Listen Microsoft, I want to give you money for your products so that I may enjoy them, and then turn around and tell others, “hey, you might want to check this out, it’s pretty cool.” Then you get more money, which you can then use to improve those products and/or build newer and better ones. I will then buy those new and better ones - makes sense, right?

I’ve got to say, you are making it really hard for me to do that.

My new Zune is almost useless when compared to my Creative Vision:M. For the past week I’ve been carrying both devices, trying to figure out which of the two are better. While I prefer the Zune’s “Twist” interface, larger screen, and overall styling, the lack of podcast support is almost a deal breaker for me. By “podcast support,” I mean that I need a way for the Zune software to download, sync, and manage my subscriptions. I don’t want to use some third party solution, as they universally suck, with the exception of iTunes (hey, that gives me an idea… maybe I can find a way to use iTunes and the Zune together… I’ll report what I find).

My three-month-old 8525 frequently locks up on me, or refuses to turn on after going to sleep. That pretty much makes it worthless as a phone, since the thing needs to be running in order to receive calls and emails and the like. I have owned multiple Windows Mobile devices over the years, and all suffered from poor performance and slow reaction times (when I hit “Answer” to pick up a phone call, it would be nice if it actually worked).

My nineteen-month-old Xbox 360 took a dump on me for the second time. Gone are the days that a console would actually make it through an entire generation w/o need of repair (like the SNES and Genesis). Wouldn’t you know it, I am two months out of warranty. I paid MS $105 (after discount) to send me a coffin and get this console fixed. I think they are giving me a free month or year of LIVE Gold.

Luckily, my one-month-old Vista PC is still working just fine. I’m sure that won’t last long.

I’m not ready to proclaim that MS sucks or anything like that, but I think my diehard loyalty to this company is the only reason why. I just need to vent my frustration a little bit. Thanks for listening.

Oh, and Creative, you are not off the hook. Your Zencast software and Zen player are sucking pretty hard right now, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Im trying speech recognition and vista. I thought this was going to work very So far, it has been unbelievably painful. I think with some training, this can work well, but I’m not sure I want to put the time into this. Typing text into web forms a seems to not work, so I am forced true dictate in wordpad then copy and paste into web forms.

As you might be able to tell, I am using voice recognition to type his Block Post. In concept, the idea is sound but its execution is a week at best.

Despite difficulties with dictation, other windows commands work well. By seen coming from and words, like ” maximize,” act as intended.

Edit: The above was posted only using Vista’s speech recognition. Everything from opening the browser and logging into my account to typing out that text and posting it. While the dictation leaves something to be desired, getting around the computer without a mouse or keyboard is pretty nice. I found myself talking like a robot for most of it, and I assume that as Vista gets used to my voice, I will be able to use a more casual tone.