including myself. Many versions of Windows are good products. Buuuut we've seen what monopolies do. A small company cares about its customers until it becomes a big company.  Then profits matter more than satisfied customers or employees.  Then the company becomes a monopoly and stops listening to its customers entirely.  This is what happened to Microsoft, a company always ready to use the marketing department to ruin almost any product. Windows 7 was a very popular product but it did TOO much. You could buy and run all kinds of programs and Microsoft wouldn't make any money on them as it had no "Itunes Apple Store" type closed market.  So they wrote Windows 8 which totally confused everyone, had not much online help and forced people into an MS marketplace where they were supposed to buy "apps" for and love it.  Nobody did and the whole thing fell apart.  A shiny bit of lipstick on Windows 7, Windows 8 sales were so bad that the company had to give away copies of Windows 10 in order to maintain it's market share.  What about Windows 9?  Ugh, see below. Not only did the company not listen to it's customers it told them what they were going to like. The architect of this stupid nonsense was executive Steve Ballmer. He is rich. So rich he makes Beverly Hills 1 percenters seem broke by comparison.  In 2015 his net worth was about $22 BILLION dollars.  Hired in 1980 as Microsoft's 30th employee he pretty much kept putting more zeros on his paycheck every year. Now he is the 21st most wealthy person on Earth. That kind of power, combined with being in the same work environment for years, makes it unlikely anybody is going to criticize you.  Although known for his high energy product demos he apparently forgot everything about sales and marketing.  His massive attempt to make Windows 8 work on everything was a huge flop and and he was eventually ousted from the company in 2013.  Oh, sorry, he "retired."  I would be forced out too if I had let the Apple Iphone become a huge hit, let my stock price stagnate, lost billions of my companies dollars in bad acquisitions and produced the poor selling Surface tablet.  In 2012 Forbes magazine called him "The worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company." On news of his "retirement" Microsoft's stock price rebounded!  Ballmer was forced to slink away, fighting with MS founder Bill Gates and leaving bad blood at the company.  With nothing going for him other than billions upon billions of dollars, Ballmer spent $2 billion to buy basketball team the Los Angeles Clippers.  The previous own was hideous racist scumbag Donald Sterling who was forced to give up the team due to anti-Black and other comments.  Ballmer brought fresh energy to the team and the players and coaches love him.  He is doing a very good job and no doubt having a lot of fun in this new role. Have a Ball, Ballmer, just stay away from Windows! You can find more good consumer advice for folks in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills at WehoComputerRepair.com. For more on this issue see How Microsoft Ignores Own Customers.

AT&T THE SPAWN OF SATAN I'm going to give you the same warning I give to my customers at WehoComputerRepair.com . Would you like to get high speed Internet from a company with "TELEGRAPH" in it's name?  Of course not, but if AT&T is your provider that is just what is happening. A Google search of the phrase "AT&T evil" brings up 940,000 results.   Is there a single person in America they have not pissed off? AT&T is a dowdy old monstrosity that treated it's customers like cattle even BEFORE it was broken up in 1982 for being a monopoly.  Things are no different now.  Since then the company has basically put itself back together again piece by piece. Now it is the 23rd largest company in the world. In 2014 the Feds sued AT&T again, this time for allegedly deceiving millions of customers by selling them supposedly “unlimited” data plans that the company later “throttled” by slowing Internet speeds when customers surfed the Web too much.  Apparently somebody at AT&T forgot to pay off a politician somewhere.   I have watched the American Telephone and Telegraph company trash my clients and myself for fifteen years.  When high speed Internet came out they sent unqualified techs to people's home who broke their computers just trying to put in a networking card.    Once they turned of MY phone service because they owed ME five dollars.  Five dollars!  Customers who requested high speed Internet in the early days found their business phones turned off for weeks by accident instead.  In 2014 I watched them put a West Hollywood music venue through two weeks of broken Internet torture.  AT&T made big promises about fixing their problems without resolving anything.  This deeply affected their ability to do business and employees had to use the Internet on their phones.   My clients who have switched away from AT&T are much happier.  Warner Cable provides very fast Internet at an affordable price and I like the service.  Do not be fooled by AT&T's claims about package deals saving you money.  It's called AT&T U-Verse: phone, Internet and TV in one package.  A package deal with them leaves you MORE dependent on them ... more trapped.  And if their signal goes out you could lose television, telephone and the 'net all at once!  Even AT&T has given up on U-Verse and is switching itself over to DirecTV which they bought in 2015.   Worst of all, when I forgot to pay a bill for five days they took my phone number I had had for 18 years and threw it away!  There went my long time business number. Then they sent me a check because they had been overbilling me for that disconnected number for years!  Idiots!  I guess that story explains this rant doesn't it?  You can find more good consumer advice for folks in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills at WehoComputerRepair.com. For more on this issue go here: ATT the Spawn of Satan.

The best places to buy electronics in Southern California

TECH SHOPPING IN LOS ANGELES

I'm going to tell you the same thing I tell my customers at wehocomputerrepair.com about shopping. Shopping for tech stuff in So Cal is great because we get all the latest gear the minute it gets off the boat from Asia. Staples and Best Buy do not have the selection they once did as electronics sales shift more onto the Internet.  People on the East Coast pay more for the same stuff because it must be shipped across America first.

By far the biggest, cheapest, best place to get tech gear is Fry's Electronics.  And what don't they sell? Computers, parts, printers, games, appliances, toys, gadgets and enough electronic components to build a hundred Artoo-Detoos.  It's hacker heaven and where all the tech savvy folks shop.  They have nine gigantic stores in Southern California. Unfortunately none of them are near West Hollywood or the West Side because they need so much real estate. It is a trip to make it out to them but it is worth it.  You just better know what you want because most of the workers are immigrants and don't know much about electronics.  The woman you just asked about network adapters might have been living in a ditch in Bolivia last week.

But the people at the memory/CPU desk are always VERY knowledgeable. Even PC experts find CPU and memory modules confusing and fast changing. It's easy to buy the wrong thing and the components don't work together.  The folks at the PC parts desk have not steered me wrong when it comes to assembling computers from scratch. If you are too far from one of the locations listed below you can always shop at Frys.com but you won't have anybody to ask if you are buying the right thing.

Another neat thing about the physical stores is that each one is done up in a different theme.  Fry's knows people sometimes have to spend a lot of time in line at Christmas so they make sure each store is full of unusual sculptures and displays.  The Burbank store has a UFO crashing into it's entrance and a Sci Fi B-movie theme inside. The computer department is help up on the suckered arms of a giant drooling octopus!  The Woodland Hills store is theme as "Alice in Wonderland" and visitors seem to be falling down the rabbit hole as they enter the store. Kids love it!

LOCATION	ADDRESS
Anaheim	3370 E. La Palma Ave.
Burbank	2311 N. Hollywood y.
City of Industry	13401 N. Crossroads Pkwy.
Fountain Valley	10800 Kalama River Ave.
Manhattan Beach	3600 Sepulveda Blvd.
Oxnard	1901 E. Ventura Blvd.
San Diego	9825 Stonecrest Blvd.
San Marcos	150 Bent Ave.
Woodland Hills	6100 Canoga Ave.

For strictly online shopping I recommend NewEgg.com.  There are several other sites that are just as good but New Egg is in Whittier. That's in LA just 12 miles from downtown. They can deliver almost anything in a day or two and they get everything the minute it comes off the boat from Asia. Long Beach is where all the Asian imports enter America. Why buy from an East Coast site that must ship electronics cross country just to get back to where it was originally imported?
You can find more good consumer advice for folks in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills at Weho Computer Repair. For more on this article go to my shopping page .