Sigh. Thirty minutes and the download process is 4% finished. It's a 650 MB download, but I have high speed Internet access. I've downloaded things a couple of Gigabytes in length in less time. It's not my home connection and it's not my Internet provider. Whatever Microsoft is doing to serve me this file, whatever servers and load balancing machines they have to manage their network, it's not working. It's quite possibly the slowest download I have ever experienced, including during my time on a dial-up connection in the 1990's. I've used Bulletin Board Systems with MODEMs clocking in at just over 300 baud, and I have never experienced such a time dilation. I'm going to need to keep this machine on all night, just to download the equivalent of an Ubuntu Lite installation, which I just did yesterday and it only took 10 minutes.

Why do we put up with it? Why do we go through this crap, and why do we tolerate it? I couldn't tell you how many times I've installed a Microsoft operating system over the last 20 years. I couldn't tell you how many times I've done it in the last three years. I can tell you I've installed my Linux desktops a couple of times and I've upgraded my Max OS X systems once. But I can tell you that each Windows installation was painful. Every. Single. Time. Their installation process is nothing like Windows. Sure, the Linux side of things can be a bit more difficult if you're trying to do something different, but if you're just installing out of the box configurations - just like I'm doing with Windows - it's a walk in the park.

So why do we put up with all of this shit? It's not because we like it. In fact, this time around it was one of the worst installations I have done in recent months, all because I wanted to play a game, which is now sitting at 5% download complete. And herein lies why I continue to suffer this operating system: I simply want to use a piece of software which can only be run on Windows. Can you imagine what this process will be like if I want to play this game five years from now? Pretty to close to impossible, I think. Their installation and software deployment model is fundamentally broken, and they have yet to come up with anything better.

After all these years, they still don't have a dependency model for software packages. They don't have the concept of a single, atomic unit of software. Instead, they have a rats nest of files and directories scattered all across the operating system. Mac OS X have application bundles and a rigid deployment model; Linux has packages with dependencies which makes installing software, and the dependencies of that software a much better experience. They too have a rigid deployment structure which only makes the lives of the user that much easier. Sure, they have their technical drawbacks sometimes, like the availability of bleeding edge software to drive bleeding edge hardware, but that's only because the bulk of the market is held by Microsoft. Naturally, if the market dries up, then those hardware vendors will see to it that their drivers and helper applications make it to the operating system of choice.

On top of all of that, Windows developers are still doing really bad things because the model continues to let them. I continue to use the operating system because I want the software the developers are writing, but I have my limits and I will go elsewhere for entertainment. One of Windows' great strengths was their drive to maintain compatibility with older software products. This didn't make them popular but it kept them in business.

There are numerous stories about what the Windows operating system developers did "in the old days" to make obsolete or broken software work. You want Sim City to work with Windows 95 for the launch? No problem. Oh wait, it seems the developers at Maxis were sneaking their hands up the dress of the Windows memory manager. Ha ha. We'll just work in some special handling for that naughty piece of software. That backward compatibility created value. That kept people coming back to The Old New Thing. Windows 7 and Vista before that are changing that model. In their quest to improve every system and the kitchen sink with Windows, they seem to be forgetting the biggest pain point of their operating system. It's not the freaking file system, or the surface manager, or the rendering routines for adding fancy window dressing (ooh, transparency). It's the fact that I need to install a million, fragmented pieces of software in order to get things done. Oh, and in the mean time, reboot a few dozen times. Ha! That never seems to get old. Funny that.