Sanity Junction

I thought I would broach a topic that will probably crop up occasionally on Placeholder Text. I had planned to avoid it for a while, but I read something today that deserves mention. I'm going to talk about Bill Gates and Microsoft.

Let me give some background. I am a Mac user (I'm typing this on my 4-year-old iBook G3), but I hope that you will recognize that I am not a fanatic, and that I'm not trying to insult anyone who uses Windows. I just get very frustrated when people make uninformed generalizations about my computer choice.

Now I know where many of these false assumptions come from: Bill Gates. My ire has been piqued by a Bill Gates interview (here). Others have already demonstrated how foolish his claims are, so I won't address specifics (my favorite rebuttal is here). I'm not surprised that the same company that posted a fake "Mac to PC convert" story a few years ago and has recently admitted to paying a PR firm to tweak its Wikipedia entry is now out and out lying. I wish Microsoft had some class. They're just like Walmart, and it drives me crazy. The more of this stuff they spew, the more I have to deal with people at work complaining about non-existent compatibility problems.

Whew! I feel better already now that I've gotten that out. I'll have something more interesting and upbeat next time (probably not about computers).

2 comments:

rbsp said...

Uh, Turtar, I hope you don't mind me crashing your blog, but now you bring up something that I'm passionate about.

I don't like Microsoft either. I am a web programmer and their internet browsers are consistently behind the times. They don't care about web standards or making their product compatible with the latest technology because they're Microsoft. They have the largest market share so they can do pretty much whatever they want including having a substandard product.

turtar said...

Drop by anytime. I'm glad to have your comments.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. It's their proprietary code. I recently read about a guy who optimizes all his webpages for IE 5.5. Are you kidding me? I'm not a designer, but I have my own website for my students, and I know IE renders things screwy. Only you can't ignore it because it's ubiquitous. I'm glad they dropped IE for the Mac.

I won't even start on Windows. . . .