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I have a lot of problems with Microsoft. Moral and practical.

Microsoft Office is the perfect example of why MS is such an awful thing. It's bloatware - a word processor should not take two minutes just to load. On a Pentium 4. With 256 MB of RAM. Something is wrong there. It has too many useless features. I am never going to write Visual Basic in Word, if I wanted to write VB, I'd go get the program for writing VB. (Who writes in VB anyways?)

I am never going to write a webpage in Word. If I need to write the code, there's Notepad. (Which, I might add, I have never seen crash. Know why? It does only what it's supposed to, no whizzyness to get in the way.)

Word should not crash when I am just typing. Word should never crash. It's a damn word processor, what am I doing that's going to screw it up that badly?

PowerPoint is another useless piece of crap. Massive program, and what does it do? Slides. That's it. Hand me the markers and the overhead, please.

Excel doesn't bother me too much, but I don't use it too much. Now what, you are asking yourself, can you do without MS Office? Same things as with, only a lot quicker. There's OpenOffice (which I'm writing this in). It's smaller. It has yet to crash on me. It can open and save in Microsoft format. All the same programs as MS Office, totally free. I like that. I also like that it's open source.

Open source, for those that don't know, means that anyone can have the source code. Usually open source projects are GPL'd, GPL being the General Public License (fsf.org). It basically says that if you change the code a bit and make your own version, that new version has to be open source as well. A preventative measure from companies stealing ideas. Like Microsoft did in the 80s....remember QDOS? Nope. Billy boy bought it, modified it, and sold it as MS-DOS. Remember Netscape? Good browser, at least compared to Internet Explorer. Microsoft leaned on computer manufacturers (Gateway and Dell, for instance) to not install Netscape on their computers. Even if the customer requested it. Then they made IE an integral part of the operating system, so if you're using Windows, you HAVE to have it.

Microsoft Internet Exploder

Don't you just love IE? Follow some kind of tech news for a week. It's THE biggest threat to your computer's safety. They're constantly putting out patches to fix the damn thing. And still, it's a leaky bucket. And there's no getting rid of it.

That's another thing they do. Insecure software. All of it. A friend of mine stopped downloading patches for Windows XP for a few months, and when he started again, it took him a WEEK to get them all. Why put out something that bad, when you could take an extra month and fix the stuff?

Another interesting tidbit: When you run Windows Update on XP, it send Microsoft a list of all the programs on your computer. Not just MS products, EVERYTHING. How long do you think until the RIAA asks them for a list of people running Kazaa?

So what to do? How do you get around all this stuff?

Get a Mac. Get Linux (with Wine, so you can still run all of your old Windows programs). If you can't do that, then use Mozilla or Opera for a web browser. Use OpenOffice or StarOffice for your office suite. Use WinAmp instead of Windows Media Player.

For the love of...er, whatever you curse/praise, don't use MSN! Don't use Hotmail! Don't EVER use anything by Microsoft that has your financial information. That's like walking around South Central LA with a clear garbage bag full of 100s. You're gonna get robbed.

Microsoft is crap. Use something else for a day, and I promise you, you won't ever want to go back.

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I don't think it's fair to say “Microsoft is Crap” any more than it is to say everything made by The Beatles or Ford is good or bad. I am prepared to see good and bad everywhere. I wouldn't say I liked every drink that the Coca Cola Company made more or less than those of any other company, I judge each product on its merits. I use Windows as my operating system because it came with the computer and it (just about) serves my needs, although there are plenty of issues I have with it.

I use Opera as my browser, but sometimes some sites just will not work in anything except Internet Explorer, so I retain it (ha! As if I really have much of a choice! It's built right into the operating system!) I also use Hotmail and MSN Messenger, but I exploit Hotmail shamelessly, barring all incoming mail except the one contact on my contact list, who has been told not to send mail to it. I also exploit MSN by using Trillian for day to day contacts and avoiding all Microsoft's advertisements and paid-for links.

My other use of Microsoft software was Outlook Express, but I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird in March 2005 and see little reason to ever consider going back. I'll give the junk filter another couple of weeks of training and then I'll have it set to automatically delete junk mail.

As for an office suite the same story applies, it came with the computer (have you noticed a pattern here?) and while it is bloated it does get the job done just enough to resist the temptation to invest time or money in something else. I agree wholeheartedly about Word being a bloated monster, most people just don't need that kind of power, the vast majority of users need a limited number of features and more reliability. I'd like to see an office suite coming with more than one text producing program, or even the three that come with Windows and Office (Word, Wordpad/Write and Notepad) a customizable program you can build and compile for your own needs, adding just the mix of feature you actually use. For me that would mean a spellchecker but not auto-correction (I can't stand interruptions!) word count, easy access to special characters, HTML characters and tags, background autosaving of versions and multiple undo, and none of the stuff I don't need, like all those print options (I'm not going to print anything - this is the twenty first century), tables, footnotes, auto date format, drop caps, rulers and last but by no means least that fucking animated paperclip.

Douglas Adams considered the horror of robots and computers with “personalities” and rightly anticipated that whoever was responsible for such an innovation would be first against the wall when the revolution comes. As it might be difficult to find a single person to admit responsibility it may be necessary to stand the entire Microsoft Corporation against that proverbial wall.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited