Reason #517 Why Microsoft Sucks

This relates to law school only tangentially. Please indulge me.

So MS Word was sluggish. I could feel it. Typing notes in class, it took a second or two for autocorrect to fix misspellings, or for asterisks to turn into bullets. I was miffed. I scoured the Web for speed-up tips, and one of them seemed to help (turn off real-time word count), but I wanted a more permanent solution. I wanted a fix that would hold up in the long run. I wanted... a version update.

I go to the Microsoft Web site and learn my version of word -- "X" -- is woefully out of date. I should really be using 10.1.5, which apparently is the height of coolness. I tried to download it, only to be informed that I really should download 10.1.4 first. Fine, I say. I go to download that. Sorry, they say, you've got to download 10.1.2 first. Regulations, and all that. Damn you, I say, and I click the link.

The downloads progress smoothly. I open the updates. One by one, I install the patches. And one by one, what do I find?

"The application Word has unexpectedly quit."

Excuse me?? I try it a couple more times. Same result. I restart the computer, confident that would solve all my computer problems.

Nope.

I am now attempting to download version X, a 102 MB file, from the Case Western web site. The version I started out with. The version I should have stuck with.

So, what have we learned from all this? At the risk of sounding trite, the moral of the story is: If it ain't broke... it isn't Microsoft.