You see, like many individuals (and most governments), I have had a love hate relationship with Bill Gates and Microsoft since it’s inception. My friend Andy’s father bought him one of the original IBM PC’s when he entered graduate school at Georgia Tech back in 1982 and it came in his door with MS Dos 1.2 or something or other on a 5-1/4” floppy disk (there were no hard drives for PC's back then, kids!). From that day forward, he and I set out, at work and at home, on an apparently endless, life long journey of upgrading our computer’s operating systems on a yearly basis.
Microsoft has perfected the cottage business of selling you a software product, immediately informing you of its deficiencies, and then attempting to sell you a “new and improved” product to correct the aforementioned problems, only to come back to you in six months if not weeks with another product and another request for some more of your hard earned cash. With the advent of the Internet, our Washington State benefactor expects us to visit their website practically every day to download some “Free” patch that fixes their latest security deficiency “du jour.”
I avoided the Windows operating system like the plague until windows 98 came out, preferring instead to fool around with DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files and occasionally firing up windows 3.1 if I had some program that wouldn’t run in DOS. When web browsers came along, I liked Netscape navigator, but the “battle of the computer nerds” made Microsoft Internet Explorer easier to use in my old age and less painful in light of my time worn lack of enthusiasm for technical mumbo-jumbo these days.
In the big picture, Internet Explorer is the most popular Web browser. Why? It comes pre-installed on your computer, with Windows. Beyond this attribute…IT SUCKS!
Remember, Mozilla Firefox….it’s good for what ails you (and your computer.)
No comments:
Post a Comment