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I probably shouldn’t admit this on the open Internet, but I’m a pretty suggestible guy. If you make a reasonable-sounding argument (not “Intelligent Design should be taught in schools”, for example, or “The Streets is a good rapper”), and I don’t have specific reasons to think that you are wrong, I will probably believe you. Not that I’ll accept your word as absolute truth, but I’ll think of your opinion as “something people think”, which is kind of similar.

So I feel good that I finally have an argument that I can thoroughly dismiss, in the form of “Shouldn’t we thank Microsoft for Vista?“, an editorial by Stan Beer. (Thanks to Matthew Montgomery for forwarding it along.) The point he makes is so completely misguided that I feel very confident in declaring it Wrong Wrong Wrongety Wrong (it is not possible to be any wronger). Basically, he says that Microsoft probably won’t bring in much new business with Vista, since most copies will be sold bundled with a new PC, so they deserve our thanks for giving us an operating system that’s better than Windows XP (hold on, we’ll talk about that in a second). Screw the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — Microsoft should write off Vista’s grueling five-year development cycle as a charitable donation!

You probably already know why this is incorrect, but let’s go through it together just for fun. The main flaw is the assumption that Microsoft stands to gain nothing by introducing Vista. Beer asks:

Pardon me for asking the obvious, but after five years of development at a cost of hundreds of millions and a marketing budget to match, what’s in this for Microsoft?

Continued market dominance? Keeping pace with Mac OS X’s visual pizzazz? The ability to cram more onerous copy protection down our throats? Solitaire? I would also add that, by creating the perception that Vista is an important upgrade, they may still sell more bundled copies of Windows than they otherwise would, since “the vast majority of existing Windows PCs won’t be able to use all of Vista’s features without major hardware upgrades“. For most people that means new PCs, and Microsoft does in fact make money selling Windows to computer manufacturers.

Another questionable aspect of this argument is the idea that we need to sympathize with a huge multinational company’s business failings. Ford has been losing market share for a decade, but their lack of revenue doesn’t mean they continue to produce cars out of the goodness of their corporate heart. Microsoft may be increasingly desperate to maintain Windows’ profitability, but that doesn’t mean we should thank them for grafting pretty graphics and a half-assed version of sudo onto their operating system and charging $239.

That’s the other thing. The whole argument relies on the assertion that Vista is a “significant improvement”. I’m willing to grant that Vista is more secure than XP; it’s probably not secure enough, but baby steps. And there’s a new user interface that looks prettier, and some goofy multimedia stuff that really doesn’t need to be shipped with the OS. This could all probably be done in XP, with the possible exception of the security stuff. If Microsoft really loved me, wouldn’t they just patch up XP?

In conclusion: no, we should not thank Microsoft for Vista. It may be less dangerously insecure, but the rest of the package, from the high price to the performance-hogging content protection, is not being done in our best interests. I don’t mean to disrespect the actual engineers at Microsoft, though, who by all accounts are tremendously talented and motivated, and it is not their fault that Windows is a gigantic and probably irredeemable clusterfuck. But man, I do not want to install Vista. No wonder Microsoft has to push it on us.