You know, with reference to the article below, I think there may be a way that Microsoft can kiss and make up with that part of the IT world (and I do mean world) who are not so easily swayed by marketing.
I have an old friend that I stay in touch with by e-mail. We were both "in the business"... IT business... for a good while, working together for a dozen years or more. I shared a statistic with him the other day that: a larger percentage of Windows users now feel that Microsoft is at least partially responsible for all the mal-ware we find on the Internet these days. For the first time, he didn't scoff at that notion. Progress. Although I've given up on trying to convince him or anyone else to change browsers, word processing programs, or especially operating systems. After you are identified as a fanatic, you, and everything you say are all the more easily dismissed.
I didn't arrive at my fanaticism overnight. Half of my IT career, though not the most lucrative half, was concerned with PCs, and for half of that half, I was as much fond of Microsoft as the next person. I didn't conclude that Windows was basically unstable by flipping a coin. I WANTED my Windows 95 system to work better. After eagerly abandoning Windows for Workgroups along with everyone else that got the chance I wanted a real operating system and looked for in in the form of Windows 95, and then Windows 98 and then Windows NT, ME, 2000, and that is where I called a halt to it. I've only booted XP one time in my life and that was just prior to reformatting the disk and installing Linux on a new HP computer. For my personal machines I've never gone back, but at work I was forced to use Windows for another couple of years. No more.
Prior to that I figure I may have booted Windows in one form or another 50 thousand times or so and re-installed it 1000 times or so. I was a fanatic about re-installing too. While others might tinker with registry settings and replace individual DLLs on a never ending trial and error basis, I was determined that there MUST be a way to do an initial install of the thing, followed by a few tweaks of course, and then for ever after it would be "just right". That magical moment never happened. I still don't know what happened to Goldie Locks either, but if she is alive she is probably still running Windows and rebooting it regularly.
Now there is some old saying that goes like "you're not paranoid if they are really out to get you" and Windows (reading about other peoples use of Windows that is) brings this saying to mind often. Not only are there a lot of "attacks" going on constantly on the Internet, but even more frequently someone is affected, one way or the other by the fear of such an attack. My non-fanatical friends have installed virus scanners, software firewalls, ad blockers, pop-up blockers. I have none of these things, although I do have a hardware firewall which came with my DSL router.
I don't feel particularly exposed without all these things. Although I've heard that there are Linux and OS X viruses I've had very little luck finding a description of one. They must be pretty well kept secrets. All the virus scanners I've found for those two environments seem to be scanning my machine for Windows viruses. Of course I don't want to pass on some infection, which I could, by forwarding some infected email from my inbox to some poor Windows user. But I rarely forward mail with attachments anyway, and when I do they are almost always Jpeg files. I don't think I represent a threat to society for not first scanning such files.
Call me a bad citizen, but I don't see the wisdom of leaving something running in the background using up CPU cycles looking for something that almost certainly doesn't exist. The fact that most, in fact almost all Windows users routinely do such things without questioning it leads me to think that it is really THEY who are the fanatics. They've long ago stopped questioning the rationality of the position they find themselves in. "Oh, just buy they few extra programs, dedicate an hour or so each day to this maintenance activity, don't look at this type of file or that, and maybe your system will be OK." Maybe.
Yesterday I got an e-mail from my Windows-user buddy. It was about some amusing encounter he had. I sent him a link to an old old web page I knew of with useful information for him. Today he responded that he can't view the page. To do so would require him to disable his pop-up blocker and he dares not do that. I wouldn't dare do it either were I in his position. Even though I know there are no pop-ups on that page, and no malicious software there (on that page). But if I advise him to disable his pop-up blocker, and something is already wrong with his machine, which suddenly gets worse... who is going to get blamed? One thing for sure it will not likely be Bill Gates. Conversation ends.
Conversations end, accusations are made, paranoia strikes deep. One guy I was helping with his computer was showing me something "funny" about his system. I don't even remember what he was trying to show me because I got sidetracked by the fact that his IE browser didn't have an Address bar. You couldn't type in a URL. No way. And I was puzzling about why. But he said never mind that. He didn't WANT an address line. You could get into too much trouble typing those in he said. When he launched Internet Explorer, some page provided by his ISP came up and he would just type in search strings (going to Google or Yahoo or who knows where) to navigate to wherever he wanted (eventually). Somehow, he thought this was safer. And in the cockamamie world of Windows, maybe it is. I had trouble not laughing out loud as I left him to his explorations.
So, I had this idea. I mean really, the people I help with their computers, even the former IT ones. They have no clue about browsers. Microsoft won. They put Netscape out of business, and they are not about to use an alternate browser unless they see Bill Gates shit the CD ROMs out of his own personal ass.
And that, well, not exactly that, but something like that is what I recommend to Microsoft. You don't NEED Internet Explorer any more, nor does anyone else in their right mind. You've got all this crap embedded in Windows that you must now warn people to disable if they are going to be on any kind of network. Do YOU, Microsoft, need that aggravation? Certainly the rest of us on the Internet don't. So don't fix that piece of junk. Jettison it. Make Firefox the default Windows browser. Keep the old IE as part of your Windows "distro" for a while just in case, but warn users to avoid using it at all costs. Maybe the first time they launch it (if they can find it buried down in some "other utilities" section of the menus) it should pop-up a special message that says something like: "Are you SURE you want to use Internet Explorer? It is very insecure and its use could make your system unstable necessitating a full re-install and losing all work you have ever done, forever."
That would be a good first step Microsoft. We would know that you really care about your users, and aren't "out to get" the rest of us on the Information Superhighway. Thanks for thinking of us. Please drive through.
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