Opinion Column by PC Magazine: Longhorn’s Missing Snap Factor

The Service Pack 3 line has been very popular recently. Longhorn will motivate a large proportion of the users to seek alternative platforms. I might as well add the statistic that half of all businesses still use Windows 2000, so will Longhorn give a reason to upgrade? Clearly this will be a high hurdle for Microsoft.

Let us wait and see if Dell gets Jobs to agree on Mac OS for third parties. This can easily balance the cost with the added value of security.

My favorite chuckle, reading the permutations discussed by Mac types since the MacIntel revelation, has been the thought, somehow favorable, of folks being able to dual-boot OS X and XP. Excepting the odd gamer who uses the OS to engage in virtual-shoot-em-up endocrine masturbation — and nothing else — what reason on Earth could move someone who has experience with both systems to want to run Windows?

I imagine by the time the quickest end of the Intel spectrum is offered under the Apple brand, Jobs will not only have moved over some of the most popular tales of adventure over to OS X, the new folks recently hired for their games division just might debut something snazzy of their own.

Seems to me that Microsoft is trying to do with OSes what the car industry has long done with cars – make people buy new products that do the same thing just on design alone. Apple does it but in a much better way. However, that’s not the point. The point is that, with the exception of game users, PC performance has long been more than adequate, and most companies (and sensible individuals) will only buy a new PC when the old one stops working or something comes along that doesn’t run on it. That’s one of the reasons why companies aren’t embracing XP, and will not embrace Longhorn. The other is the cost of supporting the damn technology.

Let’s make a few analogies to the car industry.

We all like to have new and cool looking cars. Even if they never broke, we’d still want them, because they look, well, new! But would we want a new, modern looking car, when the old one was also good, and the new one would only make 0.00000000001 miles to the gallon, because it really had to have 12.437.000 bhp to reach 50mph?? Because you see, you need a processor one or two orders of magnitude more powerful / hot / noisier (fan) than what was previously adequate whenever you jump to a new generation MS OS.

The other analogy I’d like to make is – what if the old car just worked, sorta, and you *knew* the new car would give you problems for the first three to four years? Because that’s what happens to everything MS does. Everything. As an example, I’ve been upgrading all of my companies PCs to Office 2003 and I’m bitterly biting that bullet…

And I LIKE MS products. I really do.

And finally, would you drive so often and so merrily if you’d have to call a helpdesk somewhere just so he/she could explain to you how to turn the key, how to shift gears, how to increase and decrease speed, how to open the doors?… Because, as you all know and many managers are only now realising, *that’s* what’s going on in the IT / Windows world! Has any of you done some time as a helpdesker? Does it make sense to have to explain to people how to change their passwords? Reboot Windows? Change fonts in Word? Write a CD?

I don’t think MS or Apple really want out of the featuritis / cool design party, but companies and users just might. When we start realising that by having 20 different ways of doing one thing (and there are millions of things you can do with a PC, all with those 20/30 different ways to get done) cost companies and us real money, maybe then we’ll start having OSes for the people instead of for the geeks. People just want to get their jobs done, many don’t even enjoy their time at a PC, unlikely as it may seem! So maybe we could have ‘user’s OSes’ and ‘IT guys OSes’. Users OSes wouldn’t be ‘dumbed down’ in any way – just streamlined – no ‘hidden’ ways of doing things you could do by going to Control Panel. No right click crazyness. No START to shutdown (what the hell is shutdown anyway?) – just press POWER to switch on, again to power off. Instant on.

THIS IS EASY TO DO, if you’re clever, if you pay attention to the way normal folks think and work! I’m sure MS and Apple could do it in less than a year if they wanted and sell boxes with a TFT, keyboard and mouse for less than $300. It’s just that we’re still dazed and stunned with all the smoke and mirrors.

By staying with the current business model, IT will stay in the doldrums, because the old model of selling more powerfull supercomputers to people to do the same old stuff is going to stop working someday.

My own thought on Micro$oft’s vision is that it is standard marketing. Sell the public something they might need. To do so, the public must be convinced that they will need your product. Then tack on as many frills as possible to maximize profit.

The automobile is a good analogy. Yes, you need a car to get to work, shop the stores, get to the little league game, etc. A basic car will do all that. The automobile companies though, have added on a ton of frills that you don’t need. Such as metallic paint, power windows and seats, 4-speed fans, super high performance engines, and surround sound speakers with a 1000 watt amplifier. Now the more frills added to the basic car, the more things that can go wrong. And the more complicated the interactions the greater the propensity for failures. And the more power needed to run it.

I slightly disagree with the comment that older computers will handle anything except the most modern games. As more and more consumers become involved with video processing, the demand for higher speed and more capacity will continue. I see the cutting edge of PC games as the equivalent of auto racing in the development of improved cars.

But I do agree that almost all other programs should run quite well on older computers. My five yr. old daughter plays her games on a box running WIN ME and a 1.1 AMD Athalon with 500 megs of Ram. This is my old box and only because I had some extra Ram did I put it in her box. I could have used WIN 98 but I did have the unused WIN ME. I still use this machine on occasion such as when my computer is rendering some video and I want to access the internet or type a letter in Office 2000.

What will Longhorn do for me? Or even Apple? I don’t care because I plan on being a Linux user by then. I have had enough aggravation with MS and heard enough about Apple’s problems to say ENOUGH.

Hey Bill, Steve, can you hear the stampede of little feet running from your systems?