Tuesday, June 17, 2008

World's Most Useless Dialog Box

I was trying recently to uninstall a Microsoft program from the Windows Control Panel. After selecting the app and clicking Uninstall, I got the usual progress dialog box showing a progress bar. After reaching about 50% progress, the uninstallation stopped and I received the following dialog box, after which the progress receded and the app did not uninstall. I have to consider this box stunningly uninformative, even by Microsoft standards:


Not only does this box fail to provide any useful information whatsoever, it goes further by deliberately insulting the user, thusly: The image on the screen in the icon sure looks like that of the Earth's natural satellite. The dialog box is mooning its user.

I call upon the designer and implementer of this box to step forward, publicly own up to their sins.