Used some Christmas money (thanks!) to buy the latest Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Fifty dollars US for the book and CD combined. My word processor (Corel) once offered an update to the Compact OED for its WordPerfect, but that seems to have expired. So I thought the book and CD would be a nice thing -- I have not had a new dictionary in any form since the second edition of the American Heritage Dictionary in '75 -- also a Christmas gift.
What a disappointment! The definitions are all really short in the book, and the CD will not work in user accounts* (I do not surf or do general work in administrator mode on XP), much less load into WordPerfect. Also, installation was that odd "leave-the-CD-in-the-drive-after-restart" Win95 stuff. I suppose it's for error checking. Can't they just add some "search for errors" right-click radio button after restart? OpenOffice will let you check for possible errors that way. Why won't something that amounts to 20 dollars US?
I'm becoming wary of paid software these days. Except for the software that came with purchased hardware (and that has quirks sometimes), everything I use on my PC is free. Audacity, Winamp, OpenOffice, etc. all work right off the download, assuming you know what you're doing. That's the catch with free software -- it's DIY, for the most part. But it just works! I'm writing this on free software courtesy LiveJournal. Yes, I've had a few issues with it, but I like the DIY nature of the Basic account. I'm a more-than-satisfied customer, and I owe them zip.
This situation is counterintuitive, to say the least. Software makers, it would seem, need to get serious about being customer-friendly, or there's going to be a major turnaround in consumer attitudes. I think the CEOs need to start taking a copy of their new products home with them, installing and running and using them without any "extra" help, and if there's a screwup or major short-circuit, they should get their staffs cracking on making their software products work as users need them to work, out of the box. Forget the old "user friendly" scam! If an English major like me can get his free software to work off the download with no questions asked, hey, anyone can!
(To make matters worse with my new dictionary, I stupidly assumed the plastic CD sleeve was stuck on the book's endpaper with a modern removable glue. Nope! It tore the cheap endpaper almost in half when I tugged at the sleeve, so the dictionary and "companion" CD are not returnable. Yes, clerks do check for that.)
I don't mind paying a reasonable amount for things that work well and reliably. And it's nice to have some free things, too. But to have the paid software be clunky and stupidly designed (if a parent can install the Compact OED on the administrator account but then not be able to allow his or her children to use it on their accounts, too, that's idiotic! What good is a dictionary on an administrator account? What word am I going to look up while running Defragmenter? On? Off?) and then have free software work like a song ... no, this is crazy.
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*mercurius-21 later found an effective trick to fix the problem (in SP2), as well as improved respect for the COED. Both are found in subsequent posts.
LJ orig.: 12/27/06
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