Tushar, my son decided to upgrade his laptop to Windows 8. This adventure taught me something and force me to take a critical look at the software development so far.
-------------------------------
Tushar, my son, is quite a
geek. He wants to possess the latest in gadgets and games, if only his dad
could afford them all. However, he does read up on them and loves to
window-shop. His swanky new laptop was barely out of the bubblewrap with all
the glory of Intel i7, a 1TB HDD and multiple gigs of RAM, all under the
glorified umbrella of Windows 7 Home Premium, an object of envy for lesser
mortals, yet he decided to upgrade to Windows 8, which was offered to him for a
small payment.
Even though he is quite an
expert, Tushar’s reasons to upgrade were simple – faster booting, longer
battery life and a tablet-like interface which is now the industry standard. In
his decision to do so he laid bare the myths that software giants like
Microsoft had built so far – the bigger the better. That Microsoft too
participated in breaking it is no consolation to them, since they did so after
being battered into submission. The tablets, whether of the genres of iOS,
Android or Blackberry proved beyond doubt that same, nay better, experience can
be offered with lean operating systems and leaner applications, what with
everything crammed into a measly 8GB, with ample space leftover for your data
to boot (pun intended). The “office” packages, such as “Office to Go”or the
“Quick Office Pro” are infinitesimally small compare to that bloatware called
MS Office, yet deliver everything that one needs to function in his business,
with charts, fonts and formatting galore. These iOS or Android applications
cost small change compared to the king’s ransom one was expected to pay for the
so called productivity suites, most of which was junk inside anyway, just like
the junk DNA that we carry and think that we are superior to the rest of the
animal world.
Tushar also introduced me to
those sweet little things called “APPS”, tightly written codes of software that
do nifty things for one, like buying movie tickets, checking one's PNR status
or reading a newspaper online. Games suddenly started becoming available for
seventy five rupees instead of five thousand, all tuned for hi-res called the
retina display. The colossal games, which came on double layered DVDs, asked
for a supercomputer to run with mega-power graphics cards and water cooled
microprocessors; software and hardware were soon found promoting each other’s
builders. If the Windows 8 can boot in a third of the time it took its
predecessors, provides a better interface, offers seamless integration of
tablets and mobile phones with the desktop and yet consumes less battery, one
wonders why Microsoft was keeping employed the umpteen thousand code writers
and paying them fat salaries, only to be recovered from the hapless consumers.
After all why didn’t anyone think of writing apps for Windows or Mac, leaving
it to the poor home PC user to slog it out everytime by logging into
high-traffic websites and doing the needful afresh every time he needed to buy
a movie ticket or read an ebook, starting with a www.someweirdplace.com?
Why compel the customers to do everything himself even after he had pawned his
house and his car to buy the OS and the Office Suite?
Has Microsoft learnt the lesson
and made amends in Windows 8? Only time and Tushar can tell. Tushar has asked
me to wait a few days till he is through with his own beta testing and only
then will he advise me on upgrading my older laptop to Win 8. The new MS OS is
quite clearly leaner and cleaner. I only hope they do not offer a hundred
updates over the next fifty days. I also hope that Tushar does not ask me to
buy a new laptop with a touch screen, so that a “complete” experience is his
deliverance.
I also wonder what Microsoft
will now do with the army of old-fashioned code writers, who in spite of
writing a million lines a day could never offer tightly integrated software
free of security holes. Or was it because of the million lines that they
fumbled all along? It would be interesting to see how many of these programmers
are sent home and how many for retraining.
Meanwhile, as Tushar is on his
exploration of the unknown and the inevitable, I wish him a Happy Birthday. It
is October 30 today. Maybe he could also learn a few tricks from this upheaval
in the IT world and emerge leaner, faster and stronger, with lots of apps to
embellish his personality.
Happy birthday, Beta! You do me
proud.
