Microsoft's Ballmer: Windows 7 is nearly final: "The new operating system—which could be available for purchase on PCs within a year—uses much of the same underlying technology as its predecessor, the much-maligned Vista. But Windows 7 aims to resolve many problems PC users had with Vista. For instance, Microsoft pledges to make it easier to install peripheral devices and to have the software pump out fewer annoying warnings and notifications.
Ballmer also pledged that Windows 7 will boot faster and drain laptop batteries more slowly.
'I believe Windows will remain at the center of people's technological solar system,' Ballmer said. 'We're putting in all the right ingredients: simplicity, reliability and speed, and we're working hard to get it right and to get it ready.'"
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To me, Windows is the life-destroying, energy-sucking black hole at the center of our technological galaxy, and I am trying to get my little Millenium Falcon moving at light speed in the opposite direction. Unfortunately Microsoft has successfully metastasized this monstrosity--and the even more execrable Microsoft Word--throughout the institutions of higher education, law, and government. That makes a full blown escape impossible.
3 comments:
I have a couple of solutions to the Windoze problem. I am writing this on a MacIntosh, one really great solution. The other is Linux. Both operating systems are more stable and secure than anything that has come out of Redmond.
You said, and I quote verbatim "To me, Windows is the life-destroying, energy-sucking black hole at the center of our technological galaxy..."
Why does this make me think of homeowner associations? Are they not energy-sucking black holes as well?
Open Office (www.openoffice.org) is a good replacement for Microsoft Office, by the way, and the price of Open Office is much more agreeable.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I already know about all of them. I'm writing this on a Mac, too. The problem is not what I'm doing. The problem is what my employers and my professions are doing. I have to be able to work easily and quickly with manuscripts written by other people and sent to me by publishers. I have to read them and review them. They are always Word documents. And I have to fill out all sorts of forms that were done on Word. I could go on and on, but the situation is that Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel have become the standard programs, even though the Office suite and the ghastly operating system that supports it are nothing but trouble. How about this...will Open Office handle without problems any kind of Word/Excel/Powerpoint document, let you work with it on Open Office, and then save it in the original Microsoft format?
As for HOAs, I see your point and the same thing occurred to me. Here you have a set of tasks that once were done one way, and are now done another way, but by a non-optimal means. If the typewriter is local government, private/public substitutes are the computer. But the form of HOAs and condo associations we use are a non-optimal form that has been adopted industrywide...like Microsoft Word. What we need is to get the CID equivalent of WordPerfect!
One shouldn't be surprised by the actions of Microsoft. Didn't Adam Smith write over 200 years ago that the equilibrium state of a market economy is monopoly.
This is similar to the actions of IBM 40 years ago when central processing was the only game in town. The irony is that IBM's monopoly was broken in part by personal computing and Microsoft.
I agree with the first comment that open source software, Linux, Macs and other developments will result is less dependence on Microsoft products. Linux, Open Office and Firefox are examples of open source at work. Excellent translators are available to convert Microsoft files to other formats.
Monopolies ultimately fail and usually fail with a hard fall.
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