Land of Confusion

It don't make no sense. - Mr. Plinkett

Windows 8 is a great example of the integration of technology into a culture unwilling to actively engage with technology.  Simply put, it is symptomatic of the dumbing-down of technology. [1]  There is a large difference between increasing usability through an interface, and oversimplifying something to the point of breaking its most fundamental features.  Trying to make a desktop computer function in the same way a mobile device does is idiotic.  Windows is attempting to emulate the iPad, which only makes me winder why someone would continue to use a Windows PC and not just buy an iPad.  Unlocking the computing power in portable devices to make them more useful is progress.  Limiting the power of computers to make them look and function like portable devices is backwards. The point of a desktop machine, besides it hardware configuration is the access "under the hood" to be able to reconfigure applications and have direct access to the code, or the file system in order to make things more efficient and productive.   Microsoft is doing great advertising work for Apple. We now have apps, tiles and charms.  Before it was simply icons and applications and that was good enough.  Creating cool names for them doesn't help, it just facilitates the anti-intellectualism involved in the new computing.

As PC World claims that "the unfortunate reality here is that Windows 8 doesn't work as a desktop operating system."  Even Paul Thurrott  claims "Windows 8 isn’t even Windows anymore. It’s a tablet OS that’s been grafted onto Windows like a monstrous Frankenstein experiment . . . it is those very users who don’t want or need tablet functionality that are financing Microsoft’s push towards an OS—that is not really Windows—that will replace what they’re using."

It seems clear that every alternating version of Windows is a complete catastrophe.  Windows 98 was a great improvement over 95 (although 95 brought the PC into a new generation of usability).  ME was terrible.  Microsoft hit a double target with 2000 and XP, both highly stable and applicable.  Vista was annoying (although at least it functioned).  7 seemed to have stabilized and added some evolutionary qualities to the PC.  And, with another attempt at a generational leap, 8 seems like the best one to skip.


[1] Notice how other countries have had more advanced smart phones, but here simpler versions have been sold just because Americans don't want to learn how to use their devices.  The iPhone may have changed that.