For most people, its effects are short-lived, resulting only in transitory distress. But for others, the condition becomes chronic, with the "user"--as victims of the syndrome are called--often facing recurrent bouts of anger and frustration (the main symptoms, which go away only after the errant software does).
Software rage causes sufferers to lose faith in their applications, their computers, Microsoft, the software industry, the people who represent them on the other end of the phone, technology as a whole, and in the most extreme cases, the entire human race.
What causes Software Rage Syndrome? Well, yes, bad software does. But bad software, in and of itself, doesn't result in the cases of software rage that make the news.
Indeed, a second component that's necessary to ignite the most serious cases--those that result in prolonged anger, depression, and occasionally, users acting out against their technology, sometimes by tossing their computers into large bodies of water. The significance of this last aspect of the syndrome is not well understood, but we can now unravel the rest.
Software Rage Syndrome is the result of:
- Software in which seemingly simple tasks are not explained in the help documentation.
- Online help systems that make it difficult to find the solution to a problem, often because the specific text of error messages cannot be found in the knowledge base.
- Software that no longer comes with printed documentation or any easy way for customers to print the online documentation, sometimes requiring users to run the application on two machines so the online help is available on one machine while the user manipulates the application on the other.
- Internet service providers that provide Web-based help for Web-access problems, as though people who can't get onto the Internet could use the Internet to discover why not.
- Companies that don't list contact information, sometimes at all or sometimes missing critical elements like a telephone number, on their Web site address.
- Companies that label their products as being able to do something, then fail to provide directions for use--at all--in their printed or online documentation.
Those examples only scratch the surface, but offer a glimpse of situations that users too often find themselves seemingly unable to escape. Although serious, these scenarios do not demonstrate the full course of the syndrome.
Often, after experiencing one or more of the situations above, the user will attempt to contact the software publisher and have one or more of the following experiences:
- Be sent through a bewildering telephone menu tree that leads the user to a dead end, where the problem isn't solved and no human help is available.
- The user calls the company only to find themselves speaking to someone located half the globe away, who though very sympathetic is completely unable to help resolve the problem. Users with good problem-solving skills sometimes get curry recipes as a consolation prize.
- A recording tells the user the "wait time" for assistance is in excess of 30 minutes and offers to record a message, which is then never returned.
- The user is charged US$35 to solve a problem or implement a feature that isn't fully described in the documentation or which does not work in the manner described.
Those, of course, are but examples of the frustrations than can result--if the software is bad enough or the user is exposed to enough bad software--in the life-changing symptoms already described. I'm sorry to make fun of something as serious as bad technical support, but it's one of those cases where I either have to make myself laugh or I risk starting to cry. I've been thinking about this because my friend David Pogue (www.davidpogue.com), the noted computer how-to author, coined the term "software rage" in a recent New York Times column.
Pogue has made a nice fortune off bad tech support, by the way, so in calling companies to task he's really acting against his own self interest. His "For Dummies" and "Missing Manual" books do a better job of documenting software and solving problems than all but the very best tech support (of which there isn't very much).
Microsoft HAS to be near the top of the list when it comes to lousy error messages & an almost impossible search/find help engine at their Web site/s. The average user has no hope of ever resolving the BSOD error messages or the error codes listed in the System Information-Hardware-Components-Problem Devices section. ! or the Hardware Resources-Forced Hardware section Numeric codes are listed but no explanation is offered!
Come on Microsoft, lift your game. If your Help & Support routine is going to be of any use to users, you need to provide rational explanations for the errors listed. At present all it does is use up processing resources and provides very little of any real value.