SOLIPSISTIC EMPIRE

Dick Pountain/18 June 2002/01:18/Idealog 95

Following my lethal encounter with the God of Thunder - as described in a previous column - I'm back in business using a modest Hewlett Packard Omnibook. This is not a model that I would ever have purchased for myself, but came to me as a result of an insurance claim after my old Compaq Presario was stolen. The insurance company had a policy of replacing like-for-like rather than doling out cash money, and so sent me an Omnibook with a spec precisely calibrated to be the 2002 equivalent of my 1998 Presario. I duly stored this machine away as a spare and didn't pull it out again until lightning struck.

It turns out to be a thoroughly nice, competent notebook, with an excellent keyboard and screen. It doesn't have the Trackpoint nipple I prefer, but it makes up by having two USB ports - leaving one free after adding my Wacom pad - and better still, has a button that switches off its Synaptics Touchpad to stop me inadvertantly hitting it with my dangling thumb. And it runs Windows 98SE. Yep, you heard that right. I was in such a hurry to get the spare machine into service that I reluctantly decided against zapping Windows 2000 over it: at that point my nerves could not have stood up to one of Win2K's installation wobblers that prevented it from booting. So I left the Omnibook running the Win98 that it came with and decided to suffer the indignity and inconvenience of running this 'obsolete' OS. Except that it proved to be no such thing.

After using the Omnibook for some 6 weeks now, I've found that Win98 SE lacks precisely nothing compared to Win 2000 that is of any consequence to my computer usage. Oh sorry, forgot, it doesn't have the nice green-on-black graph paper in the Task Manager Performance pane, and I really miss that. Win98 does absolutely everything I need to do, exactly as well as Win 2000 did, and the capper is that it's more stable too. That's right, more stable. I used to get a blue-screen crash at least once a fortnight with Win2K, and I haven't had a single crash so far with Win98. It also runs several applications (like the Doonesbury retrospective CD-ROM) that wouldn't run under Win2K and had been stuffed at the back of a draw. My external HP CD-Writer drive works far more reliably and stably than it did under Win2K.

But why am I telling you this stuff? Not because I'm proposing that you should all abandon XP and go back to 98. What I'm saying is that this step 'backwards' has been something of an eye-opening experience for me. I've been bitching about Microsoft's operating systems in this column for years (and attracting occasional emails from rude Australian teenagers telling me to stop talking like a 'commo') but that has always been based on theoretical grounds. Now I've actually experienced the material truth of my bitching - for me personally, Windows 2000 is no improvement whatsoever on Windows 98, and I have been conned into upgrading. Knowing it and actually feeling it are vastly different things.

The fact is that Microsoft is not an evil empire, out to exploit and enslave us all, as some zealots would have it. What Microsoft really is is a Solipsistic Empire, which merely follows its own internal agendas in a somewhat capricious and inefficient way, with very little concern for its end users at all. The 'improvements' to its operating systems are not meant for us humble PC users: they are merely steps toward some medium-term technical goal (though one that will probably be changed, by some new enthusiasm among the top brass, before they ever get there). Many of the improvements in Win 2000 and XP - tighter security, SQL support - have to do with one such agenda, namely Microsoft's need to capture the mainframe market from IBM, Oracle and the rest. Other improvements have to do with shifting Microsoft's licencing policy to a rental-based model, which will force you to keep on paying rather than just paying once, and so guarantee the firm's future cash-flow. Yet others, like the .NET extensions, have to do with Microsoft inserting itself at the centre of Web-based e-commerce so that in future it can take a percentage of all transactions. Not one of these improvements has the primary aim of improving Window's usability and reliability for stand-alone PC users: indeed such an aim would be radically impossible , if you think about it a little, because introducing major new subsystems (like replacing the file system with an SQL database) simply has to create less rather than more stability.

Paradoxically this realisation has not made me angry, but has in fact been thoroughly liberating. I no longer give a stuff what Microsoft does: I will not install any of their service packs, nor upgrade anything, ever, unless I feel like it. If that makes me a bad net citizen, tough titty, I'm displaying the same concern that Microsoft does - for number one. The realisation also makes sense of many things that previously worried me. I'd always fretted why Microsoft just could never understand that object-orientation is supposed to make things easier for programmers by hiding all the stuff you don't need to know (just check out Mark and Paul's Web Business column this issue to see the horrendous programming model for creating a Web service). The answer is that they don't care a damn because it's all written for Microsoft's own programmers - not for us - and they are paid well to wade through this stuff.