I Won’t Beat About the Bush: This Article Is Fuelled by Personal Outrage and Professional Disgust
I’ve never been a huge fan of Microsoft. Their approach to personal computing has always struck me as motivated by a deep-seated contempt for the end user. Their products are bloated, overly complex, illogical, and overpriced. Most home users adopt them because they think they must—either as a holdover from their working days or due to the myth, propagated by Microsoft in the 1990s, that if you didn’t have Office, you were isolated and unable to share files with anyone.
“I’ve just always used it.”
“I want to be able to send files to other people.”
“It’s what I’m used to.”
The truth is, most of these fears are unfounded. None of them justify the expense or pain of using Office for Mac when free, viable alternatives are readily available.
But this article isn’t about Microsoft’s products per se—it’s about their total lack of support. And I do mean none.
In the past few weeks, I’ve encountered two scenarios that confirmed what I’ve long suspected.
Case One: The Locked Account Labyrinth
A woman tried to change her Microsoft account password and ended up locking herself out. Frustrating, yes—but not catastrophic. She clicked “Forgotten Password” and was met with the infamous “Something went wrong” message. Arguably one of the most useless dialog boxes ever devised.
She tried another method. Same result. A series of questions led her right back to the same dead end: “Something went wrong.”
No phone number. No online chat. No lifeline.
Eventually, after extensive searching (via ChatGPT, Google, and Copilot), she found a phone number. It was automated, of course, and sent her through a maze of “Press 1 for this,” “Press 2 for that,” or “Press 3 if you just want to jump out the window.”
She chose the wrong rabbit hole, hung up, and called back—only to be told her query had already been answered and the call was terminated. It seems the system recognized her number.
Defeated, she abandoned Microsoft and switched to the free Pages and Numbers apps that came with her Mac. She then tried to cancel her office 365 subscription – a monthly fee of $10 a month, only to discover she needed to log into her account to do so. In a fevered hope, she clicked “Forgotten Password” again… and you can guess the rest.
So now, thanks to this trillion-dollar company, she’s paying for a product she can’t use and can’t cancel—and has no support to help her. Compare this to Apple, where you can simply call 1300 321 456. Telstra may be bad, but at least you can talk to someone when you need nuanced help.
Case Two: The Outlook Trap
Enter Steve, a businessman using Outlook for Mac. I’ve spoken before about this pile of manure and its insistence on forcing users into the “New Look” Outlook but just got serious for Steve.
Steve had been using IMAP—a decades-old protocol supported by nearly every mail client. But Microsoft has been quietly moving away from it, and it’s rumoured they’ll drop it altogether. At some point, Steve stumbled or was presented one day with the new Outlook and likely in a rush he just went with it.
Back in 2024 I wrote about Outlook just randomly deciding to dump you into the new interface despite you previously making it clear you didn’t want it.
Everything looked normal at first, but weeks later he noticed that not all folders on his Mac matched those on his iPhone or webmail. And there was no way to make them sync.
He was advised to switch to a more forgiving mail client, like Apple Mail—only to discover that the new Outlook stores email in a proprietary format inaccessible to anything but Outlook.
Just a note: every other mail client offers import and export options for backup or migration. Not Outlook.
Even restoring from a Time Machine backup didn’t help. The moment he opened Outlook, it erased the backed-up files in favour of the incomplete folders stored on Microsoft’s server. In short, the new Outlook decided he no longer had access to locally stored email.
And, like the woman in case one, Steve had no support to turn to.
This is appalling. Software quicks and bad decisions is one thing, but no business deserves your money or loyalty if it doesn’t offer human support when you need it.
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