Boing Boing: Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel? Cory Doctorow writes: "So that means that if Apple carries on down this path, I'm going to exercise my market power and switch away, and, for the first time since 1979, I won't use an Apple product as my main computer. I may even have my tattoo removed.
My data is my life, and I won't keep it in a strongbox that someone else has the keys for."
Well, I've only been an Apple customer for a few years, but the switch to Intel itself was enough to lose me as a customer. I drank the original Apple Kool-aid.
The note (or apparent note) from Scoble below, or more accurately my response to it, reminded me of how I drank the marketing Kool-Aid from Microsoft back when it pronounced OS/2 (yes, OS/2) as the next great Microsoft operating system. As soon as it hit the streets I got a copy and installed it on my original IBM AT computer that, at the time I think, had a whopping 8 meg of memory and a few hundred meg hard drive, not to mention a blazing 6Mhz 80286 processor.
Not only did the OS work on my minimalistic (at the time though it was an only slightly out of date system) PC, but it ran pretty well, never crashed, and allowed me to run old Windows programs as well as do some scripting that previously I could only do on a mainframe. It really WAS a better Windows. Much better in fact.
I'll skip the history over why IBM and Microsoft went their separate ways once and for all, other than to say that it was the first time I started thinking of Bill Gates as the spoiled rich kid down the street who takes his baseball equipment home after he is not elected captain of one of the teams. Everything Microsoft has done since can be explained by this metaphor, as well as the results, that, like children, people who should know better have caved in to his demands over the intervening years. I think this is a safe rule: It never pays to give in to extortion.
Well I was happy with OS/2 for a number of years. I upgraded my PC, and also upgraded to the newer version of OS/2 that had been "cleaned up" by IBM. The newer version did everything better than the old and continued to run OLD Windows programs just fine. Windows programs that would crash the whole OS in Windows only crashed the emulation box under OS/2, but it was a lot faster and easier to just restart that one application than to have to reboot your entire machine. What this experience proved was that the programmers at Microsoft were not such unique geniuses after all. Their code was sloppy, not well documented (some would say this was intentional) and not all that well designed. I remember IBM Redbook style papers coming out about the clean-up of the Windows APIs with cover functions that assigned them more meaningful names. There was no doubt in my mind that, absent new developments, OS/2 would remain the OS of choice. There were new developments however. Of the marketing kind.
A few years later when I worked at the Department of Energy I encountered like-minded technologists. They used OS/2 and loved it, and they were accomplishing goals of getting energy related data out to the public in a timely manner at lest in part due to OS/2 (they were still using DOS for much of this work too, and I have serious reservations about their competence in this regard). Without exception though, the user community was happy with OS/2.
What I subsequently learned was that this OS/2 community of which I was a part was a shrinking island within the DOE. We were being encouraged to switch to Windows, at the time the buggy and limited Windows for Workgroups which we all knew to be a tremendous step in the wrong direction from where we were. No effort was made to justify this change based on any technological advantage, because there simply was none. Instead we heard that somehow Microsoft would be GIVING us money, in the form of cheap PCs to make the switch. Put simply, if we ever wanted to upgrade our PCs we had to switch to Windows.
At the time I left DOE it was a done deal. I went to another government agency that was farther behind on the glide-path to selecting the wrong technology for the wrong reasons. I stayed there as long as I could stand it, or perhaps as long as they could stand me. I watched in dismay as they paid big bucks for a study that recommended they recode everything in Java only to have them hush-up the report so that they could stick with Windows and third-party development tools that are all-but unsupported now.
As an outsider I cringed when they formally placed their formerly isolated network on the Internet (something we always recommended they avoid doing at all cost) and not 6 months passed before the system had been compromised. Not only is Windows not fit for Internet use, but the typical practitioner of "network administration" in these organizations does not and will never have the experience needed to secure such "open by default" systems. That these systems survive at all is more a tribute to extensive firewalling than anything else. It only takes one careless user to open that door from the inside though, and eventually they will, if they haven't already.
So, that's my "drank the Kool-Aid" story. I drank the Kool-Aid of Microsoft marketing on OS/2 and was glad of it. They told the truth. It WAS a better Windows than Windows. It's only everything that they have said since then that has proven to be false, or at least misleading. I used Windows NT for a while too. NT 3.51 was almost as stable as OS/2. NT 4.0 was, I think, the most tested version of Windows ever released, with driver support being closely coordinated between Microsoft and many many hardware companies. It has been downhill since, although I haven't used any of it since 2000, and I haven't booted Windows at all for more than a year.
I also drank the Apple Kool-Aid regarding the superiority of the Power-PC processor. Not only that, but that notion is backed up by the convergence of PC and mainframe technologies at IBM, which, unlike Microsoft, actually engages in fundamental computing research. I can't speak to how much fundamental research Apple does, I've always seen them as an integrator, not an innovator. That need to integrate is now taking them in a direction I don't want to go, and 5 years from now I suspect many Apple users will agree. But they are too busy with applications, games, or iPods to see this now. They won't know what hit 'em. As was the case with Microsoft I think the marketing hype was valid at some point, when the focus really was on technology and not some hidden agenda. I won't be consuming any of the latest flavors.
I'll be looking carefully at the new 64-bit AMD chips for my next PC and I won't bother running whatever version of Windows it comes with. It will be re-formatted for Linux just as most of my recent PCs have. I only wish I had done so sooner on my new Powerbook, which now has a lot of data to be transfered and probably some driver issues too.
For Second-Life, I have to wonder what sort of pain-in-the-ass it will be to support two fundamentally different version of the Apple computer. At minimum a re-compile, but I also bet a fair amount of tweaking, and we don't REALLY expect those Windows hardware drivers to work do we? I also wonder how a true 64-bit version of SL might look on the AMD chips running in native Linux mode. Will people in hand cuffs and manacles ever be able to run as fast as those of us that choose to be unencumbered? I don't think so.
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