One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Every day, the same thing: I got Vista and now all my shit doesn’t work. What do I do? What do you mean, Vista can’t do X or Y or Z? I PAID MONEY FOR THIS OS, WHY DOESN’T IT WORK?

When I hear things like this, I immediately lose all respect for the customer. Not only do they obviously not consider it important to understand anything about how the ridiculously complicated TOOL they just bought works, but they don’t pay any goddamn attention to history. History is important. Those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it, and it’s more than just a cliche phrase. It should be a way of life.

My upgrade resume, on the Microsoft side of things, sits somewhere around here:
DOS 3.3 -> 4.01 -> 5.0 -> 6.0
Windows 3.0 -> 3.1 -> WfW 3.11 -> 95 -> 98
Windows NT 3.51 -> NT 4 -> 2000 -> XP -> Vista

By my count that’s eleven upgrades from three major chains. Not a single one of these went off hitch-free. We were wrangling DOS apps back in the day that wouldn’t work on 5 correctly. And every single Windows upgrade, period, caused all sorts of havoc of this nature. This is not even remotely new. So let’s investigate some truths.

Your Hardware Manufacturers Don’t Give A Fuck About Your Needs. HP doesn’t care if your three year old Deskjet doesn’t work in Vista. Canon doesn’t care about your scanner, and the modem manufacturer that made that generic piece of shit you bought on sale at OfficeMax is probably out of business, and sure as fuck wouldn’t care about you if they weren’t.

Your Hardware OEM Is Paddling Up Shit Creek In A Boat Beside You. Hardware OEMs buy parts from hardware manufacturers (see above) and similarly are at the mercy of the aforementioned hardware manufacturers (see above.)

Microsoft Doesn’t Give A Fuck About Your Needs. They’re in it to make money. Their own software may or may not work on Vista. I haven’t tried installing a copy of Office 97, but I’m betting it isn’t going to work. In addition, it is inevitable they will have added many features to the OS that sounded like a really good idea at the time, but have zero to negative effect. In particular, with Vista, they have added many features to the OS that benefit only the copyright control cops, that provide you with no tangible benefit whatsoever (but will conveniently provide you with lots of handy problems.)

Software Companies Don’t… you get it by now, right? OS upgrades are a guaranteed chance to make money, because you can just say “Your version doesn’t work with Vista, here, buy this upgrade for $299.99.” It’s like Christmas. You could steal City Hall.

Your Existing Desktop Would Have Worked Just Fine, Fuckass. Seriously. Unless you live on the cutting fucking edge, you communicate by consuming electrons and shitting them into nicely organized packets, and you know more about the physics of CS Source’s Arctic Warfare Magnum than you do about your own cock, your old OS is working just fine right where you left it. Tried Windows 2000 lately? It’s surprisingly functional, save of course for the lack of DirectX (which you hardly need if your primary application is Quickbooks) and it’s also surprisingly stable. Oh, and dear fucking Christ is it ever fast. If everybody’s talking about how snappy Aero Glass is with hardware acceleration, wait until you see 2K fly on a Geforce 4. It’s like a rabid badger on PCP, and that’s still 3 year old hardware.

Why do we let Microsoft do this to us over and over again? Why do we suffer through all this shit?

(well, other than those of us who are perfectly happy with our Macs and/or Ubuntu installs, and love to point and laugh at all you poor Windows suckers struggling to get a simple day’s work done)

Well, partially, because in the end we really hope it does live up to the hype, and that somehow it will make our lives easier. And in an odd way, it does. Speaking as someone who’s come up through the ranks, I can say unequivocally that it’s a half-truth. New OS’s have always been two steps forward, one step back: lots of features that are awesome, and some that leave you scratching your head wondering how many idiotic committees it took to think this horseshit up. I wouldn’t want to go back to NT 3.51 by any means, but I’m still going to laugh at the fools that venture forth to tread on Vista’s beds of hot coals. Hope you can run fast.