It seems my bug report is causing a bit of a stir within Microsoft. As Georgeo Pulikkathara writes,
This has certainly gotten the attention of folks internally wondering how come Ken didn’t use the official bug reporting system.
It’s mostly because Ken is a lazy sot. Like I wrote before, I looked around the support website for a few minutes but I couldn’t find anything resembling an “official bug reporting system”.
When I typed “report bug” into the search box it returned a link to some tips for reporting bugs in FoxPro and a plethora of, what else, bug reports.
Amongst all the other links on the support page, I honestly didn’t notice the Contact Us link, but even if I had found the bug report page I very much doubt that I would have called the 800 number, which I can only guess (based on my experience with the call centres of other companies) would involve a 10 minute wait to get through to the operator, followed by 15 minutes of transfers to various people until I finally ended up at the person who can actually do anything about it. And besides, how am I going to send a screenshot over the phone?
I do realize there is a remote possibility that Microsoft has an exceptional customer support service and would get my report logged in less than a minute, but why take the risk? The bug is a mere nuisance. It has no effect on anybody but anal spelling-nazis like me. I could afford to have the report go ignored, though it would bother me in irrationally profound ways every time I saw the typo (but that’s my problem, not Microsoft’s)
So I guess it was the combination of the low importance of the bug, and the expectedly high cost of reporting it through the official channels that led me to post it here.
I’m genuinely surprised that nobody has reported a bug like this before. It seemed like a very natural choice to report it this way. I’m really not used to being the first to do something.
And my web server isn’t used to seeing the kind of traffic this has generated (Report Magic graphs increasing dates from right to left for some unfathomable reason):
I hope Go Daddy will hold up after everybody returns from their long weekend getaways.
Ken Dyck 