If I had a dime for every time . . . . I find myself muttering that often while sitting there waiting for Windows to finish some inane task, whether it’s giving the hard drive a good workout (aka thrashing), wanting to reboot for no good reason, or upon start up where 67 applications combat each other for the computer’s attention thinking they are more important than me, the user. Microsoft Windows is basically a playground for poorly written software that pays no attention to what the user actually wants to accomplish. Literally, while writing this post, my old Windows laptop I’m copying files from before I wipe the drive clean and install Linux has prompted me with no fewer than 4 dialogs insisting I reboot (and I’m not referring to the incessant “Windows must reboot” dialog after a Windows update either).

Some of my favorite work interruptions: “New Wireless Networks found!” [Click the X to close] Ten seconds later “No, really!! New Wireless Networks found! Aren’t you curious?” [click to close again] “No Wireless Connection found.” Christ! Go the fuck away will you?? Even more fun: after manually shutting off the wifi hardware on your laptop, presuming that, uh, you really want it, uh, off, “No Wireless Networks found.” No shit?!? “There’s a new Java Upate!” “Windows required an update to fix one of a gillion vulnerabilities in its shitty software and decided the hell with you and what you were working on and rebooted anyway.” “Warning! Are you sure you want to quit this crappy software? It provides an essential crappy service and should you decide you wanted to use it, it wouldn’t be hogging all your memory and thrashing your hard drive!” Or my favorite quick-launch executables that run at startup so the programs will launch faster: “Hey if you want Word to startup in less time than it takes to run to Starbucks and get coffee, we recommend you run this quick launch utility, also useful in taking up an inordinate amount of memory. This will only add about 23 minutes to your computer’s start up time.” Or “Macafee SuperVirus has decided you were working on something important so it decided to perform some updates and thrash your hard drive so it could squash competing viruses.” I’ve always liked this one with trying to kill wayward processes: “Haha got you! We displayed this task manager process list to make you think you had control over your machine, but the joke is on you. We’ve decided you’re incapable of making decisions and have determined that the process taking up all your memory, hogging your CPU to the point you could scramble eggs on it, and trashing your hard drive within an inch of its life is in fact a process you cannot Kill at this time. Go wash your car or something and check back later.” I love it when you scan the local network to find a Windows share and Windows basically locks up while searching the network for computers; my Ubuntu box does a faster and more thorough job of finding Windows shares than Windows does which is amusing to say the least. Or my very, very favorite: since I usually am on the go, I close my laptop up putting Windows in standby (which works only part of the time - the other part it just stays on and runs down the battery until it’s dead). It’s safe to say when you turn your computer on or bring it out of standby you may actually want to do something really quick, like look up something on the Internet, shoot off a quick email or read a document. Well you can forget that! When I open up the computer and pray to the Steve Ballmer lunatic gods it will come on at all, it’s pretty much a free for all between various programs deciding that there are much more important things to do that don’t involve me at all (again, usually involving intense hard drive, memory and CPU exercise).

This is the first part of many, delving into the innumerable serious deficiencies regarding Microsoft software at a high level. I promise it won’t only be ranting; I will also discuss specific solutions to each of my rants should Mr. Ballmer and his team read my insights. I’ll touch on ideas that would eliminate the above gripes and discuss further annoyances.

Shit, another dialog box. No I do not want to fucking reboot now and will let you know when I do, so please stop asking!

Business Week has re-released its original story about the importance of Social Media (i.e., blogs). This time, many of the predictions and facts are annotated with updated information snippets. It is certainly an interesting re-read to see how far we’ve come!

I would like to think Steve Ballmer read my damning indictment of him and his company and my recommendations when deciding to share more of the company’s secrets. The New York Times story quotes Ballmer as saying the company was adapting to “the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-oriented world.”

According to the story, by Steve Lohr in today’s Technology section:

Microsoft said on Thursday that it would open up and share many more of its technical secrets with the rest of the software industry and competitors. Microsoft executives, in a conference call, characterized the announcement as a “strategic shift” in the company’s business practices and its handling of technical information . . .

The broader goal, they said, is to bring Microsoft’s flagship personal computer products — the Windows operating system and Office productivity programs — further into the Internet era of computing. Increasingly, people want a seamless flow of documents, data and programming code among desktop PCs and the Internet, especially as they make the shift from using software on a PC to using services on the Web.

