Keeping monopoly against one's will

Summary: An early look at a rebranding and marketing effort from Microsoft; how people are still being forced to use Windows

THE failure which is Vista 8 is worse than the Vista failure and not even AstroTurfing can save it. The man behind it retired early and reportedly got paid a lot of money (like the CFOs [1, 2]) in order not to say negative things. Yes, it's a payment made specifically to assure this. Microsoft is trying to rebrand this failure "Blue" (think "Mojave"), but critics hate the resultant system. "Final grade: FAIL," says a super-long review. "We're done."

So who would use Windows then? Well, probably those who are forced to. It's the same old strategy. UEFI restricted boot helps this strategy and so do "evangelists" who discriminate against non-Microsoft users. To quote this good new example:

GSSN will not (rightly, of course!) discriminate on the basis of race, religion and all the other things mentioned above. So, why on Earth should they (and, of course, any other equal opportunity employer) discriminate on the basis of one’s software preferences? Could they?

The software mentioned there is not some highly complex product for niche professionals. It is software for the generic, basic daily activities of pretty much every office worldwide. Expert users of LibreOffice and OpenOffice could quickly downgrade themselves to the Microsoft equivalent and still be much more productive than people with only basic skills of just that one suite. What should such users do with that form? Declare that they are only experts of “Other” (=less relevant) software, or “lie”, that is give themselves a rate correctly meaning that they won’t need babysitting just to open a spreadsheet, even if they’ve never used Excel?

Inertia is the only thing, except crime and dirty tricks, which keeps Windows going. The fastest-growing operating system, which is expected to have a billion users (not just activations), is based on Linux. ⬆