IT migraines

In 19-Mumble-Mumble, when I started my first business, technology for the individual was brand new. I had an Epson 386 PC with a 2400 Baud modem – the fastest modem on the market! I used Prodigy, the IBM/Sears miracle that replaced Compuserve. I could email people, but not send attachments. That’s what the 2400 Baud modem was for: FTP, file transfer protocol, sending Gerhard an engineering document to translate and getting the English version in return.

My software of choice was Lotus Symphony. It had 1-2-3 as spreadsheet solution, its own version of word processing (in MS-DOS), and best of all, it had a telex option! Since I did a great deal of international business, that telex feature was wonderful. Faxes existed already, but cost several thousand dollars. To have built-in telex functionality was perfect.

Lotus Symphony also debuted the notion of Windows before Microsoft did. It meant you could toggle between spreadsheet, document, and telex without missing a beat. It would still be years before Microsoft launched its version of Windows.

Prodigy nourished a community of geeks and nerds like me. We traded tips on how to create your own cursor (mine was the Texas flag), along with more serious topics that required digging behind that C prompt and writing a little code.

As Prodigy gave way to AOL, and 386 chips were replaced by Pentium processors, and 2400 Baud modems were left in the dust, those communities held firm. We followed one another from platform to platform. If you had half a brain, handling your own IT was no big deal.

Even after Microsoft changed the world with Office 97, beating out WordPerfect and Lotus once and for all (they thought), we small business owners remained fully in charge of our own destiny. Office 97 was easy to configure, and even easier to use. The processes required to set up new accounts followed simple workflows, and the software manuals were written in plain English.

Over time, as software improved and we relied on it more and more in our daily business routine, the manuals followed suit. As late as 2014, when QuickBooks Enterprise Manufacturing Edition was downloaded and not received on a CD-ROM, and the Intuit manual for that small ERP was online and not printed, software manuals were designed to be read and followed by non-IT specialists. A bit of common sense was all that was needed.

In fact, the software manual for that 2014 version of QuickBooks Enterprise Manufacturing Edition was so good, I recommended it to entry-level accountants or business owners who had no accounting background. In those days — all of ten years ago — Intuit’s manual writers taught users not only how to use the software, but in so doing, also best accounting practices for small business.

But no more. And I am not sure why.

Has it been the advent of SaaS? Or breaking unified software down into “apps” that must be administered individually? Or attempts by every software developer to be The First to have a reasonably good AI component?

I know for certain that Microsoft’s AI is at the root of many of its issues. Once they surreptitiously inserted AI dot EXE into the registries of all Windows users via a Windows update in November 2022, Windows and Office no longer function well. Microsoft “apps” don’t play well with one another, with conflicts between apps. It’s next to impossible to close Teams or Word, as both run in the background when any Microsoft “app” is started. And both Teams and Word eat up memory. Recently, whatever AI dot EXE is doing with Teams and Word, seems to be affecting File Explorer as well.

I have just spent the last six months – MONTHS, not days or weeks, but MONTHS – getting a new Microsoft tenant (account) set up. I have had a personal Microsoft Office account for forever, as we used what Microsoft then called bCentral for its Web-building program as early as 2000. Not app. Program. Now bCentral is a huge ERP, which doesn’t involve Web building. No alternative names, Microsoft Branding?

In 2021, I set up an account (tenant) for DEHeap Enterprises, Inc., the translation, genealogy, and accounting part of our business. It’s perked along all right. I thought. Setup wasn’t optimal, but I thought it was just me.

Fast forward to 2024. Both Salesforce and QGiv donated their software to Center for White Rose Studies. Yea, and public thank you to Salesforce and Bloomerang for their support of small nonprofits.

When I finally successfully configured Salesforce and sent 10-12 test emails, I decided it was time to make Salesforce interface with Outlook. But since the tenant for Outlook was not the same as the tenant for Salesforce, they could not talk to one another.

So began the odyssey of setting up a new Microsoft tenant.

I’ll spare you the gory details and the images of Denise pulling her hair out on a daily basis. Let’s just say, I wasn’t sleeping well at night, because nothing was working. I’d open tickets and Lily in Who-Knows-Where would not read the ticket but would read a script back to me. I’d ask for escalation, she’d escalate to someone else who likewise would not read my ticket.

One of the issues indirectly related to the new tenant: I spent an hour on the phone using QuickAssist so a tech support guy could see the problem. Successfully replicated the problem during that hour, tried at least five different solutions. Worked for 24 hours, then nope. Back to crashing.

Re-opened the ticket (techs sure know how to close tickets quickly!), and the new person wanted a QuickAssist session so we could replicate the issue. Me: “Umm, please just watch the session from yesterday.” – Tech Support: “Sorry, he didn’t record it.” – Me: Unglued. – Tech Support: “Well, now we can try [reads from script] [same things done the day before].”

I finally wrote Microsoft’s CEO. The letter with documentation of tickets, emails, notes, and so on took a full 10-hour day to generate. I traced the series of events hour by hour, and in some cases, minute by minute.

