Travelling Again

I am currently travelling overseas, partly for work partly for pleasure… actually mostly for pleasure. As with other times, I find that travelling to foreign countries creates a lot to reflect on, and consequently write about. My first stop will be California. I am currently in a hotel in Los Angeles, on Monday I will be driving to Anaheim where I will be attending the Microsoft Build Windows conference, then I am planning to head to Santa Barbra for a bit of R & R. After that I will be visiting Buenos Aires. I will use this my personal blog as essentially a travel diary, but my geek blog as a means of recording my thoughts on the conference.

Microsoft doesn’t care about feedback from Australians

I’m attending the Build Windows 2011 Conference in Anaheim this coming week, and as part of this Microsoft sent me out an email (presumably to all attendees, or at least all who indicated that they were a developer) inviting them to share feedback in special limited numbers discussion groups. Firstly though, they require you to fill out a quick survey. So I click on the provided link, and I’m presented with the following question.

OK, fine, I’m not too proud to be lumped in with “the rest of the world” team, so I click “Somewhere Else”, then “Next”. I am then presented with this

Thank you for your interest in our survey. Those are all the questions we have today. We hope that you will consider participating in future surveys.

OK, so basically, if you are not from any of these 8 countries, then your opinion is completely irrelevant to Microsoft. Regardless of the fact that you are the technical architect for Windows/PC version of a product that has over 400,000 user licenses world wide. Regardless of the fact that you are fostering a product that is responsible for direct license sales of SQL Server 2008 R2. The message is loud and clear, if you’re not in Microsoft’s G8, then your opinion is worthless. I wonder if our Mac Technical Architect (when he is eventually appointed) will get the same kind of treatment from Apple?

Really, the least they could have done is to let me continue with the survey, and then disregard the information anyway, I mean it really doesn’t hurt to store a few extra bytes.

Today’s Random Grumble

I absolutely love OneNote, and use it all the time, but there are some things that really infuriate me at times… I mean how difficult is it really to get url parsing and highlighting working properly?