Microsoft Certified Professional

I know many people have their complaints about Microsoft, but at least their products have a certain amount of similarity. One of the things that makes computing hard, is the lack of standardization. Microsoft has a level of internal consistency that I find very helpful when it comes to dealing with a new product. If I'm having to learn something new in the first place, I don't want to find that commands I take for granted work a different way.

Novell Networking is a perfect example. In Windows Explorer, your navigation pane is on the left, and the detail pane is on the right. Novell reverses this. So every time I went to do something in Novell, I was clicking in the wrong place.

Neither method is any more 'correct' than the other. It is fairly obvious, however, that a person familiar with Microsoft products will find other Microsoft products easier to learn, than a product that works in a fundamentally different manner.

Microsoft's market saturation has improved it's own standing considerably. Because every standard(*) computer sold comes with a version of Windows, practically everyone has seen and dealt with Microsoft products. Even if you only purchase the operating system and not MS Office, you still get a large range of Microsoft Software.

* By standard I mean a computer 'package' or 'deal' sold by a store as a complete entity, without the need for additional parts or software. I'm also ignoring Apple computers for the sake of this monologue.

The computing dream is for everything to be standardized and "user friendly". Allowing Microsoft to become such a dominant force in the IT world has helped bring a part of that dream to reality. It's just a pity that so few computer users understand just how much standardizing Microsoft has already done.

The Nature of Complaints

Without Bill's initiative those years ago, and the incredible result of Microsoft where would you be?

Maybe another company would have risen in it's place... but that is a boring hypothetical. Maybe Apple would have allowed competitors to create compatible computers -thereby driving their prices down in the same manner as IBMs. Theoretically that would mean we'd all complain about Apple and/or Steve Jobs every time something went wrong.

Lets look at an example with a greater difference: Microsoft never formed, and Apple floundered because no one would pay their prices. So what do we see instead? Pens, paper, and typewriters. Typewriters have become quite fancy but somehow they just don't compare with what everyone dreamed that computers would do. . .

Imagine this. You're using a pencil because computers haven't become viable and affordable. You're half way through writing a page, and the lead snaps. Do you rant and rave? well probably. But do you curse the pencil's producer and that company's CEO? Heck no.

So pencils aren't your thing? You're and ink person, you use ballpoint or fountain pens. Go and write out a nice long page of an essay. Look very carefully at that ink on the page. Is every bit of it even and consistent? No of course it isn't, ink is a very difficult medium to control. But again, you don't curse the maker's of the pen unto the 10th generation like you do to poor Bill.

So I say; next time your computer does not function correctly, imagine that it is a pen, and the ink ran out, or that your pencil snapped, or the propulsion mechanism in your pacer jammed. Don't you wish we had those wonderful computers so we could type up huge documents and print multiple copies etc etc etc?

That brings us back to computers. Many if not most computer errors are generated by the person operating the machine, so why does everyone blame Microsoft? Well. We are the 'blame generation'. Taking a good look at the law courts should make that clear. Nobody wants to accept that the reason their hard work has just vanished without saving is simply that they are not as clever as they believe themselves to be. Everyone would love someone else to be at fault. It is how we get by in the world today. Everyone pretending they are not to blame. Psychiatrists must be having a field day!

Aren't you glad you live in a Microsoft World? With all those wonderful computers that can do so many things that you simply cannot do yourself? Aren't you glad that you have to buy a new computer every few years just because the clever people making them keep making them so much better? We could all still be running XT computers on MSDOS v2. But it would be very slow, disk capacity would be low, and the design and graphics machines would be huge.

To sum up;

Be happy. Microsoft Loves You. Microsoft will continue to take the blame for everyone's mistakes, just so long as you keep buying their (brilliant) products anyway.