I was recently setting up a new account for a new Pay-Per-Click client in Microsoft AdCenter. We’ve been fairly busy lately, and this is work that I can do from anywhere, so I decided to do it one evening from home. I have a Macintosh at home (and at the office). I do not have a spare Windows computer, nor do I have VMware on my home computer. Essentially, from home, I have no access to a Windows computer. No big deal, right? I mean, after all, AdCenter is just a web site, so as long as I have a web browser, I’m in good shape, right? Wrong. Let’s explore what happened…
 

I got almost all of the way through the sign-up process and ran into this error:
 

Basically, it says that I must accept the sign up charge. Hmm..I didn’t see that anywhere. Let’s scroll down and find the problem.
 

Oh, look, there’s the problem. But…there’s no checkbox. Or text. The little exclamation point is where there SHOULD be a checkbox for me to accept the charges, but it’s not there. So, I figure, well, this is Firefox on a Mac, I’ll give Safari a shot. Surely it will work in there.

I fired up Safari and went to the main AdCenter page, clicked on Sign up today, which then brought up this page:
 

So, naturally, I clicked ‘Sign Up Now’. Guess what? In Safari, you can’t even click the button. Clicking on it just does nothing.
 

I was completely dumbfounded by this, so I tried it the next day at work, again on my Mac. Same issues. Unbelievable.
 

This is an excellent example of why usability and testing are so important. The Macintosh market is growing every month, and here we have one of the largest companies in the technology industry that has built a product that only works on Windows.
 

And Microsoft wonders why Google is completely obliterating them in this market…