Tim Anderson's ITWriting

March 18, 2004

Microsoft: improve Windows Media Player

Seen the microsoft.public.windowsmedia.player newsgroup? There are dozens of error reports daily, so much so that other discussion is almost impossible. This is a programming issue: WMP needs to work better and to fail gracefully. The reason for many of the queries is that users frequently see error codes rather than human-readable reports. Users turn to the newsgroup because they see 800700O5, C00D10B3, C00D11C0 and so on. For years, best practice has been not to throw numbers like this in front of the user, except perhaps in small print at the end of a sane error report.

I like Windows Media Player but I've seen quality issues too. Here's one: I have WMP configured to copy and play music to/from a network share. If the share is offline, WMP starts and then freezes. Well, I know I am a bad user setting up WMP in this way, but it does make a lot of sense if you don't want little independent music collections all over your network. But the point is that surely WMP could detect this on start-up and give me a friendly message, rather than siezing up. The real killer is that if WMP won't work, you can't get into Tools - Options to correct the problem, without putting the share back online that is.

The specific problem matters little. The point is that Microsoft needs to fix WMP fast if it wants to succeed. Especially considering that it may well have to unbundle it from Windows for legal reasons.

Farewell to the CD

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