Crazy Apple News Site

As an apology for not posting the Friday iFAQ on Friday, I present to you: Vista Bullying

In a widely reported move,¹ Microsoft has announced that the “Vista Bullying stops here”.  And we here at CANS think it’s about time, too.  I mean, look at poor little Microsoft, barely making enough money to keep every single human being on earth fed, and along come big ol’ Apple, throwing its weight around, making Vista feel bad. Be nice to Microsoft! They’re doing their best, folks!  They don’t have all that many programmers in Redmond, and making an operating system is hard! Why does Apple have to be so mean, anyway?  All Vista wants to do is take over the world and make everyone have to buy OneCare to patch all the security holes left in the original operating system.  Is that so bad?

But as much fun as it is to paint Microsoft as a spoiled, whiny little nine year old getting pushed around by a much cooler five year old, It’s even more fun to look at some of the comments they actually made in the announcement:

Yes, the changes did cause a lot of pain.

What’s funny is that the full stop did go there.  (In the interest of fair reporting² I should mention that the next line was “But the customers are starting to see benefits.”) Microsoft acknowledges that using Vista causes pain, and that it’s only a year later that “customers are starting to see benefits.”   I…I just don’t have anything to say to that, but I will mention that when I took a class that required me to write software in Visual Studio, I got a “are you sure you want to run this program?” warning every time I started Visual Studio, itself a Microsoft product.  My guess is that Microsoft wanted to let me know that if I run VS, I could write a virus, which would then infect my machine and destroy all my data.

And then there’s this comment:

Brooks noted that the same architectural changes that caused hardships in Vista are carrying over to Windows 7…

What they mean to say is that the hardships are over, because all the changes were made in Vista, so Windows 7 should be a breeze.  What it sounds like is “All the hardships in Vista are carrying over to Windows 7″, which is way funnier.

One more:

You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping. We’ve woken up and it’s time to take this message forward. This is the true story of Vista…

Ahh, pure marketing speak.  Take one metaphor, muddle it up with some other vaguely fairy-tale sounding phrases, and then “take your message forward”.  The great thing about this sentence is that it doesn’t actually mean anything! Asimov would have called it “syntactically null”.  But it sounds like big news.

Now, I have to say that the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads are getting on my nerves.  So if those went away, I’d be happy. But all this whining about “people is bein’ mean to us fer no reason” is pretty silly, and isn’t going to get Microsoft any credibility in the market, especially while they’re running their own smear campaigns against Linux.

Well, this didn’t end up being as funny as I’d hoped, but one of the first rules of comedy is that it isn’t funny to make fun of something that’s already a joke.

1. that last one is the funniest [↩]
2. I do that sometimes [↩]