Yes - I'm Picking on Microsoft - Go Figure!

As most everyone who "knows" me is aware - I've been involved in the computer industry for nigh on 30 years. As most "old timers" in the industry ALSO know - Microsoft is the favorite target of anyone in the industry. We laugh, we poke fun, we berate - It's a love/hate relationship - Microsoft is the company that most "old timers" LOVE to HATE.

All this being said - Microsoft DOES provide us with ample ammunition for all the fun/ranting/etc. This is just ONE example:

It's 11:30 pm on the 19th of April. I am sitting at my keyboard working on some code for a website. I receive a phonecall from a Network Admin friend of mine (who knows me well enough to know that I am probably still awake and at my keyboard). His call was a desperate plea for help. He had been performing some "adjustments" to their Exchange server's web interface (per a Microsoft whitepaper he had been given to solve an issue that had been having with the webmail features). After the adjustment and accompanying reboot had been done - Exchange no longer functioned AT ALL. After much Google search, manual/whitepaper reading, etc., he called me.

I arrive at his place of work and proceeded to begin combing the event logs on the mail server. When I pulled up one of the errors and READ it - I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

For those of you who do not understand what I found so amusing, let me highlight the section for you.

Only Microsoft - in their infinite wisdom - would consider "The operation completed successfully" to actually be an ERROR! Although, after a bit of thinking about the state of software that we see come out of our favorite Redmond based company, it seems fitting that they WOULD consider "completing successfully" to be an ERROR!!!