Vendors Should Do No Harm

Like most technogeeks I have an affection for new products, technologies and even new versions of Windows (except for Vista and Windows ME).  I do, however, have a bone to pick with vendors who decide to change how their products work just for sport. I'm now asking tech vendors to adopt the Hippocratic Oath's "First do no harm" and resist retiring perfectly good commands from their CLIs.

I've been motivated to raise this call by my newly updated Windows 7 machine which started popping up reminders for me to call in to vendor briefings even before I finished eating breakfast this morning.  After spitting coffee all over my keyboard, I noticed that even though it was 8:38am, my computer thought it was 9:47.  

Remembering that computer clocks aren't terribly accurate, although I'm more used to them being slow than fast, I opened an administrative DOS box and entered the NET TIME /SETSNTP:POOL.NTP.ORG command I've used for years to make my systems sync to NTP servers on the net.  It responded with a message that the /SETSNTP option has been deprecated and I should use w3tm.exe to manage the windows time service.

So I typed w32tm /? and got 3 screens worth of options.  Enter what looks like the right command and Windows 7 responds "Access Denied." 

So let me ask the folks at Microsoft, how hard would it be to have the old command line there to set my NTP server?  I know the code is there, because I finally found how to set internet time via the GUI. The larger problem is that arbitrarily changing GUI traits like renaming "Add or Remove Programs" to "Programs" could annoy grumpy old techies like me but arbitrarily changing the CLI will break batch files and scripts.I'm not complaining because there's a new command line way to manage time. I'm complaining because I typed what used to be a perfectly good command, which they went through the trouble to write an error for, rather than just keeping code that worked in the first place. Additionally, that the new command line didn't work after my two minutes of research is even forgivable.

Cisco learned this lesson years ago. They've been trying to get people to use "Copy Run Start" instead of "Write Mem" to save the running configuration to flash for years but "Write Mem" still works. At very least, vendors should display the message that there's a new command, with the full new syntax, but then perform the action anyway.

Full disclosure notice: I recently completed a commissioned benchmarking project for Microsoft that did not involve NTP or the Windows Time service. No NTP servers were injured writing this blog entry.