Microsoft Can Kiss My Arse

This week sees the launch of Microsoft's latest operating system, the imaginatively titled '7'. I wonder how many millions they spent coming to that decision ? I've been very critical of Microsoft's products on this blog, because I feel that they have taken advantage of their near monopoly by releasing a string of sloppy, badly written and over priced garbage. Those of us that remember the horrors of Windows 95 and 98 should not be surprised at this, and the less said about 2000 the better.

But with XP, the OS that I still use, they did something that most of us felt was beyond them, they created a decent piece of software. And while it is far from perfect it's a damn sight better than what went before. And XP started to help restore their reputation. Until of course the disaster that was Vista. Suddenly they were actively forcing people (Halo 2 anyone ?) to upgrade to something that was incompatible with the majority of their software and peripherals. This might have been a recoverable position if the OS itself wasn't so appalling. I have Vista running right now, on a laptop beside me, and it has just crashed for the third time today. It's slow, unstable and insultingly inept. And even though it does little else but update itself, it never ever gets any better !!!

So now we have Windows 7, a piece of software that MS are rightly worried about. Most of its vast success over the years can be attributed to Windows, and if people stop using that then MS are well and truly screwed. And now they have competition, Google have an OS out soon, the Mac OS is streets better than Windows and always has been, but most dangerous of all, cloud computing is on the near horizon and could make all OS software obsolete. For those of you who don't know, cloud computing is the concept of using the internet to use all your software, to do e-mail and to store all your data. Your home computer will be nothing more than a terminal to log into the web, which in turn will take care of your storage, processing power and everything else. Thus it won't really matter what software is on your machine, only which website you direct it to.

Google already operate partly in this way, and they are due to take it forward, but that's perhaps a year or two in the future. Until then we will still need to choose an OS for home. And I for one will not be choosing Windows 7, even if it's the improvement over Vista that they say it is. Why ? Simple, because what Win 7 effectively seems to be is the version of Vista that we should have had to start with. It looks and sounds the same as Vista, and despite a lot of new features, it seems to be disturbingly similar to its hated predecessor. What I suspect Win 7 is, is a giant patch that will bring Vista up to the level of the competition. So why is it being priced as a new piece of software because I think it should be given away free to all Vista users as an apology ? Well because of course MS would go bust if they did that. But I shan't be buying it thanks. Unless I win it in a competition I shall stick with XP until either the end of time or the moment that I can afford to buy a Mac (although I'm not sure which of those events will occur first). In the meantime Microsoft, pucker up, I'm presenting my buttocks to you right now.