Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Yeah, I'm lazy. F#@$ Microsoft

So, I fired up the old PC this morning, and attempted to open Google Chrome. Oh, Snap. Adobe Flash crashed. And, Lo and Behold, Vista began another forced Microsoft update. Ok, then. Another Microsoft update that royally screws up other companies software. And it just happens to be Google. The Flash plug-in still works perfectly with Firefox, and I'll bet it works great with IE, too. (Although, I never use IE, so I wouldn't know.) I immediately reinstalled Chrome, but I'll bet some people are still confused about what to do, or just too lazy/busy to do a reinstall right now. I wonder how much browsing traffic MS just drove away from Google? Chrome is supposed to have 1%+ of the total browsing market. In percentage terms, not a lot. In raw volume terms, that is millions or billions of pages per hour.

This of course leads to the next question: When are people going to get totally fed up with MS? I realize that it is only a small percentage of users that understand what is going on. Many people don't know the difference between an OS and a browser. So, they just toil on with Microsoft's crap. I'm using Vista now, because I am being forced to. I use software for work that is not available for Linux or anything but XP or Vista.

And, therein lies the problem. Microsoft has the best API's and "hooks" in the OS for programmers. Sorry open sourcers, but it is true. I use Open Office, and like it, but it looks like it is 10 years old compared to Office 2007. Does that make a difference to me? No. Does that make a difference to a typical user? Sad to say, yes. What is the one major difference between XP and Vista for 90% of users? Aero Glass. And most users (not POWER users) like Vista better then XP. Why? Aero Glass. Makes no difference to productivity, in fact it hurts productivity as the computer slows for programs that don't support it.

Windows sucks. Can we fix the problem people.

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