Microsoft has evidently been granted patents for what it long desired: to restrict the users of their operating systems as much as possible. Now they can do that all they want, and no one can steal the sweet invention from them. Congratulations, Redmond! Happy choking on your well-deserved mints, and happy exploding Creosote-style! I’m wondering how far will MS go in enforcing this type of OS behaviour. They stated that “virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system” if that system has an open architecture. How ingenious. What an insight. And now, thanks to finally patenting mechanisms against this sort of blasphemous, disrespectful, beyond-the-pale behaviour on the part of users, MS can curb said behaviour. (via /.)
Strange how MS doesn’t get it at all: with each Windows version from 95 up to XP, they enabled users to do more and more and more on their own, take their own decisions what to install and run. I find XP to be the peak of that enabling thinking. It is a relatively stable system (especially with the latest service packs), has little difficulty except reboots in adding and removing programmes/components of all sorts, be those applications, drivers, residents like firewalls, etc., and lets the user define default programmes, default file associations, default start-up services and applications, and so on. Of course, it has its limitations, but they are a few, and far between. The good thing with XP lies in the combination of all these features which are constantly available to the user. And where did Vista go? One hundred million warnings and confirmations are needed to install a new piece of hardware, or a programme like an audio editor which hovers slightly above average complexity. And now they want to prolong these procedural agonies even further. Dear MS, don’t you get it? Really? Your customers want stability and freedom of choice. You can’t restrict those for reasons of security because security of computer systems can only be guaranteed by both writing bug-less code and educating users about security problems. When you do that, you win. When you don’t, you get lost in the wild vistas of public anger, which are right next to the vistas of oblivion. Since choice of how to accomplish a task borders on the political so often, users need to be allowed to exercise that freedom and learn. They’re not all children under the age of three. (Actually, almost none of them are children under the age of three.)
So what do you do? Do you give people that freedom, or do you decide you can solve everything for them, keep them from cyberharm, find answers to all their questions, give them all they need and want on your own? Your choice, MS.
