Year: 2007

My old time friend and colleague Igor Gorbulinsky made a few changes to the Cutline theme running on this blog (thanks man!).  The structure is the same, but a few things changed – colors, header image, and the like.  Now, I totally love how the whole thing looks.  The only thing missing is WordPress 2.3 which I am a bit slow to upgrade to.  When that will be done, I won’t touch the look, feel, and functionality for another hundred years.

What do you guys think?  Do you like it?  Tell me you like it! :)

Every morning I drive Maxim to school.  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, after I drop him off, I go the gym.  Our office hours start at 10:00am, so I have enough time to come back from the gym, have a shower, change clothes, and have some breakfast – I don’t have to head to the office straight after the exercise.   This is a routine by now.

The other day, I had an amusing thought of how it might look from our neighbors’ point of view.  Imagine someone who has his morning coffee and smoke outside on the balcony, looking at people passing by.  Here comes a dad with his kid.  The kid is walking around, looking at things, not very much eager to get into the car.  The kid is nicely dressed and wearing a school bag.  They get into the car and drive away.

One our later, the same car comes back and parks.  The kid is gone – there is only a dad.  But he changed a lot in this last hour.  He looks exhausted.  He is all sweaty wet.  He slowly walks back home.  What happened?

Of course, you know that the guy went to the gym.  But the neighbor doesn’t.  What might he think?  What might I think, if I was in his place?  The first answer to that question that popped up in my head – the kid didn’t want to go to school and was resisting, fighting it.  It took this dad a whole hour to stuff the little one into school.  And it was a fight of the century!

Every time now I come back from the gym and walk back to the apartment, I look around.  If I can spot any neighbors, I get this huge smile on my face.  And an expression “It’s not what you think it is”…

Disclaimer:

1. I never used Windows Vista.
2. It’s been a while since I used Microsoft Windows.
3. I am a proud Linux user. For a few years now.
4. I am very biased.
5. I am not well informed on this subject.

Now, with the above disclaimer, it might seem that I don’t have anything else to say, but I do. For the last few years I’ve been working with people who either use Linux, or can fix practically any problem with their Windows installation. So I haven’t heard a lot from the Microsoft front.

Recently, on the other hand, I spend a lot of time among people who are your regular (or just above the regular) Windows users. They know a few things about computers, they aren’t afraid of the technology, but they don’t have any operating systems concept knowledge or system administration experience. And some of these people are using Windows Vista (in most cases it came pre-installed with their computers).

It seems to me, Windows Vista users aren’t very happy. Things break here and there. And although they always break here and there on all systems with no exception, on Vista they seem to break in some weird and very annoying way. When I first noticed their reactions, I just wrote it off on me being very biased.

But then I couldn’t help noticing news headlines here and there. And again, I thought that just me. But then I noticed that the trends of negative Vista feedback are getting more and more. Now I am all suspicious.

Just to put a few things together, I did a few Google searches. It seems to me, that I am not alone in my picks. Here are a few links to save you some typing:

• “vista site:slashdot.org“
• “vista site:digg.com“
• “vista site:zdnet.com“
• “vista site:wikipedia.org“
• “vista linux“
• “vista leopard“
• “vista linux leopard“

Even with me being biased, and a good old tradition of bashing anything and everything small or big coming out of Microsoft, it still seems like a lot of negative material.

What’s your stand on this? Have you noticed the trend? Have you tried Windows Vista yourself? Are you planning to? I’m interested to hear.

Matt Mullenweg made the prediction.  I’m not all that good with specific dates, but it sounds somewhat reasonable.  There are many reasons for me to agree on this.  Here are some:

• Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid.  They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.
• Windows is not the only source of income for Microsoft – they make plenty of other software (office applications and games for example), hardware (game console anyone?), and services (web in particular).
• Every new version of Windows increases Microsoft’s costs with backward compatibility, testing, troubleshooting, etc  by a lot.  These things can be easily outsourced to the community.  Money saving.
• There is plenty of third-party software in Windows.  Pushing the system open source is a good chance of brushing it up and doing some refactoring.  As Matt said in one of the comments to his own post “If Sun can do it with Java, Microsoft can do it with Windows.”.  Agreed.
• Operating system per se becomes more of a commodity thing.  OS wars are in the past.  Of course, OS is an important part of software industry, but for more and more end users, the browser is the operating system.
• The mobile industry is growing as fast as ever, with the whole variety of new devices, applications, trends and ideas.  That’s a huge money pie, where open sourcing again makes a lot of sense.
• Google is hiring all the good people and allows them to work on their projects for 20% of their time.  With Windows being closed source, there is no way for Microsoft to exploit that resource. :)

These are just a few.  The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

What do you think?