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July 27, 2005

I Have a Complaint...

I have a bona fide complaint. A reader sent me an email to say that I wasn't being funny any more because I no longer bag MicroSloth and Windblows. I also don't finish my anti-Microsloth rants with 'Here's a nickel...' and more.

Well the reason is because it is not so much fun any more. Firstly, lots of other people are bagging them out (and rightfully so) and secondly, they are begging for it now with the latest stupid decisions.

Let me show you what I mean. Check out If Operating Systems Were Stores:

Win World Longhorn – This store hasn’t opened yet but Win World Inc. has been promising for the last five years that any day now it will fling open its doors to throngs of adoring shoppers. They keep trying to open their main flagship store in Redmond but every time they think they have it ready it crashes back into rubble. This is due to several fundamental problems with their contractors. For instance, they first tried building the four square mile foundation out of rubber on a major fault line. Next they tried glass walls and cement ceilings. Soon we moved on to fixed product displays and moving floors. After that someone decided to install flood lights in the walls. Great idea but they put in 50,000 watt bulbs which flash fried all of the beta shoppers. They have been trying to rework their new concept store for years and are still no closer to building it.

Amen to that. Then again, how about If Operating Systems Were Cars:
WinCarLonghorn - This car was going to come out shortly after the horde of critical flaws in XP were discovered. This model was to include warp engines, cloaking fields, time travel portals, anti-criminal auto targeting phasers, telepathic interface etc. Sadly, despite legions of workers, no one at WinCar could seem to really implement these ideas. So, after pushing the deadline back by 4 years and cutting most of the features that was to make this model so special WinCar has decided to just rerelease WinXP with a new paint job and hope no one notices.

Amen again. And of course this type of fun and games is inspired by stupidity like this recent announcement:
WFS: Cut
.NET Framework: Cut
MONAD: Cut
Integrated Search: Cut
Avalon: Who knows?
Indigo: Who knows?
IE7: You can repaint a Kia, lower it down, put rims on it and think you are cool, but at the end of the day it is still a Kia.
And so it goes, on and on. Feature after feature is cut, promise after promise is broken, and what do we have at the end of the day? XP SP3. If Microsoft fails to deliver something approaching decent with Longhorn then they will be in trouble. Big trouble. And most people haven’t even realized this yet. But they will soon enough.

So to try and get away from the bad news, Microsloth try to rearrange the deck chairs:
It's not Longhorn anymore. Microsoft today announced that Windows Vista will be the official name of the next version of its flagship operating system, and that beta 1 of the OS will arrive by August 3.
The announcement was made Thursday afternoon at a briefing in Atlanta to some 10,000 Microsoft sales and service employees and then revealed this morning via a video posted on Microsoft's Web site.
"So there's no more Longhorn, we're now officially Windows Vista, Brian Valentine, senior vice president of Windows Core Operating System told the cheering crowd.

I think that was supposed to be "jeering" crowd but the spell-check changed to it cheering. The whole point of that exercise is that now Microslosh can just say "hey, we never promised X would be in Vista" which is true - they promised that X would be in Longhorn but Longhorn is deader than the dodo.

Anyway, the point behind all this is that it might be fun to kick Microslosh occasionally but when they run around bent over with a 'Kick Me' sign taped to their collective butt begging for someone to put the boot in, it sorts of spoils the mood.

Posted by Ozguru at July 27, 2005 06:30 AM

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Comments

So you don't want to pick on the easy targets? Go on, give them a kick while you still can...

Posted by: Rofl at July 27, 2005 10:05 AM

It's like picking on the slow kid in class, it's funny for a little while then it's just sad. M$ is the slow kid in the OS world,

Posted by: skipjack at July 27, 2005 10:59 AM

Hey skipjack, that is an excellent way of phrasing it. I have to remember that for the next rant....

Posted by: Ozguru at July 27, 2005 11:11 AM

Good to see that you ignored your own advice and hammered Windows Vista anyway...

Posted by: Rofl at July 28, 2005 11:08 AM

It was nice to see that you used 3 of my pieces, I feel so honored.

Posted by: James R. Stoup at August 2, 2005 04:07 AM