Dear Microsoft Windows ...

SpaceCanary writes "I recently read this open letter to Windows and I think it's pretty funny. The guy writes a letter to his OS as if he was breaking up with it. It's a bit strange, but finally more people are starting to see the light and moving away from Windows. The writer chronicles his relationship with the versions of Windows and finally is able to move on in the end."

Comments

Dear Windows...

[scowling]

You let me run the games I want to play, the industry-standard word processing and publishing software I need to use in my job, and haven't crashed on me in months. While your security is questionable, at least I know that there is some accountability in your design.

I'll be home by 5.

Reminds me...

[SimianOverlord]

Of a readers letter I really enjoyed from The Register UK IT mag. It was an answer to an article about Microsoft saying basically they get too much stick. Managed to track it down via Google: Enjoy, if it's your thing.

..

"Microsoft simply makes some fairly mediocre software and charges a lot for it."

No.

Microsoft deliberately designs software that is inherently insecure and refuses to fix the fundamental design flaws no matter how bad the outcome is.

When Microsoft merged IE and the desktop, almost ten years ago now, I immediately acted to get IE and Outlook banned at work. Why? Because using the same APIs to operate on trusted (local) and untrusted (email, internet) objects makes every program that uses those APIs responsible for determining, independently, whether an object is trusted or not.

I and every security administrator I knew wrote Microsoft telling them this was a horrible idea. Nothing. They ignored the security community and went on to actually build IE in to the next release of Windows so you couldn't leave it out, as part of their game-plan to try and outflank the DoJ.

I didn't know what the result would be, but I knew it would be bad. I did what I could to discourage our users from running IE and Outlook, and waited.

We didn't have long to wait.

When the Melissa virus showed up, I thought, "OK, this should let them know they've got a problem. They'll pull out IE and settle, and we'll be able to secure Windows again". Boy, was I naive.

Here we are, it's 2004 instead of 1996, and there are still weekly exploits found in IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player, programs that use the MSHTML control. Get rid of that and you'd cut the virus problem by a factor of 10 or 100. 90-99% of the time spent fighting and cleaning up after viruses should be billed directly to Redmond, and because they did it to illegally avoid complying with the agreement they had with the DoJ, there should be criminal charges on top of that.

Microsoft doesn't merely charge a lot for mediocre software, they deliberately and knowingly force people to chew up lifetimes fighting a problem that should not exist, and they do it to win a little extra market share for a secondary product that they don't even charge money for.