Eventually a tech person from the executive office called. Nelson was amazingly good. If the information he shared with me had been anywhere on support.microsoft.com or in the Admin Center of my tenant, I could have handled it without even opening a ticket.

But it wasn’t. It was in his head. No SOPs for Lily in Who-Knows-Where to work through. Her script was of the sort, “Is your computer turned on?” Please.

There was more than a tad of schadenfreude when Nelson faced some of the same crashes and wha-ats and huhs that I had encountered. Especially one particular Monday as we were working on something and Microsoft 365 crashed because of an update they had released the night before.

Several times, Nelson himself was stumped. He would always find a solution, which I greatly appreciate. But I asked him more than once, “If you are having trouble with this, how are mere mortals supposed to resolve the issue?”

I still have a LOT of work to do to completely set up the new tenant for Center for White Rose Studies. Most of it is tedious as hell. There is a Microsoft tool that will do automatically what I am having to do manually. But it’s only available to Enterprise – read, humongous – companies. And it’s expensive. So the old adage, You spend money to save time, you spend time to save money? Holds true in this case.

To me, the irony of all this: Microsoft has been preaching AUTOMATION for almost five years. Automate payables entry, automate CRM, automate your breakfast.

Guess who’s not using workflow automation in their own business? You got it. Microsoft.

Everything that Nelson helped me do (and undo, since the Microsoft tech support person in 2021 had configured things wrong) should have been part of a workflow. The workflow should have been: “Set up email.” Then move the user from one step to the next, using flowcharts to skip unnecessary steps. But nooooo. If you’re the Admin of a Microsoft tenant, there are fifteen bajillion switches to flip, decisions to make, not one bit of it automated. It was funny when Nelson would look at something and say, where’d that go?, because a new release had changed navigation.

Again: “If you are having trouble with this, how are mere mortals supposed to resolve the issue?”

Microsoft and other big companies are essentially destroying small business in the USA. It’s next to impossible to start and maintain a new, tiny-tiny business without a big pot o’ gold to pay for IT services. And even then, you’re likely to get IT support personnel who charge big bucks without knowing what they’re doing.

It may sound like I’m picking on Microsoft. I’m not. Once Nelson and I were finished (and I collapsed and literally slept for two days straight), I went back to the Salesforce-Outlook interface. I am not kidding when I say: The “software manual” just for the Salesforce-Outlook interface on the Salesforce site is twelve pages long. Looks like it’s less than 10-point font.

“The integration between Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook requires both server-side and a short client-side setup procedure. Review the system requirements and ensure that your email server is set up to communicate with the integration…”

I Googled the instructions. Found the correct Salesforce app (warning – there are scam artists out there who try to charge you $20 per month for an interface app!). Loaded it in Outlook. Clicked on it. It took me to a screen to log in to Salesforce. Done. Confirmed that I wanted it to interface to Outlook. Submit. Didn’t work. Did this three times.

Finally submitted a Salesforce ticket. A nice tech guy named Amar contacted me, asked if I were free for a Google meet. Sure. Took less than five minutes. Not twelve pages of instruction. Merely clicking on Setup in Salesforce, checking one box, and re-doing the interface within Outlook. Super simple. Again, if their software manual had a simple setup for small business, instead of a twelve-page comprehensive everything-you-need-to-know for 500,000 employees, life would be grand.

Or if they (Microsoft, Salesforce, Intuit, etc.) simply had workflows, similar to what TaxAct and TurboTax offer, life would be beautiful!

In the meantime, we small business owners must keep trying tech support, hoping for Amars and Nelsons, while more often than not, getting Lily and Lily Junior who are reading scripts and know less than you or I do. And when that fails, we must write to the Office of the CEO and hope we get Nelson, not Lily The Third.

Some days I yearn for the time when we could customize our own cursors or when strangers in Peoria would help me with an EDLIN.

But the world has moved on. I don’t want to return to telexes and FTPs. I like my color laser printer. And the Apple technology that powers my ASUS monitor as I write this in Word. It’s good. I remember squinting at that tiny black monitor with green pixelated letters. Nah. I’ll stay firmly in the twenty-first century.

In the meantime, there exists a huge gap in software. If SaaS and AI are going to abandon small business, someone could make a great deal of money creating small business versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and so on. Or Microsoft and its cohorts could wake up to how they’ve abandoned small business and the impact their lack of care has on entrepreneurs with big vision and little capital.

The next few years should be interesting. We’re all along for the ride.

2026 note: WordPerfect is BAAAAAACK!

COMMENTS WORTH KEEPING

Ooh, thanks for the flashback to the beginning. While my experience is more with accounting than IT, I feel your pain. I also hear your deep and layered knowledge base.

--Tree Langdon, December 11, 2024.

I don’t know anything about IT or accounting, but I know good, clear writing when I read it… this is good, clear writing…and interesting! Thanks for sharing.

--Sodak, December 11, 2024.

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