But It Always Says It’s Sorry Afterwards!

Posted on April 11, 2008
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 741 views |

This is going to seem like an anti-Windows rant but really, Windows is just the catalyst for this, again. The deeper question driving this post is this: why do we still put up with this shit?

The machine: a brand-new HP 6820s laptop, out of the box.
The operating system: Windows XP.
The place: a nondescript urban office.

Yesterday the laptop booted just fine, loaded XP, everything is as good as it’s ever going to get. The machine spends the day doing not a whole lot since it doesn’t have any useful software on it yet but this morning, a cold boot and:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware failure or software change might have caused this.

A couple hours and much effort later, it turns out that it seems to be suffering from a well-known yet oddly difficult to define problem that may or may not have something to do with Mup.sys and for which the solution is to re-install Windows from scratch.

Really? One day of operation and I’m already at the point where the machine is so hosed it needs to be re-imaged?

Why?

Why do we still put up with this shit? Seriously. Can anyone think of any other product for which we’d happily shell out $1200 bucks, take it home, have it completely, spectacularly fail to work, and accept that sometimes that’s the way it is? Fuck no.

We in North America live in a world in which the vast majority of the cost of what we buy is determined by convenience - we pay an inordinate amount for the convenience of the purchase as opposed to the actual material good of the product. When I buy frozen pizzas as the grocery store for $8 instead of buying the ingredients to make my own for $3, I’m paying for convenience. When I buy coffee at Starbucks instead of making my own at home, I’m paying for convenience. $13 movie tickets are just another convenience (”experience” is another word for this phenomenon, in paying for a large screen and not having to wait for it on DVD two months later). My Logitech tv remote synchs itself to my devices and grabs a whole whack of crap off the internet without me having to really care about what it’s doing; that’s pretty convenient and I paid to not have to manually program one myself.

If someone has ever told you something “just works” and they’ve happily paid a little more for it (you know what I’m talking about), they’re really saying they’re glad they paid for the convenience of it.

Yet Windows continues to deliver absolutely no convenience whatsoever and we’re still paying for it. Think of it this way: what part of a brand-new, completely non-functional laptop provides $1200 worth of value to the consumer? None of it. As is, it is a beautifully-assembled collection of a couple dozen dollars worth of precious metals, plastic and high-quality glass functioning as a remarkably unwieldy paper-weight.

The moment I have to spend my day trouble-shooting the original problem, re-installing Windows, re-configuring the user and network settings and hoping that tomorrow it doesn’t all happen again, the value of every cent spent on the convenience factor of this purchase evaporates; it becomes wasted money.

Ok, I Lied

Ok, I lied. This is going to be an anti-Windows rant, and here it comes as a comparison of operating systems.

Linux is free and with that you get every bit of convenience you’ve paid for. Given the blood, sweat and tears expended by a massive number of Linux contributors chances are if you stick with Ubuntu you’ll be up and running just fine; the work of that army of people is the currency of any convenience factor you perceive. But if Linux goes wrong then you’re going to be inconvenienced and that’s exactly what you’ve paid for. No slight to Linux, that. An entire industry has built itself up around pay-for-convenience services on top of Linux and that, IMO, is a great thing. It abstracts the cost away, makes it optional, and provides it only to those who want it.

Mac OS has a very real convenience cost built in, though it is much less than Windows zealots would have you believe. This cost reduction is not because there is less convenience now but rather because the cost used to be higher in the past and today’s users are just reaping the benefits of that. Unlike hardware, high-cost quality in software paid for in the past often continues to pay dividends into the future, even as the quality cost reduces. If the convenience cost of Mac OS 10.1 was an extra $400 back then, that convenience value is still in the OS today but at a cost today of only $40 (those are wildly arbitrary numbers simply to illustrate a point).

And Mac users realize this value (both in the cognitive sense and in the financial sense). It is precisely this that we refer to when we say “it just works” and “I don’t know, I don’t have that problem” and when we casually put the lid of our laptops down and drop them into our laptop bags knowing the machine will go to sleep as it should instead of having to shut it down each time while watching it do so to make it sure it really does shut down (you know who you are and which machines I’m talking about).

A real-world example of why I pay for the Mac convenience happened just the other day. I own a MacBook Pro. After 98 cycles the battery was down to 46%. That’s crap, that is. Apple’s own spec is 80% after 300 cycles. I took the machine back to the store it was bought at and, no questions asked, had a new battery at no cost. As you would expect. That should not be considered an exceptional experience, that’s how it should work. Fortunately it did.

I have yet to perceive this convenience cost-to-value relationship in Windows, at any level. In fact, Windows is amazingly inconvenient to use, all costs considered. Organizations pay massive licensing fees to Microsoft for the convenience of homogenizing Windows throughout their organization and then get knocked down by a single rampant virus. Home users pay for the convenience of wireless networking cards and then resign themselves to a wired shackle when “I don’t know, it’s never worked” (you can substitute your favourite “it doesn’t work” story for “wireless card” there; feel free to share in the comments). And most recently everyone’s paying an inflated convenience fee in the form of Vista, often to find out they can no longer use their printers, or cameras, or software with it.

Quite frankly, that’s just insane.

The Real Switchers?

This in fact may be the best argument for switching to Linux that I can think of, from the perspective of the typical home user. If every moment you spend battling your computer erodes the value of the convenience you’ve paid for (your time, your patience, those have a real value) then perhaps it makes sense to pay zero for convenience. You can’t erode zero.

In my opinion the Ubuntu folks have already surpassed Microsoft in terms of raw code quality and operational stability with their operating system (though Vista’s “two graphical steps forward and a Boston marathon of compatibility steps backwards” approach has really helped Ubuntu there).

From a pure dollars-to-convenience value perspective Mac OS on Apple hardware cannot (yet) be beat. Ubuntu is making impressive strides and undoubtedly both have left Microsoft motionless in the dust because as it stands today, Microsoft holds a massive global convenience deficit.

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