Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Even I didn't know that Windows had gotten this bad
Did I really manage to let the weekend pass without posting anything? Well at least I had an excuse, as I was out of town, and the trip did yield an interesting story that really opened my eyes as to the current state of the Windows platform, which I think I'll share with you now:
On Saturday evening I went to visit an old friend I hadn't seen in quite awhile. I suppose we're both equally guilty of being too busy to find time to hang out together much these days, what with me dumping around 100 hours a week into my various entrepreneurial pursuits, and him working about 50 hours a week, going to school full-time, and keeping up with his wife and 1.5 kids. Whatever happened to the old days back in high school, when we used to have the time to get together to hang out and just do nothing for awhile?
So it didn't entirely surprise me when our original plans to go out somewhere and do something sort of morphed into "Oh, we're both too worn out to go and do anything, let's just see what's on TV." We watched the college football game until it got boring (took about two hours), then we watched the World Series game until it also got boring (took about 20 minutes), and then watched some of Saturday Night Live (but somehow managed to miss the whole Ashlee-Simpson-lip-synching thing). And at some point during the evening, I decided I should probably check my email. I had my PowerBook with me, but my friend (bless his heart) is still limping along on dial-up internet. So rather than configuring my PowerBook for his dial-up connection, I decided to just fire up his Windows PC and check my email and hit a few key websites. And that's when things just went totally down the toilet.
The funny thing about using Windows is that you find out pretty quickly that certain websites you visit every day are guilty of throwing pop-up ads at visitors, except you never knew about it, because Safari's pop-up blocking actually works. For instance, I never knew that MacCentral threw a pop-up ad at you about subscribing to MacWorld Magazine until I happened to visit that site on a PC one day. So it didn't surprise me that pop-up ads began surfacing almost as soon as I began surfing the web. But at some point something goes off in your head, a little voice that kind of tells you, "Hey, you know what? This just doesn't seem right."
I'm pretty sure MacMinute.com isn't set up to throw a pornographic pop-up ad at its visitors, and I'm quite certain that visiting the mac.com webmail login in page isn't supposed to trigger a pop-up ad for viagra. In fact, at one point so many pop-up ads were appearing on the screen, one after another, that I had trouble locating the actual browser window. And the kicker was that even after I got them all closed, the taskbar was still showing that there was one pop-up ad still open...and sure enough, one of them was designed to pop open completely off-screen so that you couldn't see it or close it (other than by right-clicking on its tab in the taskbar).
Stuff like this just downright scares me, because the first thing I figure is that Windows is simply getting its revenge on me by choosing to go ape-crap precisely at the time I'm using it, so that the owner of the computer will end up blaming me. But it turns out that my friend was well aware of the out-of-control pop-up situation. And he wasn't just aware of it, he was furious about it. He'd just run Ad-Aware earlier that day, and stripped all kinds of infected crap out of his computer in the process, and yet here was Internet Explorer going crazy again already. So we ran Ad-Aware again, which stripped away 34 new infected items. We then immediately ran it once more, and one new infected file had already found its way into his system, which is remarkable considering that the computer wasn't even connected to the internet at this time.
We checked to make sure that pop-up blocking was enabled in Internet Explorer. We checked to make sure that Service Pack 2 really was installed, and that all of the latest so-called "security" updates were installed as well. And sure enough, this computer was every bit as "secure" as Microsoft deemed that it needed to be. Except whoops, yeah, the usability of the computer was disintegrating in front of our eyes as we sat there watching.
You know, I've heard one too many horror stories of people's Windows PCs falling into what they would describe as a nearly unusable state due to the ad-ware, spy-ware, and mal-ware that had built up in their computer...but I never could have imagined that it was this bad. Of all the dozens of major reasons for Switching to the Mac, I'd really never quite understood why so many potential switchers ranked the security thing so far above seemingly more compelling reasons such as the interface, the consistency, iLife, Safari, all the innovation, and so on. But sitting there Saturday night in front of a one-year-old Windows PC that had been absolutely brought to its knees by security-related issues, I finally "got" it. This really is a huge thing. The Windows platform really is literally being shredded as we speak.
My friend and I both concluded that some kind of deeply buried crap-ware was replicating the infected stuff just as fast as Ad-aware could get rid of it. He asked me what the solution was, and I told him that I honestly wasn't sure whether he would need to upgrade to the paid version of Ad-aware, or purchase some other, more powerful tool. So naturally, he asked me what I use on my computer to fight off this kind of nonsense. And before I could even manage to figure out how to answer that question, he answered it for me. It was time for him to finally "get" something that I'd been trying to get him to understand for years.
"This doesn't happen to Apples, does it?" he asked out loud, not so much in the form of a question, but more along the lines of a lightbulb going off in his head. "No, never," I told him, explaining this that kind of crap just doesn't happen to well-built, well-designed operating systems. And at that point, I pretty much knew what was coming next:
"That's it, I'm never buying another PC again."
And there it was.
