Originally Written: August 28th, 2003 (In case it seems obsolete in some parts)
Computers are too easy to use. I think Bill Gates caused great harm to the computer industry. Some people are saying I’m wrong and that it’s Microsoft that soley made computers what they are today. I fully disagree with this argument. Microsoft may be selling innovating solutions but they are not inventing them. A majority of the time Microsoft does not create products on its own. They usually buy the company that invented the product. Microsoft then makes changes to the products so they are more user friendly, insecure and inferior to competing products. Microsoft’s owes it’s success to IBM for purchasing a peice of software it didn’t even own when Bill Gates made the deal with them. He used their money to buy DOS and licensed it to them. They also used the OS themselves to create MS-DOS.
The computer industry of today was only partially assisted by Microsoft. The biggest impact on the computer industry is PC Gaming. Games push the hardware and games push the software. A computer built in 1997 can still be used very well for word processing, spreadsheets, web development and browsing. My mom has a 166mhz computer with 48mb ram and it works fine. She can do all the daily tasks on it that she normally does without upgrading to Windows XP. Games are the reason that people need the newest CPU’s and Graphics cards. You don’t need a 128mb AGP 8x graphics card to browse the web.
Now, thanks to Microsoft anybody can use a computer and this means all sorts of idiots will be browsing the web. Part of this blame also goes over to the folks who created America Online, perfect name too. Anybody in America can now get online, just give them twice the amount of money that you would give another ISP. Then they can show the world how ignorant they are in every subject.
Back in the old days when DOS ruled the home user world it kicked more ass. When a user made a mistake, the computer threw a big incoherant error at them which made them fear it. Now they get big huge buttons and music. I don’t think DOS did a good enough job so I decided to modify an open source command.com (FreeCom, which is used in FreeDOS) to make it more user unfriendly. Errors are generated with curse words to scare them even more than MS-DOS/PC-DOS did.
The same thing is happening to Linux too. Soon everything will be just like it is on a Mac. If I had it my way, everytime a user made a mistake the operating system would throw a few viruses into the mix. Everytime the user made a configuration error it would format their computer. These are ideas I copied from Maddox but they are good ones that should be repeated. I’m thinking of designing a keyboard that has all sorts of friendly looking shortcuts for users. However, if they press any of those keys it will set their arms on fire.
Now a list of people who have some form of mental illness:
1. People who use AOL (Those who use it on top of High Speed are the worst).
2. People who use website builders provided by the hosting site (Yahoo Pagebuilder is an example).
3. People who own a Mac, and hate PC’s.
4. People who paid money for a Microsoft operating system.
5. People who purchased an X-Box ONLY because Microsoft made it.
6. People who confuse Download with Upload.
7. People who confuse Install with Download.
8. People who bought Microsoft Plus! for XP.
9. People who installed Microsoft Plus! for XP and used it to convert all their MP3s to WMA.
10. People who use Zone Alarm or Norton Anti-virus.
11. People who use IIS, IE and ASP.
12. People who encode WMA music files.
13. People who say Linux sucks.
14. SCO – (Previously known as Caldera).
Microsoft didn’t make computers easy to use, they made them unreliable to use. The first very popular microprocessor based computing device was the 1977 Atari VCS [Video Computer System] later to be renamed the Atari 2600.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600
It’s funny, but I never remember it crashing or locking up. Later during the Home Computer craze of the 80s I recall my system was stable and the software always seemed to work, Word Processor, Games, etc.
Today, people suffer so much distress using their Microsoft based computer system that gaming really isn’t very popular on the machines even though they certainly have the processing power to handle the task, they DEFINITELY lack the ability create stable games that truly are fun ..for very long, before the horrid system takes the fun away.
Folks flock to dedicated “game” computer devices because the systems Microsoft monopolized weren’t stable enough to maintain the fun. Sooner or later distressing crashes, renewal notices, trail-ware expiration notices, signing 20 page license agreements without any idea what was signed, much less even making an attempt to read it, viral alerts, security alert pop-ups, and so forth ..and the joy is soon greatly diminished.
Work is painfully popular on Microsoft based systems because work is just that, it’s work, it’s not supposed to a “fun” or “joyful” experience, or at least that’s the notion and we end up tolerating it.
Folks chore away within their Microsoft paradigm constantly battling the clutter and pop-ups demanding that they renew whatever expired, or re-subscribe to some additional that shouldn’t need in the first place. It interferes with their work but since its a chore, they tolerate it.
One thing people will not tolerate is Trying to Have Fun / Joy (playing a game on PC) because when they discover it turns out to not be so much or satisfaction battling the constant headaches on their machine, they decide not to re-attempt to have that fun any longer (playing a game on PC). Eventually, sooner or later, they don’t seek to have “fun” on their PC anylonger… just like the California gold miners eventually gave up after the gold ran dry, PC gamers, like gold miners panning for gold and never getting much in return, decide to look elsewhere or do something different. On a PC that would usually be “I’ll do more work instead”
The Personal Computer paradigm is definitely a chore ..or worse yet, for many its an outright battle they despise with intensity. That’s why after purchases PC games for a couple of years, year ago, I finally that by far, most of my money was wasted, having yielded very little fun. Thanks Microsoft for all you’ve contributed to the computer world!!
Without Microsoft we probably would have a world with productivity on computing devises, its just that we wouldn’t have many of those annoyances:
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