Microsoft at Columbia University

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@columbia.edu>]

  Just had an interesting chat with the techie in charge of microcomputer
  support at Columbia. I was having problems printing because the Microsoft
  network client doesn't work properly when there is heavy traffic. He
  disabled it and I am using the Novell client instead.
  
  He says that the new pricing schedule that MS has instituted for
  educational institutions represents a major hit. He also said that he
  despises MS software himself and tries to avoid it at all costs. He says
  that Microsoft Office installations fail 30% of the time, a shockingly high
  incident rate.
  
  By the way, speaking of Microsoft applications, is it just me or is there
  something really messed up with the way that the mouse functions on
  high-powered pc's using WIN95 in at least two respects:
  
  1) when you insert the cursor in the middle of a sentence, it will often
  highlight the entire sentence when this is not intended.
  
  2) when you scroll forward using the mouse from one page to the next, you
  lose control over the speed of the scrolling and you shoot forward to the
  end of the document.
  
  If I released custom-written software to my users at Columbia that was this
  missed up, I would lose my job. Meanwhile, MS makes billions. Something's
  wrong here.
  
  Louis Proyect