Windows is User-Friendly? The Hell…?

If being user-friendly was actually an *advantage*, everyone would have switched over to the Mac circa 1988- 1992 at the latest. MSDOS was horribly user hostile, even more user user hostile than unix sans X (the unix CLI is at least *powerful* and cryptic- the DOS CLI was powerless and cryptic). There was just no comparison. It wasn’t until 1995 that Microsoft managed to finally release an OS that could be claimed, with a straight face, to be as user friendly as the Mac. The fact that users were willing to stick with an obviously inferior Microsoft operating systems for a decade says that being user friendly is overrated as an advantage (at least).

So what does Microsoft offer? I would argue: a *lack* of choice. This sounds weird, but bear with me. Microsoft is effectively a co-inheritor (with Intel) of the IBM monopoly in computers. The first computer IBM shipped more than a dozen units of, where they didn’t make the CPU and write the OS, was the IBM PC- A mistake they never recovered from. And the thing they used to say was that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. IBM was the safe choice. Not necessarily the best, or even a good, choice, but the safe choice. You didn’t need to know anything about technology to make IT decisions- all you needed to know was IBM’s phone number.

This is what Microsoft offers, more so than anything else, to the vast majority of it’s users: a “safe” choice. And the only way for it to truely be a safe choice is that it is the only choice. Because if there was a choice, and you choose A over B, and things go south, then maybe they wouldn’t have gone south if you had choosen B instead- especially if you can’t explain why you choose A instead of B. Thus any choice is not a safe choice. But if there wasn’t a choice, if there wasn’t B, then it’s not your fault if things go south- there was nothing else you can do.

Which, I think, is the danger introduced by Linux- and why so many column inches and kilobytes are being expended explaining why, facts to the contrary, Linux really isn’t a choice. Because if there is a choice, there is the danger of a wrong choice. Even worse, even if you take Microsoft off the table, you still have a choice- *which* linux? Redhat? Suse? Debian? Ubuntu? One of the other Linuxs? Or maybe one of the BSDs? Gnome or KDE? Emacs or vi? Postgresql or Mysql? C++ or Java or C#? Perl, Python, or Ruby?

Note that Microsoft produces a number of products- acess vr.s ms sql server, C++ vr.s C# vr.s VB, Windows home vr.s pro vr.s server, etc. – but it is carefull to never compete with itself. For any given situation, there is only one solution, and Microsoft will tell you which one it is. Open source will wildly compete with itself no problem- witness gnome v. kde, or python v. ruby, or emacs v. vi. In all three cases, the “solution set” provided by the different open source projects are almost completely identical (and, generally, if you use one, you can replace it with the other). Name a situation where Microsoft allows that to happen. The closest you can come is the C++/C#/VB situation- but even there, witness how Microsoft is “positioning” the languages. C++ is for “he-man” programmers and systems programming and the parts of the program that need to be seriously high speed. C# is for your professional applications level programmer. VB is for your non-programmer needing to do some scripting. Don’t worry, you don’t have to make any decisions- Microsoft will tell you what it right for you.