Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Like Andy & Trevin, I feel that bluetooth on Windows is a complete and utter disaster, or as Trevin says "Bluetooth is the devil". I feel sorry for our users.
When you buy a PC with “bluetooth support” one of two things will happen:
If you get #1 you are sort of lucky. It stays out of your way, and does not have a million running processes, desktop icons and other garbage. However, you will not be able to pair it with a Bluetooth Headset for use with Skype or Office Communicator. You will be able to use a bluetooth mouse, dial-up connection and other stuff. Because the Microsoft bluetooth stack lacks some “core” features, a bunch of our OEMs have decided that they can do a better job writing software than we can (and they have failed). Hardware companies should NOT be allowed to make software. Companies that are in commodity businesses should not be allowed either. They just DON’T CARE about usability and they DON’T RESPECT YOUR PC.
If you get #2 you PC will be infected by unsigned drivers (with software to fake click them anyway), shortcuts everywhere (that you cannot remove), 40 (yes 40) prefab COM ports for your use, 3 always running processes for Bluetooth AV support, Hands Free, LAN profiles, tray icons, and something else. The UI for pairing is utterly confusing, and the options dialog has incomprehensible settings with 3 rows of tabs. You will be able to pair it with a bluetooth headset but will find it impossible to use with ActiveSync, a mouse, or exchange files over bluetooth. However, you’ll be able to exchange business cards (yipee, who needs that) and a million other things in an attempt to support every single bluetooth profile on the planet.
Why is it that software vendors feel the need to put crap all over the machine in an effort to remind you who they are and that they are valuable. Why don’t they spend their R&D getting their drivers signed and WHQL certified rather than instructing you on how to click “Install Anyway”. Anti Virus Software is like this, placing shortcuts, explorer shell add-ins, outlook toolbar etc all over the place…
It’s times like these where I long for the days of using a Mac where Apple has NAILED the bluetooth experience (like 2 years ago).