Basic Instructions on Windows Vista Wednesday, October 08, 2008

I found Basic Instructions when Scott Adams (Scott – your site is painfully slow) recommended it sometime back in August. Today's is about Windows Vista.

Now, you may have noticed that Microsoft has been trying some new advertising strategies. There was The Mojave Experiment which took a we secretly replaced this fine restaurant's usual coffee with Folgers Crystals approach. I was swayed, but then I read "Call me Fishmeal" and Joe Wilcox who convinced me that the campaign is wrongheaded.

Then they tried Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. I personally like Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld so I liked the ads. But I'll admit: the message was less than clear.

Now there's "I'm a PC", which, while better, arguably is just doing Apple's work for them. But there could be something to trying to coopt the enemy's strategy.

I'm a Windows evangelist because I think Microsoft has done something few other technology companies have: created vast suites of software that truly interoperate. I agree with the Linux purists that open standards should be preferred to corporate agendas, but Microsoft's powerful market share demonstrated what an office productivity suite looked like. They won the office desktop, I don't think anyone can disagree with that.

But these ads don't play to the brand's strength: omnipresence, familiarity, business clout. Maybe they want to seem friendlier, like their cuter neighbors, the Macs. But that's not what geeks do. But if Bill Gates taught us anything, it's that the geeks could inherit the Earth.

The Unix Philosophy Tuesday, January 29, 2008

This is one of the most concise and practical articles on technical philosophy I have ever read. It's an excerpt from The Art of Unix Programming (that's a full-text link; Amazon link here) and it describes an overall methodology for solving complex programming problems: keep it simple. Effective software isn't cute, it isn't clever, and it isn't hard to understand. Effective software is written such that it does precisely what it is supposed to – no more and no less. Computers are tools that help us do human work; each piece in the workflow chain should work as expected or tell us why it cannot. The human sitting at the keyboard should understand what is happening so that computer can assist him.

Being a man who has sold his soul to Microsoft, you might think this a strange recommendation. After all, isn't the Redmond Behemoth known for at least stretching (if not throttling, bludgeoning and stomping on) these rules of minimalism? Perhaps. But I think what Microsoft has done well is demonstrate to the programming community that "least astonishment" from a user point of view is something quite different from what it means to an engineer. I recommend every programmer of every stripe read The Basics of the Unix Philosophy.

Bill Gates Knighted Thursday, March 03, 2005

Maybe I don't get the whole knighting thing, but it seems to me that this is just further proof that a knighthood is nothing more than an acknowledgement of fame. I find myself wondering... why does the Queen of England feel it necessary to bestow such a great honor on mere celebrities?

Not to say that all celebrity knightings are bogus. For instance, Paul McCartney, IMHO, was a good choice. He's British, at least, and has had arguably one of the most influential musical careers of anyone in the last fifty years. But do people like Bill Gates, Elton John and Rudy Giuliani belong in the same category?