Geek with an Attitude

It’s been a while.  Shut up.  I’ve got some thoughts about software.

Without software, most computers are just inert boxes of highly technical electronic components.  In order to do anything, a computer must have instructions.  This is where software comes in.  The software runs the computer, and the computer can only do what the software is capable of telling it to do.  That’s why it’s so amazing that so much of our current software sucks.

I don’t mean to complain…ok, I kinda do.  Why can’t, for example, Microsoft — the biggest software company in the world — get it right most of the time?  Windows Vista?  Really?  I remember the day I first installed it, and it took 11 gigs of hard drive space, and I thought, “Why does this need so much of my space?”  And then I ran it and got my answer:  It’s bloated, and sad, and provides all sorts of new things nobody asked for while breaking a bunch of stuff that did work in Windows XP.  If it’s a newer operating system, why won’t games from 2005 work on it?  And why does everything seem so much slower?

This is certainly not confined to Vista, or even Microsoft.  Using iTunes in Windows is an exercise in wondering why it doesn’t do what I want it to, and why it keeps asking me to update the software, and why those updates always entail completely reinstalling the program.  Maybe it’s better on a Mac, but on Macs, software tends to work.  I don’t know why it can’t work that way on PC’s.  I suspect the underlying OS is the problem.

There’s a lot of hay that could be raised about the current trend of “software as a service,” “web 2.0 crapola,” and so on.  I’ll get to that in the weeks ahead, though.  Suffice to say that software, I’m keeping my eye on you.

Love,

Mike