Microsoft teams with Creative Commons or Common Corporate Mistakes

Microsoft tonight announced a new partnership with Creative Commons, the organization dedicated to providing content producers a legal alternative to “all rights reserved” copyright law, to offer a new tool for easy insertion of Creative Commons licenses into works created with Microsoft Office.

The only problem I have noticed with the tool is that it can not handle being behind a proxy server.  It seems rather strange for someone like Microsoft not to support something as simple as a proxy server.  I hope they update the tool at some point, I can’t use it until it gets that feature.

Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine, when corporations, like Microsoft in this case, fail to take into consideration the full extent of a problem.  This happens many times with proxy servers.  Perhaps this is a problem with the way that Microsoft has laid out the networking services in Windows.  I know from experience that there is no real place to go to see if there is a proxy on a Microsoft Windows Machine.  The place these settings are set is in the browser, which is not really all that well thought out.  A proxy definition is something that should be at the operating system or networking level and definitely not at the application level.

Even if an application needs to define a separate local proxy, the application should be able to do so through standard OOP methods of inheritance and extension of the network proxy object.