Reliable Systems

I am a lucky, lucky guy. Among the many reasons I believe that is a gift for timing. Last week I installed a new Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS) for our house. It replaced an aging server that just wasn’t cost effective to keep adding storage to. For our home needs of photos, music, and videos it just didn’t seem to make sense to buy high performance storage and a new HP Windows Home Server seemed a perfect fit. It also offered a number of features that looked pretty good - like full automatic backup of the various desktops in our house and easy restore.

Amazingly enough, I got to test that feature out just a week after putting the server in place - the drive in my wife’s machine tanked out of the blue. Dell shipped us out a new drive that arrived the next day, and I was looking forward to being able to pop in the Microsoft-provided full recovery CD, restore the machine, and have her on her way without any incident. It might be one of my few towering triumphs of home technology.

And Microsoft put some real work into this: They provide the recovery CD, you boot from it and it asks for one password and connects to the server to see what backups are available to be restored. It even prompts you to restore the backups for the local machine which it must be figuring out by MAC address or something (since the drive was absolutely brand new, so nothing to go off there). So far I was pretty impressed.

Then I ran into it, the usability issue I knew had to be there. It refused to run a restore to the new drive because, well, it was new - it wasn’t formatted, so it didn’t know what to do. A dialog popped up informing me that I might want to run disk administrator, which it provides a nice button to start up.

Here’s the thing

I know exactly what to do with disk administrator; I can administer a Windows 2003 server which is basically what WHS is under the covers. I’ve been using Windows NT since, well - it was just NT. So this didn’t throw me personally, but Microsoft is really hoping - and billing - that WHS is a server for the rest of the world - for say my parents to use, and they could use one. The problem is that for all of the work they did to get it this far (and it must have been a lot of work - the recovery CD booted up a special running copy of Vista and went right into a recovery wizard that was, over all, pretty smart) they then dropped the ball completely by not recognizing that a blank drive means… Time for a full system restore. If not, at least do what the OS installation has been doing since… NT 3.1 like prompting “would you like recovery to format the drive?” or something that people will understand.

If my parents had gotten to that point, they would have stopped and had to call me, and that’s pretty much game over from a usability standpoint. I don’t even know if I could easily walk them through how to use disk administrator from scratch to partition and format a drive without seeing the screen.

Close Microsoft, very close. But the home user market really wants choices in plain language to tell them what to do, particularly when recovering from something as traumatic as a complete system failure. Great usability isn’t cheap, but it’s worth it. Here’s the worst part: I’m sure that the WHS team at Microsoft, which by all appearances is pretty smart and had to make a lot of hard choices, had a meeting where they probably debated this point, and taking the time to smooth out this wrinkle reliably lost out. Possibly because it wouldn’t work correctly if the home system was running Turkish windows and had SCSI RAID or some other such boundary case. Too bad. Apple would have taken the time to make it work - an easier task with a lot less hardware variation to support, but making it work right when it’s hard is exactly what people pay for. Do it often enough and you get a reputation for excellence.

My wife’s system was back up and running in no time, overall from her perspective it rocked: Her machine died a rapid, painful death and was back up exactly where she was quickly, having lost only a few hours work. For me, it was another in a line of recent experiences with Windows where it was so good in so many ways that the few cigarette burns and scratches in the finish really stand out.

A Plea to Microsoft

Stop living up to what your detractors say about you. You spend a fortune on getting things right and I know enough to really respect just how hard it is to accomplish what you do. The Microsoft folks I’ve worked with are passionate and take a lot of pride in what they do. Check out the Windows Home Server Team Blog - these folks love what they do. But the Microsoft brand is not known for just working and for being easy enough you can recommend it to your Mom. You can fix this.