The two of us have had many conversations about Macs and PCs over the years (most of them initiated by him, actually), so he's been fully aware for some time now that Macs are better than PCs at just about every aspect of computing. But in all that time, the idea of having a vastly better computing experience had simply never motivated him to do anything about it...because all along, Windows had been "good enough" to get by on. Not "good enough" in the sense that you would even want to try to do anything with the computer that would go above and beyond the bare minumum. But good enough in the sense that you could actually spend twenty minutes a day on the internet and visit half a dozen websites without the system having a total meltdown. Except now, his PC was no longer even "good enough" for that. And he could see that even if he got the infections on his PC cleared up, or even if he bought a brand new PC, the Windows operating system is enough of a disaster that there was no reason to think that he'd be safe from another such meltdown.
All the sudden he wanted to know actual specifics about Macintosh models, specs, prices, retail locations...the kinds of questions that mean that the person's line of thinking has progressed beyond "Should I switch to the Mac?" and even beyond "Yes, I should switch to the Mac," and has now reached the point of "I want to switch to the Mac."
After looking at every Mac make and model out there, he decided he wants a 12 inch iBook with a Combo drive, which comes out to $999 (actually $949 since he's a student), comfortably below the magic thousand dollar mark. I couldn't help but think to myself that if this had been two weeks ago, that price would still have been $1099, which I think he would have rejected as being too high. But this new price he was OK with (especially when he saw that it actually came with everything he needed), and he told me that he'd been setting aside money to upgrade his current PC, and he would now instead be earmarking that money for an iBook. It's going to take him awhile, especially with that "1.5 children" thing going on, but he'll get there eventually.
Remember what I said a few weeks back about Windows users making up their mind to Switch to the Mac all the way back in 2002, but only beginning to pull the trigger now here in 2004? Well, here's a case of someone who just decided to Switch now, and who knows how long it'll take him to actually get there. The greater point is, of course, that the great influx of refugees pouring into the Mac platform is only now beginning to get underway. And after finally seeing first-hand just how badly the Windows platform is falling apart, I'm now convinced that the influx is going to be even larger than I'd thought. Now, I know that not every PC is as bad off as his was, but it would now appear that every PC has a good chance of ending up being that bad off, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time until the majority of existing Windows machines are no longer usable at all.
It's one thing to be the better platform. It's a whole other thing to be the only usable platform out there. You do the math.
Did I really manage to let the weekend pass without posting anything? Well at least I had an excuse, as I was out of town, and the trip did yield an interesting story that really opened my eyes as to the current state of the Windows platform, which I think I'll share with you now:
On Saturday evening I went to visit an old friend I hadn't seen in quite awhile. I suppose we're both equally guilty of being too busy to find time to hang out together much these days, what with me dumping around 100 hours a week into my various entrepreneurial pursuits, and him working about 50 hours a week, going to school full-time, and keeping up with his wife and 1.5 kids. Whatever happened to the old days back in high school, when we used to have the time to get together to hang out and just do nothing for awhile?
So it didn't entirely surprise me when our original plans to go out somewhere and do something sort of morphed into "Oh, we're both too worn out to go and do anything, let's just see what's on TV." We watched the college football game until it got boring (took about two hours), then we watched the World Series game until it also got boring (took about 20 minutes), and then watched some of Saturday Night Live (but somehow managed to miss the whole Ashlee-Simpson-lip-synching thing). And at some point during the evening, I decided I should probably check my email. I had my PowerBook with me, but my friend (bless his heart) is still limping along on dial-up internet. So rather than configuring my PowerBook for his dial-up connection, I decided to just fire up his Windows PC and check my email and hit a few key websites. And that's when things just went totally down the toilet.
The funny thing about using Windows is that you find out pretty quickly that certain websites you visit every day are guilty of throwing pop-up ads at visitors, except you never knew about it, because Safari's pop-up blocking actually works. For instance, I never knew that MacCentral threw a pop-up ad at you about subscribing to MacWorld Magazine until I happened to visit that site on a PC one day. So it didn't surprise me that pop-up ads began surfacing almost as soon as I began surfing the web. But at some point something goes off in your head, a little voice that kind of tells you, "Hey, you know what? This just doesn't seem right."
I'm pretty sure MacMinute.com isn't set up to throw a pornographic pop-up ad at its visitors, and I'm quite certain that visiting the mac.com webmail login in page isn't supposed to trigger a pop-up ad for viagra. In fact, at one point so many pop-up ads were appearing on the screen, one after another, that I had trouble locating the actual browser window. And the kicker was that even after I got them all closed, the taskbar was still showing that there was one pop-up ad still open...and sure enough, one of them was designed to pop open completely off-screen so that you couldn't see it or close it (other than by right-clicking on its tab in the taskbar).
