tekHedd – the blog

So I went on vacation, and immediately got sick. Immediately getting sick is completely normal for a holiday, so there’s nothing interesting about that. What better way to appreciate a tropical island than by lying in bed and shivering?

But I had an inspiration, as I huddled under the covers with a raging fever. “I’ve done it!” I thought. “I’ve achieved warm-heartedness!” Which shows both how powerful the Dalai Lama’s message is, and also how deluded you can become when you have a fever.

You are a lock manufacturer. You make the best locks in the world.

A hotel has a crime committed in room 33, and the door is locked. The government comes to you and says “we need the master key to every lock of this brand in the country to open this door. We’ll only use it to open this one door. It’s completely legal; it’s a crime scene investigation.”

You can’t reasonably deny that request, right?

For totally logical reasons that are not explained here, your company’s locks all open with a master key, that you keep in a vault at your company headquarters. Only the FBI will have the master key, so what’s the harm? They would never lose it or accidentally allow a duplicate to be made. Right?

Right?

OK, the problem with this situation is obvious. We would never hand out the top secret master key to every lock ever made. But, they explain “A master key is the ONLY way into the room, because it’s made of a fictional kryptonite alloy. Only your master key can open this door. It’s OK, it’s only the one door. We promise we will never use the key again for any reason unless there is a court order or it is totally legal to.”

Oh. So there’s no other way in, and it is technically possible to let the FBI in, but only by handing over the key to every lock in the world.

You are the lock manufacturer. What do you do?

My new old Macbook

I don’t want to own an Apple computer. Well, technically that is a lie. I want to own one of everything, two of most things. I like toys.  I’ve wanted a Mac for a long time: light, good power management, an easy to use interface with a very UNIX-y hacker-friendly underbelly. So, as a toy.

But, as an actual user of computers, I’ve always been put off by the very poor price/performance ratio of Apple’s products. For half the money you can buy the same hardware and run, you know, Windows. Or Linux, but that’s very limited when you want to play games or make music. So,.. Windows.

Apple has run its customer relations to encourage a very nasty little clique, or even a cult–it’s a closed ecosystem that doesn’t like standards. I hate that. In contrast, Microsoft has traditionally given me quite a lot of power and control over my hardware. Oh, Microsoft wants control over my hardware, but whenever they forget that they can’t have it, they are reminded by their customers that “openness” is the only thing they do better than Apple, really.

As a result, I have a large investment in Windows-specific application software, and it’s just too much work to move all of my projects over to Apple to make it worth the investment of both time and money. Sure, 100% of my audio apps and 99% of my plugins are cross-licensed and I don’t even have to do anything but reinstall, but that’s a lot of work. And I have a perfectly good quad core i7 gaming laptop that crunches video beautifully and has a lovely 17″ screen (hooray Samsung). Why would I pay more money for half the cores and a siginficant downgrade?

Well, I have a reason, now. Microsoft.

Microsoft’s mid-life crisis

Every year I say “I really should move to Apple, it’s better for pro audio.” But I never do, because Windows is good enough and Microsoft doesn’t try to tell me how to compute, well, not very hard.

And then, something terrible happened. The Microsoft Surface turned out to be really good and moderately successful. And Microsoft realizes that this is their last chance to be relevant in the appliance and cloud based world. There is a strictly limited amount of time left where “which OS you run” will still be relevant, and “Microsoft Office is the only option for businesses.” They don’t have much time left, the way they’re doing things. This is Microsoft’s mid-life crisis. And they’ve decided to actually take a risk, and go all in on Windows 10.

Microsoft, metaphorically speaking, decided this would be a good time to get a divorce, buy a Corvette[*], and try to pick up high school girls.

Yes, in the process of pushing windows 10, Microsoft became assholes. Oh sure, Vista was lame and Windows 8’s app store was annoying, but upgrading to those was a choice, and in fact in the end I decided 8 was OK. (Yes, really!) But Microsoft in their middle aged insecurity started pushing nag windows via Windows Update, and lost my trust. When Microsoft started treating my computer as their computer, they willingly abandoned the only high ground they had, their only real advantage.

A service business is based on trust.

Microsoft’s decision to treat my computer as their computer made me really, really mad. It’s not just that I hate being pushed. Yes, push me for a decision and you will get a big fat no, with a side order of attitude and maybe a couple of Jager shots because that stuff is just gross. But, no, being pushed is just part of the problem. The larger issue is that we-the-customers trusted them-the-vendor to push updates onto our computers, and they pushed advertising and nag windows. Microsoft made my gaming computer, that I spent hours building and optimizing nag me. Think about it for a second. My dedicated gaming computer nagged me.

Fuck that.

Trust is important. A service business is based on trust. I own, I don’t even know the count any more, something like 100 games in the Steam store. I now have close to 20 on gog.com. If Valve decides to change their business practices, I am so totally hosed, I know. But Steam has built trust over years. They know better than to throw away that relationship and all future sales. You can’t sell Anything-As-A-Service (AAS) if your customers think you’re an ass. (Something Oracle should think about.)

Thanks, Microsoft–you finally managed to tip the scales, something you weren’t able to do with any previous version of the OS, something that not even Vista or ME could accomplish. And I now own a nice Macbook, have the audio migration planned, and will be selling off hardware that runs Windows (or running Linux and Bitwig).

Yeah, I’m pissed.

[*] – Note: Corvette, also a thing I would love to have two of