Posted on 06/13/2006 11:15:21 AM PDT by Swordmaker
I HAVE had just about enough of Microsoft.
I've had it with rebooting my notebook and my desktop constantly because my applications crawl to a halt. I've had it with reformatting my drives every few months to get rid of all the stuff that accumulates on them.
I've had it with dysfunctional bloatware, inelegantly designed and inefficiently coded. I've had it with viruses and worms and Trojan horses and spyware and all the other rubbish that Microsoft lets in.
In a move that will delight many readers of this column, I am taking the plunge and going Apple Macintosh. My son has been using one for a year now, and Apple's OS X operating system is everything Microsoft's is not. I don't care about Vista; I'm moving now.
I'm not alone. I don't know a single soul with a good word to say about Microsoft. It's true, of course, that all large companies get their share of malcontents, but Microsoft just keeps attracting criticism. Flaky products, flakier business practices, greed, hubris. On and on it goes.
I don't care if Bill Gates is the world's biggest philanthropist. The pain he has inflicted on the world in the past 20 years through lousy products easily outweighs any good he has done.
Now that the Apple Mac is using Intel processors, and the prices are reasonable, and the inter-operability is fine, I see no reason not to switch. I can always run Windows if I want, though my intention is to avoid Microsoft whenever possible. Apple is as arrogant as Microsoft but at least its stuff works as advertised.
All successful companies eventually fade. IBM was once more powerful than Microsoft is now. It was larger than its six or seven largest competitors combined. It is still big, but is now just another computer company.
It's not even that, really. It's moving more and more into services, and even sold its PC division to Chinese company Lenovo last year. IBM now gets more money from outsourcing and consultancy than it does from hardware or software.
Microsoft is not going to go away any time soon. It has tens of billions in the bank, which irritates the hell out of its shareholders, who would like to see a bit more in the form of dividends. Its products are on more than 95 per cent of the world's PCs. It will be around long after you and I - and Bill Gates - are gone.
But there is a strong possibility that even Microsoft will become just another software company. The world is changing and Microsoft is not changing with it. It has become too big, with all the problems of inertia. Its enormous installed base brings with it the massive disadvantage of having to adapt while staying the same. It may prove an impossible task.
The many delays in Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system, have become and industry joke. It is years late and there is no guarantee it will be ready when Microsoft says, which is late this year or early next year. Gartner consultants are already predicting further delays.
Microsoft is in a bind. It has to get Vista out, ready or not. But it may find that users don't want it. It is a complete rewrite of the operating systems, with different file structures and different naming conventions.
It will be a bigger change than the move from Windows 98 to Windows NT nearly a decade ago. This will present nightmares for many users, particularly those in large organisations who will need to co-ordinate the shift across hundreds or even thousands of machines.
At the same time, Microsoft is releasing Office 2007, the first truly new version of its dominant desktop applications since the move from MS-DOS to Windows in the days before the internet browser was even invented. Users will be faced with a double whammy. Many won't bother. Some, like me, will go with Apple. Others will look at open source alternatives, at both the operating system and applications level. Some will stay with what they have - it does the job, and there are more important things to worry about and spend money on than feeding more cash into the Microsoft machine.
But the real threat to Microsoft is not unhappy users boycotting its products. It is that its business model is under threat. It's very reason for existence is being eroded. Bill Gates' vision was a computer on every desk, and Microsoft products on every computer.
He achieved his ambition, which brought him wealth unimaginable. But now the world of computer applications is moving off the desktop and on to the internet. We are starting to see rudimentary web-based applications, from Google and others, but it is the nature of applications, rather than where they reside, which is the real shift.
We will probably always need PC-based word processors and spreadsheets and databases, but others styles of application are becoming increasingly important. Intelligent search is changing the way people think about information, and the way they use it.
Applications are becoming embedded on more and more devices. There are more mobile phones than computers on the planet. Information, and information technology, is moving beyond the era of discrete desktop computers towards a supernet of interlinked devices and mini-applications.
Microsoft doesn't play there, try as it might. Google does. So does Apple.
The world is changing, and so am I. I will report back on my Macintosh experience in a future column.
Our family PC runs XP Home and is used more than a little, probably an average of 20-25 hours per week. I installed SpywareBlaster and AVG anti-virus on it, both of which can or do update themselves automatically. If you consider that "anal," so be it.
None of us "digs around" at all—much less "really"—to keep anything cleaned up. I might clear the browser cache every 3 or 4 months, if I think about it. But, whether it's surfing the 'Net, burning DVDs or CDs, recording cable TV, synching with my PDA, editing or printing photos, editing audio, backing up the other PCs on our home network, FTP-ing to and from my Web sites, or ripping CDs, it's been running fine since I built it about 3 years ago. Never had any reason to consider reformatting the drive or reloading the OS (knocking on wood as I type that ;).
Yeah, I read about it last night. They have a hole...
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