...a crash a day keeps slow performance, ole!...

For years I had no particular qualms about Bill and his company. They made great software, period.

From the nights at varsity being wasted away on one of the all time classics (which I believe has now been stopped due to the business case) with Flight Simulator to the various forms of O/S's I have seen over the years, there have been no issues.

Yes there was the need to fiddle around with a few settings in the beginning on 3.1 and in the early stages of Workgroup and so on, but it still worked - and most importantly it was fast.

Then came XP and brought a fast operating system (relatively) with simplicity. It worked for 99.9% of the time. Yes there was the occasional crash but by and large it was stable, performed and had limited bugs.

Then came Vista...




And then all that was well came crashing down at a ridiculously fast rate. This was not a choice. Twice I managed to not get Vista loaded but with the latest laptop I was not really left with many choices - one being that the policy changed and the second being that support for a lot of hardware vendors on XP had been stopped - like Bluetooth drivers for Widcomm devices - they just refuse to write it for XP any more and I suppose that is fair - or maybe just stupid.

I now have at least one application failure per day. I also have at least one complete "hold down power button" to reboot scenario and then of course somehow the complete old blue screen that Microsoft was notorious for made it back in the last version of the software as a weekly feature.

So one cannot help but wonder whether those Apple junkies out there have the right idea with Snow Leopard having just been launched. I mean - yes my iPod crashes as well - less often I have to say - but hell - at least the lines on the hardware is unbelievably cool.

Looking at the Macbook Air I believe that people can be forgiven for living with the occasional crash. The fact that everyone wants to play with their ultra cool and sleek notebook is a reasonable expection that you probably have to live with.

So...

In a million MBA case studies there is the argument that for the super cool brands like the Apple's of the world, brand loyalty overrides logic every now and then and the brand will be forgiven for some seriously blatant blunders on the product line.

But one has to ask yourself the question in the current day and age whether this is something that is even remotely deserved in the software market of late - especially in the O/S market - brand is less important as this item has really started to become a commodity.

I hate messing around with my PC - the thing must just work and keep on working - so actually taking the step to install Ubuntu recently after a 650MB download left me quite surprised with the O/S and it was free; and it works; and it is fast; and it knew what a 3G card was!

So this is the last chance - I will soon try Microsoft Windows 7 and if it works I will stick to it blindly for another couple of years.

Should it not - I will join the millions of people who have already given up and moved to either a complete Open Source notebook or a Macbook. Not that Microsoft could care less about what I do - but seriously - looking at this, I understand why Microsoft is having so much difficulty holding on to the number one spot in the desktop software market year-on-year.

There are many business lessons in this and I am sure that in the MBA graduates of five to ten years from now there is going to be some interesting case studies under some interesting headings...