Geeky Baldisms

There are a smattering of I Love Windows Vista websites out there. However, these are dwarfed into insignificance by the legions of those who are unimpressed to a greater or lesser degree.

I don't run Vista, I never intend to. I'm a happy Linux camper, and XP will be the desktop of choice at my place of employment for the foreseeable future.

But it seems that a major bugbear that people have with Microsoft's latest and greatest(?) is its bizarrely different interface.

Microsoft, who generally seems blissfully unaware of what is popular among the masses, has, since Windows 1.0, seen fit to radically rework the UI with each release.

Up until Vista, the practice was more or less tolerated by its customers. But now, the rebellion of users befuddled by the Vista experience is evidenced by downgrades to XP (and a small but growing number of Linux converts).

Microsoft, it's time to take a long, hard look at one of your hated rivals, and the way they do business.

I'll never forget the day in 1993 that I excitedly unpacked my first PC, plugged everything in, and watched with keen delight as that first DOS prompt appeared.

I was happily running MS-DOS 6.2. Somehow, that friendly CLI (on which I ran a wonderful, long-lost GUI called Geoworks) turned into the vile monster that is Vista.

What happened? Why?

The plain and simple fact is that when you run a CLI, its brand name doesn't matter nearly as much as when you begin depending on a GUI.

I remember playing around with DR-DOS and NDOS as command-line shells. They all looked and acted pretty much the same.

And Geoworks provided a graphical desktop, complete with rudimentary multitasking, as did Desqview and Windows 3.1.

But by 1995, things had changed. 32-bit operating systems became the state-of-the-art, and a prepackaged GUI was an integral part of the deal. Witness OS2/Warp and Windows 95.

While booting into a CLI was possible with Windows 95, there was no such thing as an add-on GUI that would run in 32 bit mode on top of it. So you were stuck with Microsoft's product, unless you wanted to take a walk on the wild side and give IBM's product a try.

When Hitler was in the midst of gaining world domination, he underestimated an enemy. Germany's rousing defeat at the hands of Russia during the winter of 1942-43 was the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime.

The RIAA, a fitting comparison to the fuehrer, has made major assaults on its home territory by suing everyone from prepubescent children to grandmothers who don't know how to power on computers. However, the corporate entity's future fate is sealed by going after the same enemy that whupped the Germans: Russia.

They pressured the Russian government via bribes or whatever to shut down allofmp3.com. No problem, now there are a handful of Russian sites offering the same deal, music for about a dime a song. And in case the RIAA should manage to buy enough Stoli to get them shut down, there are plenty more where they came from.

The end result is slow death for an entity that exists solely to make money off of the talent of others by charging exorbitant middleman fees. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not shedding any tears.

What did these clueless morons do to get in this mess, anyhow?

Simple. They ignored technology, and the benefits thereof. They also ignored what their customers wanted. It doesn't matter how big you are, or how many politicians you have in your pocket, thumbing your nose at paying customers will put you out of business.

The RIAA has stubbornly stuck by their CD package for nearly 25 years. And while the price of media and digital recording technology has fallen to the point that it's practically free, record companies still try to sell CD's at the same price that they cost when introduced.

I have a sub-$100 car stereo that plays mp3's from CD's, USB drives, or camera flash drives. I can put over 30 hours of music on one drive if I wish. Standard CD's give you a bit over an hour of music, then have to be changed for more. Do you think I want to mess with the only musical format that I can buy in a store?

Another problem: consumers don't want to pay a dollar for a song.

I used to get TWO songs on a vinyl 45 for that price.

Ten cents a song is an acceptable price, and double that wouldn't chase me away. There should be plenty of room for everyone to make a nice profit with a twenty-cent song. Even middlemen.

Thirdly, DRM is universally despised by all but its corporate proponents. Windows Vista has enough built in to choke a fast dual-core processor. It's there for the benefit of the RIAA and their nearly-as-clueless cohorts, the MPAA. It benefits Joe Consumer not a whit. And it keeps fast hardware from translating into a fast operating system.