Your favorite software should die

This month's issue of PC Magazine is loaded with phrases with this level of irony against the great popularity of Microsoft and specifically the Windows operating system. I want to dedicate this post to Nadia Molina, who is leaving PC Magazine, we will miss her mole and her unmistakable voice on podcasts, but we surely know about her through her  Personal blog.

Returning to the theme of the month, John Dvorak, with a heavy subject "Windows should die" proposes that after 25 years of history, it must be admitted that the most popular operating system cannot progress further ... not in the way it has been happening. Meanwhile, Lance Ulanoff makes a contrast of how other things have changed in 25 years and that a Windows restart is almost impossible; your theme "More of the same? !Do not!" Is conclusive.

And is that Steve Ballmer A few months ago, after the bad taste that provoked Windows Vista dared to say one of the phrases that will go down in history in the Idiotipedia. He stated that if 97% of people used Windows, that was the clearest demonstration that the PC was better than Mac, a tragic way to measure quality by volume of consumption. Then by showing Windows 7 he dares to say that it is nothing more than Windows Vista a little improved. Wow!

In technologies, users do not have much freedom to choose, not if we want the processes implemented to be sustainable. It is true that nobody puts a knife at us to buy the most expensive program on the market, but Moore's law has been in charge of maintaining the monopoly of large commercial brands to assassinate small initiatives whose market share is insignificant and consequently commercially unsustainable. We see how innovative technologies that turn great brand-name software around and a half are viewed with contempt because of the relative shortage of fans; on the contrary, the great ones, instead of fighting their shortcomings, only seek to saturate the different niches, mutating their many times "absurd way of taking us".

Here is not so easy to say "For tastes, colors”, Because the life cycle of clothing fashions, although shorter, are recyclable; something that does not happen in the technological environment. Personally, I prefer to implement these mass brands, due to the ease of finding human resources to use them, commercial support and the guarantee that they will not die (very soon). But I must admit that doing it with low-cost solutions would be easier both in price, practicality and ease of creating new functionalities. In weighing both sides of the scale, between making it more expensive and difficult or making it "uncertainly sustainable", it is obvious that the first risk is more acceptable than the second.

Curiously, the second part of the PC Magazine publication is uncovered by throwing a good amount of flowers to Apple computers and applications, which they have been doing for a long time. We congratulate you on this act, not only for believing that you are right but because in these times, when writing for the opinion of the majority is a measure of success and swimming against that current requires courage in the format "Persea"; They play it if we remember that the English version of this magazine disappeared a couple of months ago (in print).

Anyone who has tried Linux knows that it is more efficient than Windows, that it sings it to the sky instead of criticizing the neighbor's lawn, even if it does it only for its 22 daily visitors. But you need to be consistent and unbiased in this, taking care not to fall into the extreme of constant disbelief and unproductive pessimism. At the end of the road, the passion to find new ways of doing things will build better results and time will prove us right.

Concluding this post I recommend as an obligatory exercise, in the privacy of the 45 centimeters that separate us from the monitor, a few minutes to reflect on whether our most used programs in the geospatial world could also walk the coffin on our back. If the innovations of the last eight years have produced greater effectiveness in massive processes, if new ways of doing things have decreased steps and the need to increase RAM is equivalent to the share of innovation and development Produced in daily routines.

Nevertheless, give life to the king.