Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

There’s a sort of mental health hypochondria in which one asks, at wit’s end, What is wrong with me? and means it. It’s an overreaction in most cases, but you hear it a lot when people are fundamentally frustrated, and at their breaking point, and assume that if it hasn’t worked, there’s something so fundamentally wrong with them there is “no way” they can complete it.

This arbitrary cutoff point for inductive thinking about possible solutions also happens to computer companies, writers and users, when they confront something so fundamentally frustrating they don’t know how to take out their anger and frustration upon it. That thing is Microsoft, with which 65,000 employees, is entrenched in the same corporate culture that is also slowing Apple and Google, although slower, because they’re smaller. Get it? The bigger a company gets, the more layers of management you have, and the more people game the system. It’s a size issue.

Legitimate reasons to be frustrated with Microsoft:

Windows security blunders.

Cryptic marketing.

Slowness and lack of drivers in Vista.

Slowness to respond to anything.

Marketing takes precedence over good technology, sometimes.

Gates and Ballmer have the social graces of drunken camels and annoy people.

(Author’s note: I don’t claim to have social graces better than those of a drunken camel.)

As people get frustrated with Microsoft and buy Apple, they’re not reflecting a sense of faith in Apple as much as they are suggesting that the Windows ecosystem is fundamentally broken. In order to do this, they need to ignore the core audience that Windows serves, and how important it is to them to have backward compatibility.

When Apple first talked about upgrading their aging and incompetent OS 9, pundits said they had two choices: unleash something new, and run older stuff in emulation or virtualization, or keep building on and running the risk of being like Windows, which is a lot of really excellent code, some mediocre corporate bloat^TM code, and a ton of legacy code that makes it not only giant but slow. On the plus side, you can run programs from 1983 and have them interact easily with your current apps.

IBM, formerly the king of the PC business, keeps selling mainframes for the same reason. Data portability is a beast. It’s expensive to move your data to a new system, and easy to keep the combination that has been working for you in working order. Apple never had to deal with this problem. Linux has barely had to, but the BSD team has had to consider it to a greater degree.

I will never buy Apple products because Apple is bad psychology, but I admire the simplicity of their design. Every task relates to the user. Packaging is simple. Options are reduced. The problem is that while this works well for the home user, where 90% of the people are doing the same few tasks, it breaks down in the world of business where customization and compatibility are necessary. Still, there’s a lot Microsoft can learn from Apple.

One is that they need to manage public opinion better.

For example, in the “blogosphere,” it is widely regarded as truth that Microsoft Windows Vista is a complete failure. But back in reality, not only do many people use it, but many of them like it. But public opinion sways people, and if they hear other children in the schoolyard saying that Windows is too difficult and they’re buying a Mac, they will follow suit. Yes, Mr. Ballmer, you can call them pathetic sheep, and you might be right, but it’s the reality of the situation.

The Houston Chronicle’s Dwight Silverman offers an interesting insight here:

But let me tell you: Vista on an SDD with no junkware running in the background is a revelation. It’s snappy and even faster than a clean install of Windows XP on a traditional drive. While Dell has made great strides in reducing its junkware load, even its cleanest machines still have some. ^{^}

He’s echoing the sentiments of Ed Bott, who writes with convincing literacy of the human-computer equation:

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software.

{ deletia }

blew away all traces of the old installation and set up a pristine copy of Windows Vista Business, with up-to-date drivers and zero crapware. The initial results were eye-opening and impressive. After my makeover, this machine was every bit as fast as its specs said it should have been. ^{^}

Silverman had originally suggested that the windows ecosystem is broken:

This is a tremendous issue, because it is the ecosystem surrounding Windows — the vendors that make hardware that rely on it and the software developers who make programs that run on it — that has driven Microsoft’s success. The ecosystem has become horribly complex over time, to the point that it’s collapsing of its own weight, out of whack, out of balance.

Windows, although a proprietary operating system, is the hub of an open computing system. Anyone can build a computer that runs it, using off the shelf parts. Any hardware vendor can make components for it. And software vendors have access to the Windows Application Programming Interface, or API, and can write programs that run on it.

This open system has worked well so far; it’s what has driven the growth of the personal computing industry for decades. The ability for anyone to enter the market has driven prices down and innovation up, and consumers have benefited. It’s why Windows has a market share that dwarfs those of all other operating systems. ^{^}

Silverman points out two broken aspects: software compatibility, and hardware compatibility. I’d like to point out a few more:

Microsoft feels beholden to developers, software companies and software owners to not rock the boat.

Too many people have influence on the direction of Windows, resulting in no direction

Microsoft has only begun to validate hardware for its operating systems, something which is long overdue. Most “XP crashes” I investigated were the result of junk hardware, usually cheap motherboards.

Microsoft’s sales model is awkward, limited, and confusing to the consumer.

Everyone in the world is gunning for Microsoft, because they’re the near monopoly that has saved us years of time and headache with incompatibilities.

All of these are easy to fix with some decisive leadership, which has been lacking since Gates has known he will be retiring soon. That’s easily fixed: find a leader who can be arbitrary like Apple’s Steve Jobs, and let him or her loose on the company. Also, look at an intelligent licensing model, and keep in mind that while people loved Windows XP, most people were happiest with Windows 2000 because of these principles:

Simple. It had very few functions, little software bundled with it, was small and fast.

Consistent. What worked in one dialog worked in others like it, for the most part.

Single-purpose. It was designed to be a general purpose operating system, and made no guesses as to the user’s goals.

Reliable. More stable than most OS X systems, even.

Apple has violated these principles with recent releases of OS X. Being neurotic, they can’t resist gunking up a good thing, which puts them into the same bloated category as Microsoft and its suppliers. I guess it’s true that the bigger a company gets, the less responsive to obvious reality it becomes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 7:49 am and is filed under Information Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.