I have had it with Microsoft. Allow me to explain… (he said, with a theatrical flourish).
If you read these post (rants) you know already that Micrisoft isn’t exactly at the top of my Ethical Companies list. Not since Mr Gates retired from control of the thing. Without his vision and his desire to uplift the Human Race, Microsoft has fallen, just like a certain angel did way back when.
Ever since Bill left the company I have watched the quality and rational thought (i.e., good engineering) gradually leaking out of Windows and all the rest of Microsoft’s products. With Windows 11 its gone positively wonky. Windows 11, in fact, has fallen flat with a dull thud that was heard around the World (and laughed at by those in the Know).
What got me in that Mood today was when I ran into another (yet another) bug in a program I’ve been using for years and I realized that the Bug is why M$FT has actually replaced that old standard with something “new and improved” but actually built by an outside company and is far less intuitive and far more bizarre to try to use. Instead of fixing a relatively simple bug, they replaced the whole thing, shattering a long-time standard way of doing things, under Windows. So much for serving the consumer.
Microsoft is living a Lie. They are lying to their customers, to their employees (actually, many of them know the Truth, but the younger ones almost certainly won’t unless they hold higher levels of training in computers than is actually required [or even encouraged] any more in the computer industry. And they lie to the Stock Holders, which is technically a crime. Only the FTC is another organization that no longer seems to know what its job is, or used to be at least.
I just purchased a very high end desktop computer. Very expensive, bleeding-edge technology (as we old pros in the computer industry say) and I’ll be danged if I’m going to have any part of its 6 billion instruction cycles a second wasted by Microsoft’s laziness, Corporate attitude and Legal Graft. I’ll leave that for my already-corrupted less expensive computers.
Here’s the punch line for you (sort of): You can put Linux on a computer, install the “Windows compatibility software” for Linux, which lets many Windows things run under Linux, then bring up some Windows software and even with all that, those programs now (quite often) run faster than they do natively under Windows.
That should be outrageously embarrassing to Microsoft management at all levels, but truth is I doubt they know or care. Very unprofessional.
This is not so much a tribute to Linux (unless actually doing your job to the best of your ability is that praise worthy — that’s actually just professional, in the old and professional definition of the word) as it is proof of how far Windows has sunk since Bill Gates was ousted. But even that can’t fix the 100s of thousands of Bugs lurking around in M$FT’s product line. No exaggeration, I know the internal bug list (last time I had it verified) is in the six figures. In a company where the programmers are not allowed to work on bugs.
Microsoft releases “security and quality” fixes and totally avoids the word “bug.” Believe me, those are bug fixes and only the very, very most essential ones, the ones the Big Clients object to, not the ones the 90% of Windows users object to get fixed — because the average user is just little fish. That means you, by the way, as per Microsoft’s (and most large corporations these days) attitude toward the general consumer.
Advice: if you are in any way up for being a little adventurous, buy a cheap new computer, scrub the hard drive (it probably comes with Windows 11 Home edition, which is in two ways only good for throwing away anyway: 11 and “Home” edition) and install Debian Linux on it. Then play around with it. If you get used to it, and then go back to a Windows machine it will gradually dawn on you how much the problems and difficulty you’ve been have with the computer is Windows, and not you.
Microsoft: you stink. You lie about your products, even though in the last 2-and-something years you have spent $100 billiion on acquiring companies with far higher engineering ethics than your own, rather than spending 2% of that to improve and certify the quality of your own products. Shame on you! When billions upon billions of computers around the world are dependent on your systems, you MUST make sure they are as perfect as humanly possible. A single bad update or a bug in some critical system in Windows and the entire infrastructure of modern life could be irreparably harmed, millions of deaths could happen if Windows stopped working. Doesn’t that responsibility scare you? If it doesn’t, then change professions. Fast.
Microsoft: If the responsibility of what you are doing doesn’t scare
you silly, then you need to change professions, very, very fast.
By the way, recent reports do show that Windows is losing market share at a fast pace now. Linux is on the upswing. So are Apples, which operating system is (ta-da!) based on Linux! So is Android based on Linux, so is ChomeOS, so is… well, I don’t need to go on, do I? Windows is only rogue OS on the planet and in many ways technically no longer qualifies as an Operating System. (More like an advertising portal for Microsoft & Greed, Inc.)
Why are they losing market share? For all the above reasons, and many more. Higher-end users are fed up with the Bugs, the Lunacy and with spending Big Dollars on faster machines to try to make up for Microsoft’s laziness and unprofessionalism.
Dear Stock Holder: please find ethical and good-of-the-future oriented companies to invest your money in. DO NOT INVEST IN GREED! In the long run we all lose. That’s not exactly rocket science to figure out.
So there…
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