Microsoft

Microsoft's army of apologists like to spread the word that Linux is a "hobbyists OS", so this post is a look at what that means and why it's a label more suited to Windows. The attack is meant to draw attention to the fact that anyone can write code which appears in Linux, inferring the quality of the code is dubious. Basically, it can't be good quality if people outside the corporation write it.

I saw this promo piece in the BBC about the launch of Microsoft's new Fix-it service and a few things spring to mind. The first is that Microsoft have a long track record of causing more problems than they fix when applying updates. They set Windows to download and apply all critical updates without user intervention. So when a user goes to shut down their PC they have no idea if they have to hang around for 15 mins so that Windows can apply it's updates or not. Similarly they have no idea if those updates will cause a problem when they next start up their PC.

At last, the Tesco self service Windows-kiosk tills have a new innovation; the "I'm using my own bag" button. It seems that between Microsoft and Tesco the penny has finally dropped that some people may actually want to do that and shouldn't need fleshware assistance to do it. Having said that, it still needed manual overrides when I used it. I'm guessing that someone picking up their bag to get a better angle to put their shopping in wasn't thought of as a use case. Still, it's a step in the right direction.

As I stated in my previous post, I bought an MSI Wind yesterday with XP installed, which was wiped and replaced with UNR as soon as I got home. I did have some communications with Argos, Comet, Currys and MSI during my research. I had mixed results, some of which are against UK consumer law as far as I know.

In the mainstream computing world we have Windows, OSX and Linux / BSD. The first two are proprietary, the second two are open source. You can of course run open source applications on both Windows and OSX but the platforms themselves are closed. The question is more about the skill sets and what users are encouraged to do, and how FLOSS users are better suited to a new environment than Windows or OSX users.

For a while now I've been thinking about the way Windows is often pre-installed on new PCs. Most of the time a new PC has two partitions, one with the entire Windows install and users documents, and one with a restore partition. The CD the customer is given with their new PC is a restore CD, not an install CD. This is a way of avoiding giving the customer a full install CD of Windows, which is not good, specially since they paid for a Windows licence built into the price of their PC.

The last couple of weeks saw the release of both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux 9.10, both of whom had people throwing launch parties to celebrate these events but something didn't sit right with me about the idea of Microsoft doing them. It's taken until now to organise my thoughts and explain what I mean.

Like many companies in Microsoft's partner eccosphere, Tesco ensure that your choice is limited to the hardware and software, which mysteriously excludes the OS it runs. Like any PC sellers, they let you know that all PCs are as different as the uses people buy them for. It's why you have a choice of everything from the size of screen to graphics card, or ram to HD capacity. There are plenty of vendors to choose from too, depending on your preference and budget, from ASUS to HP, Toshiba to Acer. Yet the one constant in the equation of "which PC suits your needs" is Windows.

I checked my feeds this morning and found to my surprise that Windows 7 was released today in the UK, ahead of the rest of the world. We currently have postmen and women determined to make life difficult for those who rely on the mail, so copies of Windows 7 were posted early to those who'd ordered them online.