How can a company get so big and so rich by writing truly horrible, malicious software?

I'm talking, of course, about Microsoft. They insist they know better than me what I am trying to achieve.

I've given up on Internet Exploder. Microsoft knows that I couldn't possibly want to refresh a page I have just viewed, and no matter how many times I click refresh, it keeps showing me the old page. And it doesn't matter what my refresh settings are. When I've just uploaded revisions to my website, this is maddeningly frustrating.

And email. Microsoft doesn't want you to know where your email lives. It puts it in the most obscure place possible, and then turns it into a HIDDEN FILE! In the same breath, they advise you to back up often. How? Please explain?

I have discovered I can switch my inbox to a place I know about. So I've put my email along with my other regularly backed-up document folders. But now I had to recover some backed up email because I wanted a license number for some software. So I set up a different store for the backup, and switched to that. When I switched back, despite my instructions to the contrary, Microsoft overwrote my current email with my ancient backup.

I'm told that if I upgrade to XP, I can't use search to find files. Microsoft knows what files I want to search for, and won't show me certain hidden files no matter how hard I want to find them. Guess I won't be buying the upgrade then. In fact, if I didn't have so much money invested in Windows software, I'd move to something else.

This is the problem when you want to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

I was trying to find out how to hide the URL on a web page. I had a very good reason for doing this, as I was trying to do a simple paid download page without learning php and asp and other various web programming languages. Some guy in my search results said he could think of no reason why anybody would want to hide the URL, it's an essential navigation aid.

Guess I know who his boss is.