Being Held Hostage By Your Computer

You know, it amazes me how capitalism works to benefit people at the same time it screws them over. So here we have the unethical capitalists, Microsoft, who wish to not out-innovate their competitors, but crush them, and they have made this really paranoid, stinky OS called Vista. Microsoft got so money hungry that they actually had to make their OS prey on its own users with nasty stuff under the hood and an OS that calls home without your real permission (except by the EULA you probably ignored or the certificate in the box). Microsoft took several years to try and get it out the door, and spent billions on it, and it was so big and bad that they had to shave off huge chunks of it in order to get the boulder to move. And so after its release Gartner Group reviews it and says it's still not ready for primetime. So here we have all these businesses put on hold. They can take the wild guess that they'll be okay on Vista and won't be in more of a mess than they already are, or they can stay on their current OS until Microsoft stops supporting it and forces them to upgrade, or they can switch to something else.

To me, I recommend the Ernie Ball approach -- screw Microsoft. Take a wild ride and give your employees a really good OS called Ubuntu. And you might say, "But my office is not technical enough to handle Linux." Okay, fair enough, but this is not your ordinary Linux -- it's easier. Secondly, how many of you Windows users have edited a config.sys or autoexec.bat, what, just 10 years ago? And how many of you have learned to chase Spyware all through the guts of the OS in the registry, files on the hard drive, and anywhere else that people identified on the web? I bet it was a lot. So I don't buy that argument anymore that Windows users are not technically savvy enough.

Also remember back in the old days when you IT managers wanted to hire LAN managers for your big company. You hired, what, experts with Windows, right? Well, sure, they're bigoted against Linux and may not know Linux, but you could replace, retrain, or augment them with Linux professionals. And in the process, you, the consumer, win and can send a message to oppressive capitalists who stopped listening to you and began purely focusing on cash flow.

So try Ubuntu out today. It's free and not as bad as you might think.