I dislike Microsoft products in general…
Today my rant is about their Office Live — a supposedly intuitive, all-in-one business service that allows folks to post documents, run websites, etc. etc.
I was interested in it a couple months ago, thinking it would be really nice to have a website that if something went wrong I didn’t have to bother my tech-spouse…
Boy was that a bad idea!
Not only do I not recommend it, I give it a rating of “4-bad”
Avoid Microsoft Office Live. Even the free version is not worth it!
It came with the offer of free domain name registration, so when I decided to try their interface I had them use the name I wanted for my greeting card business, which I could easily have purchased and set up on our own servers… Now I can’t get into their system to change the domain back over to me!
And the interface, quite naturally, is inadequate. For starters, it insists you use Internet Explorer with all its problems and counter-intuitivities. Which naturally assumes you use a Windows product for your operating system… which I don’t always!
True to form, if you create a page in their system, it looks TERRIBLE in anything else. In Firefox, the browser I use and recommend, the margins don’t line up, text is not in the right place and it just looks like dreck. And in the basic version I use (the free one, which is supposed to give you a chance to try it so you want to buy it) you can’t hard code or upload pages that work properly. That only comes with the packages that are $20 or more a month…
[Note: Vox, LiveJournal, Blogger/Blogspot, frappr all have multi-broswer interfaces that work well and look good across the board. These are free, low-budget but highly functional sites; contrast this to the lack of functionality on the fee-based product I am discussing produced by a true industry giant. Kinda sad, in an ironic way.]
The real clincher? When I sent a request for assistance I never received a response. Nothing.
Now it is entirely possible that the higher-priced packages allow a person to make better websites. And they might actually care about paying customers. But they come with so many things that I wouldn’t use or need that it seems wasteful. And the price is, quite honestly, out of my range — I don’t make in a year what the site alone would cost!
In the meantime, the domain name I own (by their terms) is held hostage by an entity I cannot contact, linked to a barely functional and highly unappealing website.
In general, I use the same philosophy with software and computer things that I do in any other area of my life. If the company doesn’t care about people who purchase smaller items or come in to “browse” then I don’t trust them to take care of me when I am ready to spend more.
Again, do not use Microsoft Office Live if you want to have anything that looks good and works better.