“How much time do you have invested in a platform, and how often do you rely upon that knowledge?”
As operating systems become less relevant, we should focus our time on what matters – even if that means giving up on hard-earned knowledge
How much do you care about an operating system? It’s an intriguing question, and I’ll admit it’s one that’s best discussed over a pint of your favourite tipple. Or glass of Chardonnay, or whatever your favoured drink.
The stark reality is that most people don’t care a jot. They’re only concerned with what it can do for them. This is a clear shift in the commoditisation of the computer and the services it offers.
This has profound effects on the decision-making process in terms of what to buy next. It’s a tough question to answer, but it has to be asked – how much do you actually have invested in your current platform? By that, I don’t mean licensing costs for specific software, because it is hoped that good software is cross-platform and there’s some sort of migration process available from one platform to another. No, I mean how much personal time and effort do you have invested in a platform, and how often do you need to rely upon that knowledge?
It’s a fascinating question, because I’ve been thinking long and hard about my time investment over the past 25 years in various platforms, and what value, and thus importance, they have to me now.
Back in the old days, you really had to get inside Windows 3x or 9x, or the early days of NT, to make it work. Everything came in a somewhat part-baked fashion, relying upon your knowledge to stitch together what was necessary to make a complete platform. On Windows 3x before Adobe Type Manager and TrueType, it was the knowledge necessary to build and install typefaces onto the screen and to laser printers. It seems almost hilariously archaic now, but that’s what we had to do back then.
By the mid-1990s we were into networking with a vengeance, using a variety of stacks such as Netware and Microsoft’s own networking solutions. In the noughties, it was all about big networks, centralised login and Active Directory. And knowing how to wrestle with a Backup Domain Controller and those pesky services.
As we move into the business end of this decade, it’s all about managing a disparate set of devices, and the explosion of mobility in the workplace.
An example. Yesterday, I booted up a rarely used Dell laptop. It had probably been six months since it was last turned on. And there I discovered (hopefully) my last installed copy of Windows 8. I make no excuses that I was completely lost by this platform. Then it dawned on me that I had managed to stay on Windows 7 for serious desktops, and had avoided Windows 8 for most other work as much as possible.
Ever since I migrated to the first Windows 10 betas all those months ago, I’d successfully purged thoughts of Windows 8 from my mind. I’d still take Windows 7 64-bit over Windows 10 on a desktop machine any day, but that comes down to familiarity. I can make Windows 7 dance to whatever tune I desire. I still find myself cursing the nonsense in Windows 10, where it’s possible to do the same thing through two different routes. It isn’t as unpleasant as Windows 8, but it grates all the same.
My solution to this dusty Windows 8 laptop? Going back to Windows 7 wasn’t an easy option, so I pushed it forward to Windows 10, a process that seemed to take most of a working day.
There is still something really quite broken about the way Windows handles updates. I was working recently with a bunch of Windows 7 64-bit VMs, running in a mixture of VMware Fusion and Parallels containers. Getting Windows 7 to update appears to be a battle made in hell itself. It can take literally hours of the dialog box spinning around telling me it’s checking for updates. So much so that you need to disable power down and screen off to give it time overnight to try to complete its work.
There is a wizard that Microsoft has provided to help diagnose Windows Update issues. I’ve tried it repeatedly, but it just tells me that something is
“Back in the old days, you had to rely upon your knowledge to stitch together what was necessary to make a platform complete”