A Cold Day in Hell--Well, New York's Times Square

Published: January 30, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I'll admit it. Even after standing in the 15 degree windy iciness of Times Square yesterday at Microsoft's Windows Vista announcement, it is very hard to not be sucked up into the excitement of a slick, new operating system. It is always interesting to be in the same room with the richest man in the world, too, and I won't lie--it is mainly because so few of the 6.5 billion people on the planet can say that sentence.

But don't get the wrong idea. I do not worship Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, chairman, and chief software architect, and I certainly do not have anything but grudging respect for his sidekick, Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer. I was a beta tester for the early editions of the Windows add-on for DOS way back in the late 1980s, and I run my business in an Excel spreadsheet and have for more than a decade. I have been balancing the home books in an Excel sheet since I got my first Windows-based PC in 1989. I had early access to DOS 4 and DOS 5 and Windows 2.89 and 3.0. When Windows 3.1 came on the market, it was the first time I had what I would call a rocketsled machine--based on a 33 MHz 80486--and it was the first time, after writing about Unix workstations for years, that I had a machine that was as capable in many ways as a Unix workstation. And like millions of us, I was rooting for Microsoft to take on the proprietary and Unix platform vendors to make a good, affordable platform.

Some time around the advent of the commercialized Internet and the launch of Windows 95 and Office 2005, both Microsoft and I changed. Regardless of what the courts ruled, I think Microsoft tied a browser to an operating system and drove a potentially huge competitor--Netscape Communications--out of business, which is synonymous with being acquired by America Online. I still used Windows, moving from Windows 95, to Windows 98, to Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, to Windows 2000, to Windows XP Pro. By the time Linux came along in the late 1990s, I was exposed to the open source movement and have been rooting for Linux since then, even though Linux is an alien environment compared to Windows and even though Linux has been a disappointment.

When Windows Vista was launched last November, I said it would be a cold day in hell before I upgraded to Windows Vista. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do not need my money. That's for sure. I have a reasonably stable although sometimes cranky Windows XP workstation, and it has paid for itself over the years. I have done software upgrades enough to know that they are a big pain. It never works out smoothly--Unix, Windows, Linux, or otherwise. I am not changing just because an interface is slicker. I am also taking baby steps in a move to Linux, putting Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on my laptop, which I have used as a Linux testing machine for years.

Yesterday as we all waited for what seemed like an eternity in the line to get into the Vista Extravaganza at the Nokia Theatre, we were not at all like the people that Microsoft showed in its television commercials, which it previewed. "The Wow starts now!" is the Microsoft slogan for Vista, which is being aimed more at consumers because commercial users have basically said that they will have a slow uptake for Vista's business editions precisely because it requires more iron and more money for questionable value to the end user experience of answering emails, typing documents, and surfing at work like most employees are not supposed to do but do anyway.

When I am surprised or in awe of something, I don't say "Wow." I usually say one of a few expletives, which are on a spectrum of intensity--a kind of colorful language rainbow. Some are monosyllabic, some have more syllables, and sometimes this is all strung together with equally colorful and sometimes unexpected adjectives and adverbs--and if I am really riled up, with a Brooklyn accent that I appear to have inherited from Bugs Bunny. Given this, my exclamation would have been "The #@$##! ^^%$##@ *~^%$# starts now, %$%%$#@#@!!" and that is at least more interesting and more accurate when talking about an IT upgrade.

What most people standing near me in the line along Broadway, where dozens of New York's Finest were dressed warmly to make sure us nerds didn't get out of hand, were saying as they waited was not a clean as "Wow!" There was a lot of disbelief that they wouldn't let us into the theatre where it was warm, there was a considerable amount of cursing, and then, as we finally got to the door, there was even more disbelief and cursing as we realized that they set the signup tables outside on 45th Street. This meant that the people trying to get us our badges were as frozen as we were, thus making the process a lot longer.

Gates and Ballmer had no idea that any of this was happening, of course. But this is not exactly a good way to get a warm reception for a new set of products. If they had known how cold it was, Gates and Ballmer could have simply opened the door to the theatre to perform bag searches and signups inside the building. Or they could have asked that hot chocolate and coffee be served in the line or as we entered the building. These guys have the bags of money that would make such moves a mere snap of the fingers. But events like this are perfectly scripted, and in this perfection, they do not allow for a changing of gears when something is not right--just like a software product launch. And more times than not, the top dogs are unaware that there is a problem until it is too late.

Hoping to capitalize--or whatever is the opposite of capitalize, to be more accurate--on the potential opening in the market for Linux on the desktop made possible by the advent of Windows Vista and the resistance of the Windows 2000 and Windows XP installed base to change their systems, proponents of the Linux platform wearing puce hazmat suits and representing an organization called BadVista.org were on hand, giving out CDs of Linux software and brochureware. BadVista is just a clever, extremely short-lived front for the Free Software Foundation, which was clear as soon as you heard the Hazmat Drones calling it "GNU Linux." Stallman has to always get his way, you know.

This provided some amusement for us in the line, and more than a few of us were thinking about stealing the hazmat suit, since it was wind-proof. I thought I might simply buy the hazmat suit, but you would expect a Linux enthusiast to not be about the money. The Linux community, having seen the bad weather a-foot in Times Square that day, might have done better to have asked the supermodels a few blocks away at a Cover Girl event to don some rollerskates and go up and down the sidewalk giving out hot lemonade spiked with a little whisky. In this regard, they didn't think much better about the situation than Microsoft did.

In the end, it was just a cold day in Times Square--and not Hell--and therefore, I am still not moving to Windows Vista and I am still trying to see if I can live with just Linux.

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