Printing Problems - A Tale of Two Sites

Friday 12th November, 2004

If I was in any doubt about the difference between Apple and Microsoft trying to get info out of their support sites has reaffirmed my choice. The Apple site is just sooooooo much better ( that’s six o’s of better-ness btw.)

I’ve just been trying to help a customer out with their printer problems. Upgrading to 10.3.6 and Word 2004 update at the same time has resulted in some strange behaviour: Half way through printing a document, it decides to switch page size. All very odd.

But back to the point.

The interface is cleaner. The search engine is intelligent (and not just a Google import - don’t they trust their own MSN search engine? ;-) ), and the user support is well organised and clean.

Apple manage to take a web page, and make it feel like an Apple application (albeit one where they actually stick to the Interface Guidelines…)

I may not have a solution yet, but I’ve come away from the Apple site, having been given the ‘warm and fuzzies’. Does Steve’s RDF extend via Akamai servers too I wonder?