Stuff like this just downright scares me, because the first thing I figure is that Windows is simply getting its revenge on me by choosing to go ape-crap precisely at the time I'm using it, so that the owner of the computer will end up blaming me. But it turns out that my friend was well aware of the out-of-control pop-up situation. And he wasn't just aware of it, he was furious about it. He'd just run Ad-Aware earlier that day, and stripped all kinds of infected crap out of his computer in the process, and yet here was Internet Explorer going crazy again already. So we ran Ad-Aware again, which stripped away 34 new infected items. We then immediately ran it once more, and one new infected file had already found its way into his system, which is remarkable considering that the computer wasn't even connected to the internet at this time.
We checked to make sure that pop-up blocking was enabled in Internet Explorer. We checked to make sure that Service Pack 2 really was installed, and that all of the latest so-called "security" updates were installed as well. And sure enough, this computer was every bit as "secure" as Microsoft deemed that it needed to be. Except whoops, yeah, the usability of the computer was disintegrating in front of our eyes as we sat there watching.
You know, I've heard one too many horror stories of people's Windows PCs falling into what they would describe as a nearly unusable state due to the ad-ware, spy-ware, and mal-ware that had built up in their computer...but I never could have imagined that it was this bad. Of all the dozens of major reasons for Switching to the Mac, I'd really never quite understood why so many potential switchers ranked the security thing so far above seemingly more compelling reasons such as the interface, the consistency, iLife, Safari, all the innovation, and so on. But sitting there Saturday night in front of a one-year-old Windows PC that had been absolutely brought to its knees by security-related issues, I finally "got" it. This really is a huge thing. The Windows platform really is literally being shredded as we speak.
My friend and I both concluded that some kind of deeply buried crap-ware was replicating the infected stuff just as fast as Ad-aware could get rid of it. He asked me what the solution was, and I told him that I honestly wasn't sure whether he would need to upgrade to the paid version of Ad-aware, or purchase some other, more powerful tool. So naturally, he asked me what I use on my computer to fight off this kind of nonsense. And before I could even manage to figure out how to answer that question, he answered it for me. It was time for him to finally "get" something that I'd been trying to get him to understand for years.
"This doesn't happen to Apples, does it?" he asked out loud, not so much in the form of a question, but more along the lines of a lightbulb going off in his head. "No, never," I told him, explaining this that kind of crap just doesn't happen to well-built, well-designed operating systems. And at that point, I pretty much knew what was coming next:
"That's it, I'm never buying another PC again."
And there it was.
The two of us have had many conversations about Macs and PCs over the years (most of them initiated by him, actually), so he's been fully aware for some time now that Macs are better than PCs at just about every aspect of computing. But in all that time, the idea of having a vastly better computing experience had simply never motivated him to do anything about it...because all along, Windows had been "good enough" to get by on. Not "good enough" in the sense that you would even want to try to do anything with the computer that would go above and beyond the bare minumum. But good enough in the sense that you could actually spend twenty minutes a day on the internet and visit half a dozen websites without the system having a total meltdown. Except now, his PC was no longer even "good enough" for that. And he could see that even if he got the infections on his PC cleared up, or even if he bought a brand new PC, the Windows operating system is enough of a disaster that there was no reason to think that he'd be safe from another such meltdown.
All the sudden he wanted to know actual specifics about Macintosh models, specs, prices, retail locations...the kinds of questions that mean that the person's line of thinking has progressed beyond "Should I switch to the Mac?" and even beyond "Yes, I should switch to the Mac," and has now reached the point of "I want to switch to the Mac."
After looking at every Mac make and model out there, he decided he wants a 12 inch iBook with a Combo drive, which comes out to $999 (actually $949 since he's a student), comfortably below the magic thousand dollar mark. I couldn't help but think to myself that if this had been two weeks ago, that price would still have been $1099, which I think he would have rejected as being too high. But this new price he was OK with (especially when he saw that it actually came with everything he needed), and he told me that he'd been setting aside money to upgrade his current PC, and he would now instead be earmarking that money for an iBook. It's going to take him awhile, especially with that "1.5 children" thing going on, but he'll get there eventually.
Remember what I said a few weeks back about Windows users making up their mind to Switch to the Mac all the way back in 2002, but only beginning to pull the trigger now here in 2004? Well, here's a case of someone who just decided to Switch now, and who knows how long it'll take him to actually get there. The greater point is, of course, that the great influx of refugees pouring into the Mac platform is only now beginning to get underway. And after finally seeing first-hand just how badly the Windows platform is falling apart, I'm now convinced that the influx is going to be even larger than I'd thought. Now, I know that not every PC is as bad off as his was, but it would now appear that every PC has a good chance of ending up being that bad off, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time until the majority of existing Windows machines are no longer usable at all.
It's one thing to be the better platform. It's a whole other thing to be the only usable platform out there. You do the math.
Comments:
Awesome stuff. I have had to deal with friends machines and fix some fairly complex problems, including a couple that were just too far gone and needed a complete re-install of the operating system. Windows just seems to bog down, get slower and die after about 6 months, it is really nasty. I have managed to convert most of my friends to date and they are better off for it, so I will continue to preach and show the virtues of Macs against the horrible monopoly that is Windows. If people don't have the money, I will suggest Linux as a very nice alternative.
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: 5:45 AM
: 5:45 AM
