From the Editor’s Desk: Pragmatic ⭐

As an Amiga user and enthusiast in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was not impressed with Microsoft or anything it made, especially Windows. PCs of that era booted into a limited MS-DOS command line environment, which I found quaint, and true multitasking was mostly an unfulfilled promise. But the Amiga failed along with Commodore, and when I decided to return to school in my late 20s to study software development, the only question was whether I would need a PC or a Mac. And that meant there was really no question at all, since the computer science college classes at that time all assumed the PC.

I had used the original IBM PC and some clones by that point, but my funds were tight, so I started pricing out the components I would need to build my first PC. Its barely beating heart was an AMD 386SX because it was so much cheaper than the real Intel chips, including the expensive 80486. It would be enough.

I continued to be unimpressed with the PC as a platform. But in time, a few things changed and helped to alter my opinions about Microsoft and its software. The professor of a networking class recommended that I check out Windows for Workgroups, which I did, and I found its 32-bit memory and disk access options even more compelling than its networking functionality. My wife worked at a training company that got pre-release versions of the Microsoft Office 6.0 suite, and I was blown away by the quality of the apps, especially Microsoft Word. Visual Basic had its warts but it was still an impressive way to create apps visually and quickly. And then I got caught up in what became my career and found myself using an early beta of Windows 4.0, soon renamed to Windows 95, that was quite interesting to me.

I also bought Charles Petzold’s iconic book Programming Windows (the 3.1 edition, I believe) and read and re-read it, amazed by how complex it all was. And while this may seem odd, that complexity helped shift my opinions, too, as it was so technical and difficult to understand. Clearly, this was a sophisticated environment, I believed. (Now I realize it was just complex and poorly designed.) I had a similar reaction with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), a horrible “wrapper” a few years later.

This all happened in the early 1990s. In From the Editor’s Desk: Early Influences ⭐, I wrote about the “era” that, for me, ran from about 1978 to 1993, a 15-year period in which I was what I would now call a personal technology enthusiast. 1993 was (again, for me) what we now call an inflection point, a slice in time when everything changes and this hobby, this enthusiasm, turned into a life’s work. In that earlier post, I noted that we moved to Phoenix in 1993 and that the movie Jurassic Park and the videogame Star Wars: X-Wing were both released that year too. But 1993 was also the beginning of a new era in which I became part of the tech industry, in a peripheral sense, through the writing of books. The first of which were all about Windows and other Microsoft products and targeted the education market.

Things escalated quickly, as they sometimes do. Commodore declared bankruptcy in early 1994, ending that dream and taking what was left of my childhood with it. Windows was already taking over the world, and thanks to the changes coming in Windows 95, I would resent that a lot less than before. Plus, Office was terrific, the Internet was happening, and everything was changing again. Some in the Amiga community turned to OS/2, hoping to escape from Microsoft. I saw its technical advantages, but I also saw the problems, too many problems, and argued that they were just backing another lost cause.

My opinions about Microsoft at any given time are whatever they are, but the reality of that era is that Microsoft was personal computing. It had dominated the market with an inferior text-based OS that formalized the PC platform, it had expanded that domination with a Windows GUI that started off badly but got interesting in 1990, and it had killed all the competition it saw in OSes and office productivity. Like it or not, Microsoft was inevitable, as were Windows and Office.

I didn’t see this at the time, but all the preceding events have at least one thing in common: Things beyond my control changed or occurred and each time I proceeded pragmatically. This is what defines the era that, for me, started in 1993 and continues to this day. I had my reasons for not liking Microsoft just as I had my reasons for loving the Amiga. But the world was evolving, and it was clear which way things were going. And so I simply did the right thing for myself in adopting Microsoft’s platforms. And while the improvements it made in the 1990s helped make that a lot more enjoyable, that’s sort of beside the point. I was a fan of personal technology from the youngest age imaginable, and by the time I was 30 years old, that hadn’t changed. It’s just that personal computing had consolidated, and Microsoft was at the center.

But I’m never happy. I’ve been intrigued by alternatives since there were alternatives to dominant platforms, and while working in the computer lab I mentioned in Have a Blast ⭐, I discovered Linux and began downloading Slackware Linux floppy disk images on the school’s PCs and creating the multi-disk install set so I could experiment. I was even more fascinated by the resurgence of Apple in the early 2000s and the way it brought NeXTStep to the Mac as Mac OS X. In the years since, I’ve used countless Linux distributions, bought countless Macs, and have tried countless alternatives of every kind imaginable.

And yet I’ve stuck with Windows for all these years. This is in some ways astonishing. But it’s also just pragmatic. I literally prefer it over the alternatives, and it still works better for me. And it is perhaps notable that Windows has withstood so many other potential choices, especially in recent years as Microsoft seems to sometimes forget that Windows even exists. But this is really about the alternatives, in this case, not meeting my needs. Not yet, at least.

But in the war for our souls, there are battles big and small. The personal computing space has evolved greatly over the past 30 years and Microsoft and Windows are, by some measures, just small players now. The world embraced the web and then mobile, and now it’s struggling with AI, but from a high level perspective, this is all about heterogeneity. That’s good, at least in theory. But now we have multiple Big Tech players, each with their own strengths and abuses, and also a growing collection of what I call Little Tech alternatives that are ever more effective and useful. They’re like fast-moving rodents running around the feet of dinosaurs that don’t realize the asteroid is hurtling towards the earth and they’ll soon be dead.

It’s worth remembering that those rodents inherited the earth. Perhaps Little Tech can duplicate that unexpected success. But until or unless that happens, we can only play with the cards we were dealt. And that’s a mix of Big Tech and Little Tech products and services. As it has been for several years or more.

When I started Thurrott.com with George over a decade ago, I wanted to publicly pivot from a Microsoft-centric viewpoint to a more general personal computing stance. To many, I will always be the Microsoft guy, or the Windows guy, but I’ve always been open eyed and interested in other things. This became overt, perhaps, with the switch to Thurrott.com. But it has also escalated in recent years thanks to enshittification. These days, it’s always enshittification.

When I get asked about the changes enshittification is forcing on me, it’s clear that some misunderstand my response. This is not a total rejection of Big Tech, but rather a clear acknowledgement that these companies will never value me as a customer, so I need to aggressively look out for my own best interests. I always take a centrist stance, but here I feel myself leaning, if not veering, away from Big Tech when it makes sense and towards Little Tech when that makes sense. But that also means I will use Big Tech when that makes sense.

I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to think or care about any of this.

But it occurred to me that this shift, which I view as something happening to me, and not something I decided on and then did, can be summed up in a pithy way. And that my focus hasn’t really changed all that much, though it may seem that way from the outside. That is, when it comes to personal technology, as in most things in my life, I am above all else a pragmatist. It’s that simple.

I’m always distressed when a person can easily describe themselves with a short phrase, so it’s also somewhat hypocritical of me to embrace such an overly simplistic way to explain myself. It feels like a half-step up from explaining your behavior in terms of Astrology—“sorry, I’m a classic Virgo,” or whatever idiocy—or from someone telling you what they do for a living as if that somehow defines them. People are complex and nuanced. So this feels wrong.

But it’s not wrong, it’s real. And it’s happening. And so it’s right.

My deep connection with personal technology is as much emotional as it is anything else, and it continues to this day despite Big Tech’s myriad attempts to beat the love out of me. And I feel good about that. We all need a sense of purpose, and we all want things to just work properly. I will seek that out wherever I can find it.