A culture of low expectations

I am yet again noting how shitty Windows software is. I’m running Vista on my gaming machine. First of all, let me say that Vista is not nearly as bad as I hear everyone saying it is. I have had some problems but I do not look back on XP as some dream come true. XP was barely adequate and Vista is barely adequate. No big paradigm shift there.

But I am constantly disappointed not just by Microsoft’s software but by almost all software written for Windows. They try to make the software “easy” in totally the wrong way. They hide useful information, they don’t give you options, they infrequently use tool tips. They sort of assume you are dumb and they manage to alienate both the dumb people and the smart people.

Steve Jobs said, if this was just about money Microsoft would make great software. It is confusing to me that Apple can make such great software and inspire such great software and Microsoft manages to inspire a lot of very poorly conceived, poorly executed and hard-to-use software. Some people will claim this is because there is so much more software for Windows, so there is going to more bad software as a result.

I don’t buy it. My latest complaint of shit-ass software was written by Intel. It’s horrible software. It is software to configure and managed RAID. It has told me there is an error on one of my disks. It hasn’t told me what the error is! It has no help for me to repair the error. It’s only advice is I should back up my data. There are no tool tips and the help is incomplete and sucky. It is supposedly logging events somewhere but they are nowhere within the Event Viewer. There are no other logs I can find. Apparently you need to be a Microsoft Certified Retard in order to diagnose this goddamn problem. I know RAID inside and out. I have run Windows for a decade and computers for 3 decades. It is an absolute failure of leadership by Microsoft and Intel that they let shitty software like this into the marketplace.

And yet Windows Weenies will defend this backwards-ass hegemony with all their lives. They love the mediocrity. They love the unintuitive nature of things, the constant annoying little popups, the DLL conflict hell. They love the shit ton of crappy software they can run on their crappy OS and feel they are on the “business” operating system.

This is why Apple is gaining market share and market capitalization. From the very top down, Apple manages quality. Microsoft, from the top down, clearly does not understand their users or the marketplace. The only reason they are surviving at this point is because of Office and because so many business users think they are required to use this inadequate shit.

The only company that is really competing with Apple right now is Google. Microsoft is falling.

A culture of low expectations

2 thoughts on “A culture of low expectations

  1. I don’t know to what extent you are speaking from experience with macs and mac software. It kicks Linux’s ass. I love linux, as a server and the desktop, but there is no comparison. I know many ex-linux-desktop people who are running macs. also many ex-windows people. it’s better.

    Apple is far from flawless as a company and I do find myself oddly forgiving of their proprietary nature. But this is a company declared dead a million times which still has a minimal market share in the computer market. Their success is tied to their innovation and it really is admirable, I think. That’s why people keep copying them.

    Yes, I’m a Mac fanboy but I am so for a reason.


  2. Cairnarvon says:

    Microsoft presumably doesn’t write Intel’s software.

    Apple fanboyism annoys me far more than Microsoft fanboyism. Microsoft has maybe four fanatics, and every other defender secretly realises their OS is crap but defends it anyway just to avoid losing face because they honestly don’t know how to install a real OS. The Apple kids actually seem to believe what they’re saying.
    Going by business practices, Apple is a much worse company than Microsoft ever was. The only reason it doesn’t make as big a splash is because they don’t hold a monopoly, and because of the reality distortion field.

    I really don’t understand why Mac OS still has the reputation of being a secure, userfriendly OS. A decade ago that might have been true, but nowadays, even many Linux distros blow it out of the water in terms of usability.

    Anyway, my main problem with Vista is the DRM issues (and Apple has always been considerably worse than Microsoft on any issues involving DRM) and the “trusted computing” bullshit. The only way I’d ever use a Vista system is if it wasn’t connected to any network, but most of it just doesn’t work if it isn’t.
    It’s true that if you just look at what the user is presented with, Vista isn’t that much worse than XP, but like all modern malware, the worst bits of it are hidden from the average user.


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