The story also quotes Microsoft’s general counsel as saying, “qualitatively and quantitatively different from anything we’ve done in the past.”

I think this is great news, however I am not 100% sure of its sincerity. Did Microsoft finally wake up and realize the world around them or is this some surreptitious strategy to gain regulator approval to pursue Yahoo and continue with business as usual?

I suppose I’m the eternal optimist and hope they really are changing their tune and overall company strategy to fit the realities of the current marketplace. Microsoft has plenty to teach the industry; they certainly have much to learn from it.

We will have to stay tuned and see. Microsoft has much to do to de-vilify itself and step down as the industry bully and consider itself an important part of the technology ecosystem. It needs to become a shepherd of open standards and interoperability. A rising tide of industry-wide innovation will lift all boats and broaden technology’s reach, which will help technology achieve its promise.

Seriously, get a life, SCO and SNCP. In case you haven’t heard, SCO filed chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year as a result of its failed lawsuits against Linux vendors and customers. Now it has courted a new suitor, Stephen Norris Capital Partners, to the tune of $100 million to continue it’s nonsensical war against open source and Linux.

At least companies that put out crappy software and/or fall seriously short in the ethics department still actually try to innovate and compete (e.g., Microsoft - though conspiracy theories abound that say they’re behind all this nonsense). This cause, however, is only about greed, opportunism, desperation, and psychopathy, pure and simple. Perhaps these guys ought to try to better life on the planet with their “largesse.” Perhaps someone could actually innovate with that money. You know, find a cure for cancer, or develop social programs to eliminate poverty. I certainly hope the bankruptcy court sees this for the extortionist fraud it is and severs it off at the head.

Even if their case has some merit (which it certainly doesn’t appear to given what’s transpired and SCO’s own tactics of declaring bankruptcy weeks before going to trial), from a moral perspective what they’re doing is simply wrong. With all that’s at stake, with users and governments around the world benefiting from the spread of free software, this is analogous to a rogue enterprise waging a trillion dollar intellectual property battle to blot out the use of antibiotics. It doesn’t make economic sense, legal sense, or business sense, and smacks of moral turpitude.

I just read Christina’s post about her new phone with T-Mobile and must agree. As my comment states there:

I must agree - t-mobile rocks. I’ve had literally ten (I mean, literally, ten. Really.) cell phone providers and have enjoyed my stay with t-mobile for the last 3 years. When I call, someone answers, chit chats if necessary while solving the problem (i.e., not reading from a script somewhere in India) and fixes it to my satisfaction. No 3 hour hold times (cingular), no arrogant jackass posturing (sprint), nor ineptitude of any kind. I plan on sticking with them for a while!

I thought this post was very interesting, especially given the fact I told my dad he should think about using a blog for his university classes that he teaches. The thought was he could put his syllabi, curriculum, assignments, learning material, tips and much more in a well-suited environment. And he wouldn’t even need to learn HTML (to date he has created online content in MS Word and uploaded the file after saved as HTML; we know what that markup looks like)! It makes perfect sense to me.

I co-founded an online backup company a couple of years ago which targets schools throughout the country to back up their data. As I traveled around to all the big trade shows to see the latest technology tools available to teachers and the education marketplace, I left feeling much of it was the same old, rehashed stuff. In fact I was actually involved several years ago in funding and launching an e-learning company that had a different twist to address this void. Unfortunately our timing was really bad (though there were certainly other issues as well) and it closed its doors. I really think OpenCourseWare built around the WordPress core makes tons of sense. It’s extensible, scalable, and easy to use. I will be keeping an eye on their progress . . .

This is sort of a follow up to my article on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. I encourage you to read (or re-read) that article; the premise is that Google continues to innovate and has fully embraced the open source model of application development and become active in promoting and contributing to the open source community. This is what I believe Microsoft should do if it doesn’t want to go the way of the IBM Selectric. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s proprietary software dogma has reached pathological proportions and it will take a major changing of the guard (that means you, Ballmer) to knock any sense into the executive suite. If Microsoft doesn’t start getting with the open source program (in principle and action), I predict it will be a vestigial semblance of itself in twenty years time. This blog entry demonstrates what Google is doing and why they will continue to rule as long as the innovation continues.

Now here is an example of something so simple it’s stupid (a weird twist on KISS I suppose): hot-swap batteries for your laptop.