I No Longer Hate Microsoft

Why should you let Microsoft ruin an otherwise perfect day?

Roblimo’s Hideaway

When I was younger, I got together with friends now and then for an evening of drinking beer and discussing the perfidy of Microsoft and just how bad Windows was technically, especially considering the endless amount of R&D money poured into it.

Nowadays I am tired of hating, and if I decide to take it up again as a hobby I can think of many better targets for my bile than Microsoft. Really. Certain terrorist groups, American politicians we won’t name here, and N. Korean dictators are all worse than Microsoft when it comes to pure “ruin the world” evil. Even worse, Bill Gates has gone from exploiter and astroturfer-in-chief to (possibly) the most generous philanthropist in history.

I mean, how can you hate someone who goes around wiping out deadly diseases?

That depends on how long a memory you have, and mine can go to the moon and back, no problem, so Microsoft astroturf makes me madder today than it did when it was fresh because it was the original “fake news” that started chipping away at people’s trust in American journalism — and you know where that led.

But I don’t think anyone at Microsoft anticipated the 2016/2017 political scene back when they started down the highway to astroturf. They just wanted people to believe Windows was more reliable than it really was, and that Microsoft was a benevolent uncle of a company, not a greedy, grasping corporate monster.

And then something amazing happened…

Windows kept some of its worst malignancies intact, including its need to be rebooted half a dozen times on every install, but the past few versions have been fairly stable. I have Windows and Linux running side-by-side on my desk, and I can’t say that I notice the old Windows/Linux pattern, where Windows crashes at least once a day while Linux just goes (as the song says) “on and on…”

I personally attribute this improvement in Windows to Linux. All that good stuff about competition, you know. So yes, every Windows user should say “thank you” to every Linux developer. It won’t happen, but I’ve long thought it should.

Anyway, Linux and Windows are both far more usable by ordinary people than either one was 10 years ago. So why should I hate Windows or Microsoft? It doesn’t do any good.

Besides, I now do nearly half of my “computing” in Android. Should I start hating Android now?

I don’t think so. Aside from anything else, I’m just too old to waste my time hating — although if you want to hate Microsoft a little for me, purely for old time’s sake, I won’t get in your way.

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