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PCs still suck

  • Articolo

Okay so I probably shouldn't be writing that as a title considering who I work for, but I had a rather frustrating weekend IT session. Since I work at Microsoft, all of my family and friends expect me to answer any obscure computer problem they might have.  I wonder if doctors have this same problem?

I had 3 separate "support" calls this weekend:

  1. My wife informed me that Win32 was not working on our laptop.
  2. My in-laws told me that they couldn't see themselves when talking to us through video conferencing (and hence we couldn't see them either)
  3. Our laptop was consistently blue-screening (separate issue from the first) during video conferencing.

All 3 of these problems would not be diagnosable by say my wife. In fact one of them was only fixable because of the specific knowledge I have from working here.

PC's still aren't ready or usable by home consumers. At least not without a lot of hand holding and support. How come we haven't fixed this yet? Why do PCs have to be so techie? Okay I know why, but the reasons/excuses seem shortsighted to me.

What if we had an OS where all drivers were controlled/written by the vendor. What if the whole OS allowed but a single app to run at a time? And what if you had to control it with say, a game controller, instead of a keyboard and a mouse?

I think for Christmas next year I'm buying everybody an X-box with live and a camera.

Now if only X-box live would come with a browser.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2007
    >>What if we had an OS where all drivers were controlled/written by the vendor. What if the whole OS allowed but a single app to run at a time? And what if you had to control it with say, a game controller, instead of a keyboard and a mouse?<< I had that back in 1987, it was called GEOS ;)

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2007
    Yeah I guess I wasn't abdicating going back in time. Just something simpler I guess. Maybe a mac is the answer (oops did I just say that). I just think most people who use computers don't need to multitask, or do anything but play games, write e-mail, and surf the web. Maybe write a document or two. Can't we just have an OS that does just those things and nothing else? Would that be so bad? Does my mother really need to be able to run Visual Studio and host her own web server on her machine?