Windows Altruism
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!