413. Microsoftness
Since post 412 my PC has made two more trips to the ER. The docs couldn't find anything wrong. I've begin to worry they think I'm a psychosomatic complainer, or worse yet afflicted with a computer version of Munchhausen's by proxy syndrome.
The basic symptom is that plugging in the iPod makes the mouse stop working. That's a problem when you run (or try to run) a Microsoft operating system entirely dependent on that miracle of anti-ergonomic design, the computer mouse, for basic functions.
The techs called me up and asked me to bring in those two components, but they were unable to recreate the problem on the bench. Their best guess is that yet another USB device – the keyboard, printer or scanner – somehow interacts with the iPod to disable the mouse. (Or could the problem lie with my incessant muttering under my breath?)
So now I've given up on fixing the PC and concentrate instead on managing its failures. The black box now sits sideways beside my desk, giving me easy access to the USB ports (who passed the law requiring them to be located on the back?), so I can pull and plug the cords like an old phone exchange operator, making sure never more than the barest minimum number of devices are connected at a time.
Time to buy a new PC? Ah, compadre, the pity of the thing is that this is a new PC, at least in its essentials. I purchased it in increments last summer by sinking a couple hundred into trying to get my last one to continue working past its third birthday. The techs salvaged the disk drives and sound card from that one and transplanted them into a new box with a new motherboard, new USB ports, and a brand new copy of a Microsoft operating system….
That last clause pretty much sums up the source of the problem, I'm afraid. Steve Ballmer, the pudgy CEO of Microsoft, explained why last year, in a roundabout way, when he described Safari's and Chrome's market share as "rounding errors."
Market share. That's what Microsoft is about. Or, in the language of another era, monopoly. As Ballmer told us, Microsoft's goal is to maintain its market position. That means its goal is to make products good enough to maintain a monopoly market share.
Not good products. Good-enough ones.
People, and especially IT managers, won't switch to a competitor as long as Microsoft's operating system, browser, email program, etc., is just good enough that switching seems not quite worth the hassle. After many years of using Microsoft products, I've concluded the company has pegged the good-enough point at 85% of a really good product.
If Microsoft made a 100% good operating system -- say, one that could run five different USB devices simultaneously without unpredictably freezing and losing its ability to re-start -- it would have wasted all the resources needed to get to that point from 85%.
The reason Microsoft products are so consistently mediocre isn't that Microsoft doesn't know what it's doing, but exactly the opposite. Mediocrity is the only rational strategy for a monopolist. Anything else is throwing away money.
Of course, Microsoft's strategic mediocrity means that American businesses are running computer systems that are only about 85% of what they could be. Does the mediocrity of their computer systems affect their productivity? Does gravity? How about oxygen?
The cost of the missing 15% is paid by all of us in lost productivity and the familiar hair-tearing frustration, which has so aptly been termed Microsoftness, a word that deserves to be in everyday use.
Micosoftness is a development cost Microsoft has successfully avoided paying by shifting it to PC users. It's a hidden cost, not so obvious as the Apple price tag, but I think it's steeper.
Still, I recognize that in one way it's unfair to pick on Microsoft. They're only one particularly conspicuous (to a blogger) example of what it means to be living in this second age of monopoly. The next post will look at some other monopoliess, ones that, unlike Microsoft's strangehold, haven't had quite such a direct effect on the continuity of this blog. And we'll get into the law of it, or rather lawlessness.
Until then, this is Ernestine, logging off.
Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 02:53PM in Monopoly, Unintended consequences
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