Isuppose I should be pleased that error messages are getting friendlier. Sure, Windows 10’s stability (or lack thereof) hasn’t always filled me with confidence, but at least when things go pear-shaped it tells me something that sounds like it’s been written by a human being.
‘The server stumbled, page could not be loaded’ is easier to take than ‘Windows store error, exception xxxgetstuffed’, even if it means you’ll be jumping through hoops for the next two hours just to get a few updates to download. And while I’m not a big fan of ‘We couldn’t complete the updates. Undoing changes. Don’t turn off your computer’, at least it explains roughly what’s gone wrong.
It hasn’t always been thus. I’ve been using Windows since the dark days of Windows 3.1, where getting any work done involved some passing familiarity with the MS-DOS command line. Then you’d get beauties like an endless scroll of ‘Not reading drive A. Abort, Retry, Fail?’ or that most helpful of messages, ‘General Failure’. When General Failure was in town you knew his comrades Major Fault and Captain Cock-Up could not be far behind, and on that count Microsoft never let you down. Basically, you were stuffed. In those days, developers wrote error messages for other developers, and – with no Google to help – the odds against you decoding their technobabble were longer than the Great Wall of China.
Things hardly improved in the Windows 95/98 era, when I worked as a reviewer and had to make sense of pre-release software and hardware. It was rare that a week went by without the good old ‘Blue screen of death’ (BSOD) informing me ominously that ‘A fatal exception has occurred’. If you were really unlucky, your PC might reset itself and then go into a deadly spiral of further blue screens and resets. Otherwise, it might sit there, waiting gormlessly for you to turn it off and on again, when what you really wanted to do was turn it off permanently with a sledgehammer. I sometimes think Microsoft considered this a Windows feature. The way error messages came and went without any good reason would leave the user in a nearconstant state of suspense.
If you didn’t get the good old BSOD, then you might get equally impenetrable messages informing you that you were the victim of one of a bewildering range of Windows Protection errors, or that (a personal favourite) ‘The action could not be completed. The action could not be completed’. Clearly Microsoft thinks saying it twice makes an unknown error less annoying.
Meanwhile, nothing quite brightens up your day more than waiting hours for a program to install only to be told ‘Unable to start the program. One of the installed components may be missing’. I respond by hissing, “Some of your installed components may go missing, you little [expletive deleted]”.
So why do the new error messages still drive me up the wall? Because some of them are as much use as an inflatable dartboard. It’s all very well for Office to inform me, ‘Something went wrong. Sorry, we ran into a problem’, but it doesn’t actually tell me anything about the problem, what caused it or what I need to do to fix it. Ditto the nowlegendary ‘Something happened. Something happened’.
Most of all though, these new error messages remind me of the kind of cheerful, agreeable but utterly useless nonsense you get when you phone the water company to find out why there’s nothing coming out of your tap. When an update won’t install I don’t want a cute quip or some vague reassuring message. No, I want to feel that this is a known problem that’s being fixed. And I certainly don’t want to have to type the error code into Google. In fact, there’s only one thing I really, really want: how about software that, you know, just works?