In microsoft's defense, if my family members were ever to have a problem with their desktops, I'd rather my linux using grandma speak to someone in india than to try to wade through messageboards.
I personally prefer the messageboards because I can see and follow the answer. But that's just me.
As far as the kludgy software, MS's bloat in windows, office, and others is ahead of all the competition. It's *TOO* integrated. That's why you need a few gigs of memory in order to get halfway decent performance.
I don't mind having to have lots of memory.
I HATE . . . ABSOLUTELY LOATHE trying to get answers to what should not have been problems to begin with--and have to go through POW level torture to get usually inane solutions that aren't solutions at all.
And message boards . . . haven't been too fortunate with those. Maybe I lack some particular kind of patience for them or something but I just rarely have been answered with anything useful. Maybe my problems and system are too idiosyncratic or something.
Even when I pay MS for tech service, I rarely get anything that helpful.
They have the money and mental horsepower to have most of such problems software automated in terms of searching the problem out and automatically sending the system a fix. This many years into the company . . . it's ridiculous that they do not have such software easily available--at least on their website. No excuse. They have the money and the brains. They seem to lack the customer caring and the will.
They deserve to have Linux eat them alive.