Windows 7 Was ( Not ) My Idea

I am sure you have seen the commercials where you have various “every man” characters claiming that their suggestions for Windows 7 helped to make it into the product that it is today. The commercials end with that catchy phrase “I’m Joe Blow, and Windows 7 was my idea.” I guess the message that we are to take from this is that Microsoft spent years listening to its customers, and incorporated the best of their ideas into this fabulous new product.

I installed Windows 7 about three weeks ago with the idea that I wanted to take an honest look at whether or not I should move away from Mac OS/X. I will admit I went into the exercise with a pretty significant bias, but I also work on Windows every day in the context of my day job, and truly believe that the .NET programming language is simply awesome.

Within the first three weeks, I have had the following things occur:

• My Start menu was cluttered with stupid little applications like Stickies and other applications of no value, all of which I had to go in and remove one by one.
• Although I was a member of the Administrators group on the machine, I did not have administrator privileges on the box. I could not write files where I wanted to, I could not install applications in particular locations, and had to use the ‘Run As Administrator’ function just to compile code.
• I could not login as the administrator without running some special command to enable the administrator login.
• I was unable to download an attachment because Microsoft thought I should have anti-virus software installed before I did. I literally COULD NOT download something until I installed what they thought was an acceptable amount of protection
• Then came the icing on the cake. I was installing Symantec Anti-Virus on the machine so that I could get past the ridiculous security measures forced on me by the operating system, and I got the famous Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD).

The BSOD has been around since the early days of Window NT, and has taken on legendary status for Windows users. It is the thing that strikes fear into the hearts of millions, as it can mean the end of your Windows installation and the beginning of days of recovery time. I digress…

So, I went thru the recommended steps ( starting in safe mode, running system recovery, etc. ) and although my good friends at Windows 7 told me that they could not repair my machine, it somehow came back to life anyway, minus a few pieces of software that I would have to reinstall. No big deal, right?

Well, no. How is it that Microsoft has not moved us beyond this wretched error handling? Why are they still building an operating system that you can’t restart if you install a bad piece of software? Have they not yet figured out how to isolate starting the operating system reliably, and give us something that really is better?

Windows 7 is just a ghost of Windows past. They still clutter the install with mindless crap, they still can’t figure out how to give you a simple environment to work in, and it still crashes the same way it did 10 years ago.

Here is my idea for Windows 7:

Start over. No, I mean really start over. Hire different people. Don’t listen to the idiots on the street who think they know what they want. Give us something we did not know we wanted or needed, and make it so great that we will pay you ridiculous premiums to have it. Make it so simple that we can’t believe we haven’t had it all along, and make it work like something built in 2010 should work. And for the love of all things holy, may we never see the BSOD again.

I’m Scott Barstow, and Windows 7 was ( not ) my idea. Not even close…