Windows 7: The love that hurts so bad

It’s the ultimate cop-out. First, you claim bias: “He hates Windows. He hates Microsoft. He’s looking for reasons to bash them both.” Then, when you realize you can’t refute the hard data, you attack the source on a personal level: “He’s an ass. He’s clueless. He’s lying, making stuff up.”

The bias claims I usually dismiss out of hand. Whenever I say anything negative about one party, they immediately claim “bias” and accuse me of being a shill for the “other guy.” So, even though I personally hate Macs — and think the whole FOSS/Linux movement is an excuse for liberal, tree-hugging, Mountain Dew-slurping wannabe hippies to carry their teen-angst-fueled rebellious streak into adulthood — I ignore these comments since they’re inevitable.

[ Even if you loathe Randall C. Kennedy, you’ll want to see what his data shows Windows users actually do with their PCs. ]

As for the claims of “cluelessness,” I chalk these up to people who can’t be bothered to research my background. Sixteen years of publicly advocating the widespread adoption of a Windows NT-based OS architecture, including penning the very first book about running NT on the desktop (“Migrating to Windows NT” from Brady Books — look it up), may have left me a bit senile, but to attempt to impugn my technical chops shows laziness on the part of my readers.

Ask Mike Nash how “clueless” I am about NT. Likely response: “If only it were true…. “

No, it’s the “lying” accusation that puzzles me the most. It implies that the whole narrative is somehow subjective — that I’m in a position to twist evidence in support of some perceived agenda. Never mind that the tools and resources I employ are all publicly available (see www.xpnet.com). Or that the conclusions I draw are based entirely on hard data that anyone with a passing knowledge of Windows internals can obtain for themselves.

Benchmarking is hard. Setting up test harnesses and monitoring data streams to confirm a third-party result is hard. Bashing the source and calling him a liar? Hey, that’s easy! Let’s do that!

But I get it. You love Windows. I mean, you really, really, really love Windows. And frankly, so do I. Windows NT has been my constant companion for nearly two decades and a great source of personal and professional growth. However, unlike you, I haven’t let my fondness for the NT architecture blind me to the changes taking place. The sad truth is that Microsoft has hobbled this once elegant OS with way too much consumer-focused baggage. And somewhere between Windows 2000 and Vista they lost sight of the very attributes that drew IT shops to the NT platform in the first place.

Of course, I don’t expect you to understand. You probably grew up on Windows XP. I’m guessing you’ve never even seen one of those pioneering early builds, like Windows NT 4.0 (a release for which Microsoft actually hired me to write the Reviewer’s Guide — yeah, I’m “clueless”).

Without real-world experience to provide a point of reference, it’s easy to believe that it was always this way — that Windows was meant to be a fat, bloated pile of DRM and consumerism. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

“Until you’ve seen the curvature of the Earth, it’s easy to believe the world is flat.”

I believe they called Columbus a liar, too.