From the Editor’s Desk: Breathtaking (Premium)

Many, many years ago, I realized that my enthusiasm for personal technology had shifted from supporting products and services, or perhaps the companies that made them, to supporting the users of those products and services, or perhaps the customers of the companies that made them. That is, I'd been fascinating by personal technology since before we even used that term, I recall seeing my first Commodore home computer and imagining the games I would create for that device. But when I entered the industry, not by becoming a software developer as expected, but rather by becoming a writer of books, an author, my concerns shifted.

This realization wasn't immediate. And it was confused by another contrary reality in which I slowly found myself supporting Microsoft and its products and services after having dismissed this company as ridiculous. Growing up, I was firmly in the Commodore and then Amiga camp, and my view of MS-DOS and Microsoft's growing collection of software and languages in the 1980s was decidedly negative. It wasn't until Microsoft delivered Windows 3.0 in 1990, decisively pointing the way forward for the entire industry, that my views about it started to soften. And when I saw a pre-release version of what became Office 4.0 in late 1993, the bit flipped. Microsoft had clearly turned some corner on quality and usefulness.

My first books were about programming languages, Windows, and Office apps, and while I never intended to focus on Microsoft explicitly--I mean, I did co-author a tome about Borland Delphi 3 in the late 1990s--I simply followed the industry. Even though I lived this history, it's difficult to sometimes remember how dominant Microsoft was. But in those days, personal computing was Microsoft. And Microsoft was personal computing.

And it wasn't until the company had established its dominance that I began to understand my role in this mess. Someone was complaining to me about some feature or behavior or whatever in some Microsoft product and I asked why they didn't contact support and see what they could do about it. I had just done so with Novell. It owned WordPerfect at the time, and it was using a mysterious feature called the Registry that I had never heard of. This was in Windows 3.1, before it became more well-known--and more broadly used--in Windows 95 and later. Novell had been helpful in getting me over my Registry hump, and I had been able to get a lab of computers in the school I was working at properly configured.

But he was unconvinced. Microsoft would never fix the issue he was experiencing, he said.

You pay for this software, I argued, unknowingly taking my first steps into a Ralph Nader-like future. This relationship was all wrong, I said. You shouldn't have to contort yourself to what Microsoft is doing, you're the customer. It should do what you need.

That we would still be dealing with this type of thing 30 years later is ironic and sad. Indeed, this was a theme of a short talk I...