Microsoft - A victim of its own sword

People really hate Microsoft sometimes. Poor thing is always cursed for the BSODS (blue screen of deaths) that it gives; or the buggy source code that it has.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see Windows evolving from 95 to Vista. Win95 seems such a stripped off and bare bone version of Window’s latest OS, the Vista. And the more I look back, the more I miss the previous OS’s that the company came out with.

Life with Windows 98 was so simple. Even after its buggy core and non-slick, non-transparent, non-aero interface it used to do the job. It wasn’t as paranoid as Vista because it never gave me any security alerts every time I ventured into installing a new software. Vista tries to be the wise guy and downloads updates and other hard-disk hogging bull crap without informing me. The moment I turn off ‘automatic updates’ or ‘data execution prevention’ the entire system goes berserk as if I’ve committed a carnal sin and keeps pestering me to turn it back on!

An OS is supposed to be smart; and being smart doesn’t mean doing things on its own, it means knowing where its making the blunders. Sadly, none of the Windows that Microsoft has released are smart. They are either plain ‘dumb’ or they try to be the ‘wise guy’. And quite naturally as one hard core gujju that I am, I’d rather prefer someone that obeys me rather than acting up and doing things that I haven’t asked to.

Another sad part about Windows is the fact that it can never let go of its past. Because Windows supports a large range of softwares, it needs the flexibility to integrate additional plug-ins for audio, video and other codecs. Thus in hindsight, Windows would never be able to let go of its past. There will always remain a backward compatibility option so that your old softwares (like SPSS 10.0) works even on Windows Vista smoothly.

And because of this fact, no Windows will ever be bug-free, because even before the new OS is built its already carrying the older bugs from the previous OS’s core. Microsoft would never be able to built Windows on a clean slate unless it shreds off its past.

Now leaving the past aside and looking at the present (Vista to be precise) the latest OS really seems to be a sad copy of the Mac OS X. The transitions, the icons which have a fold on the top right, the way the text box illuminates every time I click on are crude plagiarisms right from the Mac. Its quite disheartening to know that there can be such similarities between the Mac and Vista. Surely such things wouldn’t have happened out of coincidence! I’m not too dumb to take that. But it just gets you thinking that is there such a dearth of creative heads of Microsoft that they cannot create one stunning GUI without taking the help of Mac?

As a Windows user (out of chance and not out of choice...) I really wish a lot more from these guys. Constant upgrades and support doesn’t show how great the OS is, it only shows how abysmal is the quality that you guys have to give me patches and updates to make sure that my laptop doesn’t conk off anytime soon.!