We’re a long way from the 90s, technologically speaking. Removable rewritable media of all types – floppy, Zip disk, CD-RW – have been replaced by flash drives. Token Ring and LocalTalk are long gone; it’s all Ethernet and (more likely) wi-fi these days. Smartphones and tablets are evolving a post-PC world. I can’t remember the last time I heard the word “Netware”.
And yet, right there in the middle of everything: Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
Microsoft’s leveraging of Windows to give it a monopoly in the productivity space has left us, in the present day, with the same package everywhere. There are more Macs in the workplace than ever, the browser wars have returned and given us Safari and Chrome in addition to the revived Mozilla in the form of Firefox, and even Windows itself seems to be headed toward a hybrid desktop-tablet model, but Microsoft Office bangs along, largely uninterrupted by the likes of iWork or Google Docs.
Which is a shame, really. I don’t know what presentation software was out there before PowerPoint became the standard and then the cliche, but aside from a few Keynote devotees, there’s nothing else out there. And Excel is literally the only spreadsheet I’ve ever had to support – hell, it may as well be the operating system as far as some users are concerned. I miss the hell out of WordPerfect – in fact, I still maintain that WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac OS was the pinnacle of word processing and Office still has yet to catch up – but everybody is using Word to this very day.
So we creep slowly on with whatever Microsoft churns up, and maybe something else will get traction but probably not. Not when we get brand new MacBook Airs with Mountain Lion and the first thing we still install is Microsoft Office. And then there’s the browser issue. In the previous iteration of the aforementioned browser wars, Microsoft tied Internet Explorer into the OS as tight as they could, to the point where Word is now the default HTML editor (synergy!) and the file systems is still technically being viewed through browser windows.
The downside, as we all struggled with ten years ago, is that linking the OS to the productivity software to the browser to the email client to the mail server system means that you end up with a nice vulnerable monoculture with a million possible vectors for malware. Which means we have to overlay everything with security and antivirus software, which has to be maintained and updated constantly. Which is how we had the situation a couple of weeks ago where the Sophos Anti-Virus updater changed its heuristics and decided that every software updater on a Windows system was malware…including its own updater.
And so I’ve spent the last week wrestling with one single Windows laptop, trying to figure out if the spontaneous recurring flash of a DOS window represents an actual infection, damage to the system files as a result of the malfunction, or just some other updater that’s missing or broken and failing to work properly. And I don’t know if the problem is due to something exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the Windows ecosystem or the result of a flawed attempt to protect it.
This is no way to run computing, people. Underhanded moves made during the Clinton era so that BIll Gates could own the world are still causing problems throughout the IT world fifteen years later. And it may not get any better, because Microsoft’s much-vaunted Surface tablets focus on having a keyboard and trackpad available for the window-and-pointer set…because they include a traditional Windows environment for backward compatibility. Everything comes back to working with Windows, because Windows is still the whole shooting match.
We let them get too big long ago, and now we can’t get rid of the results.