(No Title)

6/7/2005

CNET: “What about for business buyers? What’s your elevator pitch to those customers? Why should they buy Longhorn?”
Ballmer: “The dynamic is that the end user gets excited about it because they use it at home. And all business decision makers and IT people are end users. The end users are excited by the new shell… The new user interface-kind of sexy, kind of cool.”

So, Apple’s on x86 and Microsoft is touting eye candy as the primary motivating factor for businesses purchasing the next-generation Windows OS. Somebody please right the world again for me. I long for the simplistic mid to late-90’s, where Mac’s were for incompetent artsy-fartsy users, Linux was for hackers of the higher order, and MS was the only choice… and not a bad one at that.

I feel like Windows ME was underrated post facto. Yes, it became unstable after a year or so even with de-frag/scandisk/etc, but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. It’s my belief that all computers should be refreshed at least once a year. Windows 2000 was not as good as everybody makes it out to be (lacked nice included features of XP like drag-drop CD burning), but since businesses bought in (and smartly so), it has a good reputation. XP Home is a pretty unfortunate system that does its job well. XP Pro is especially beautiful, and even more so considering that once you tire of the blue taskbar you can switch back to Windows 2000 look and feel.

So why the emphasis on eye candy? I theorize it is due to what I might term “feature saturation.” We have DirectX, COM, DCOM, XML Web Services/SOAP, ActiveX, .Net, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. But the “nauseum” is literal. Our “Wintel” (ha ha) machines are vomiting acronym-based technologies that we have no cause to use and no balls to discard. Because who knows if some random company is using some custom “solution” based on these technologies.

.Net was the platform to end all platforms. Too bad MS doesn’t have the cajones to build more of Longhorn on top of it. .Net should equate to the Java VM, but it has a core flaw (in my humble and only limitedly-experienced opinion): .Net is not friendly enough to cross-platform portability. I find it offensive that the “common language runtime” or CLR has a Windows.Forms library when everything else is abstracted above the system configuration layer. Why not a Qt/GTK/Swing -ish cross-platform graphics abstraction layer that could be implemented atop any graphics system?

The answer is arrogance. And Mono hate/FUD. But I digress.

My point is that Windows technology in itself is saturated. Whatever .Net cannot do should be added to .Net. The Windows kernel should not depend upon the .Net framework, but almost everything else should. If .Net is too slow for this (it’s not, in truth), then why in the heck are they selling it? The Mono project should provide a compatibility layer between .Net Windows apps and the Linux/BSD OS. This allows MS to sell legal Office licenses (for some future, .Net-based version) to Linux users, which is probably more lucrative than Windows itself. It also finally kills off the Wine project, which was noble but a bit silly.

And the end user is not learning jackedy squat any more. What’s .Net? What’s Avalon? What’s WinFS? Why do I want it? Will it make my Internet faster? Will it make those “security center” things stop showing up that have been there since my neighbor upgraded my CPU to SP2? The reason they’re not learning is that it is not necessary. The least common denominator prevails. Even our friends the script-kiddie 1337 h4×0rz don’t really care about technologies. It’s pointless, just a way to sell MSCE certifications and 1000 page Que books.

What I see right now is a boatload of irrelevant MIS/BCIS/whatever majors who know nothing about the work itself, care nothing about computers, and only know to call the guys who know and accept the lowest bid.

Above these morons is a technocracy of consultants and developers, which is increasingly alienated by “MS Bad Thing (fill in the blank).” The ones who are worth their salt are already running Linux, BSD, or OS X at home and only hack ASP or C# at work because it pays the tuition and buys the Volvo. .Net is good, but it’s not typically a whole lot of fun. In fact, it’s easy enough that it takes the heavy challenges out of coding. There is some great stuff out there still, but the majority of business coding is database interfaces and simple, if-then logic. Lots of grunt work.

.Net thrives on this deterministic-type object oriented programming. I know. I wrote one.

Anyway, pointless rant. Just amazed that UI is the critical factor right now, with Moore’s law chugging away and all this untapped possibility out there.