Do you see OWC?

From the rant of week dept...

Recently we've been pushing sites on our network to hurry up and deploy Office 2003 already. Our original image was built with Office XP and we have had the 2003 version availble for the users to install for almost a year. It won't be mandatory until later this year due to corporate politics. However, one of the fun things we've been encountering is the lack of consistency provided by Microsoft in their OWC or "Office Web Components". Office XP shipped with "OWC10" which has a unique CLSID and does not have a version independent ProgID. Now Office 2003 Standard comes with OWC11, and Office 2003 Pro - mostly because the MS Access team couldn't get their act together - comes with OWC10 and OWC11. Guess what? OWC11 has a new CLSID and still has no version independent ProgID. So to instantiate them, you have to use the actual CLSID. It's created a problem for those folks who actually used the Office Web Components to do spreadsheet type things on their web sites. They end up having to change their code on their production sites to do an instantiation of the CLSID for OWC11, then check the object to see if it is == Nothing. If it is, try an instantiation of OWC10 instead. Seems a bit silly - and unfortunately the people who built the pages are never around anymore so maintenance can be iffy.

Why Microsoft, why? Why can't you create version independent ProgID's for these things like you do for say Excel? It's almost like the OWC team likes to physically hurt their customers (similar to Dilbert's boss). Couldn't those folks have just went into dentistry or something and let people who actually like customers write the OWC code?