Everybody knows about stories when Microsoft updates their Operating System or some application and the end result is that we are worse off than we were before, right? Well, one of those companies that are loved by their users seriously blew this one. This weekend I was trying to install iTunes 7, because, yes, shame on me, I am the proud owner of an Apple iPod, or should I say I used to be the proud owner of that device. I love devices and the iPod which I bought in 2004 not only sounded great, but it looked great as well. One thing I didn’t like about the device is that it is not capable of playing WMA files, but I got over that after transferring all my music to MP3 format. So far I was even happy with the free iTunes program that Apple provided to play music but also to synchronize between an iPod device and a computer. Right now I am changing my opinion though. I just tried to install iTunes 7.x for Windows XP and I got into a situation. After installing on one computer, iTunes 7.x just ran fine so I decided to upgrade my music server as well. Of course, I should have known this, iTunes 7.x is not running on that computer. I looked at some newsgroups and, with me, many other people get a mysterious error message. It turns out that iTunes is not working so I can’t synchronize my iPod player right now. It also turns out that I can’t go back to the previous iTunes 6.x because it keeps bugging me that a new upgrade is available that I should download. Gosh, it is so much fun to go after Microsoft when some upgrades are not giving us the results we want to have, but why is it relatively quiet after upgrading to some new Apple software that is not working? I am trying to stay polite, but in reality I am really P O’d. I guess I should say that this proves that we are all simply human beings, making mistakes. At the same time, I need to have the possibility to keep my iPod synchronized. Hopefully Apple comes with an update very, very fast. Otherwise I guess I have to switch to another player. Perhaps a device powered by Windows CE (a portable Media Centre device for instance), assuming Microsoft will not leave their Windows XP users with malfunctioning software to synchronize with portable devices.

Maarten Struys