I love this time of year and the opportunity Festivus affords us to gather your friends and family around, and tell them all the ways they have disappointed you over the past year! In the immortal words of Frank Costanza “I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it!”
Pointless features that end up like the LOL cat to your left either because they were poorly chosen or poorly implemented. I’m looking at you… Facebook Questions, Google Instant Search, and Skype <> Facebook integration. I don’t need yet another view of my Facebook news feed… IN SKYPE. Just work on keeping those super-mega-nodes up OK?
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Marketing emails composed entirely of images – It’s bad enough you spam me, but how can you not realize that for 90% of us the default setting in email clients, hotmail, and gmail BLOCKS your images. Use rich text in your email and be happy I might read the first line.
Apple – The notification system on your iPhone is terrible… but that’s nothing compared to waiting 2 hours for an iPhone to “Sync” every time I connect it to iTunes… or 8 hours to upgrade my iPad to iOS 4.2. These devices are so cool but tied to anchors like ATT and iTunes. PS: It’s appalling that you get to tout amazing full screen applications that have existed since the dawn of the GUI.
Windows Phone 7 – For making a phone compelling enough I have to support one as our family IT director. You took a different path with your live tiles and social integration. I love and respect that. It looks awesome. WHY then, are you making me learn Silverlight to write a decent app for you? Imagine the developer mindshare you could have earned if you had simply launched with HTML5 hardware accelerated browser based apps instead of some watered down IE7 DOM.
Groupon and Facebook Deals – For bringing back the modern equivalent of coupon clipping. It wasn’t cool when newspapers were relevant and it’s not cool now. You know what is cool though… 6 billion dollars. That’s pretty cool. Saying no to 6 billion…. to be decided if that was cool or not.
Old Media & Comcast – Here’s the deal. I want to pay you… actual money… to watch the programming I want to watch ala-cart without commercials. I’d probably end up spending almost as much a month on season pass subscriptions as I used to spend in cable bills. Why do you make this difficult? Preview new shows for free with commercials and let me pay to watch clean versions. Instead I just decided to cut a lot of TV and get rid of anything not labeled as “Limited” cable… which is actually very freeing. I should actually thank you for the time I got back in my life to develop GoodDay late at night instead of watching Jersey Hookers and other forms of trash TV I hear is popular these days.
Ruby on Rails – Not because you provide elegant solutions to timeless problems. My grievance is with your legion of smug fanboys driving around in their fancy hybrid cars that think everything not-ruby is evil. Maybe my grievance should actually be with .NET failing to evolve, but that’s too easy a target.
The Red Sox – You just sucked it up this year. Good spending in the offseason. Maybe the OF will do better without Adrian “Rib – Wrecker” Beltre around. 