I'm too sexy for my PC: an open letter to Microshaft

Dear God Gates:

You've been replaced. Catapulted. Outta here. Whether your shizz was good while it lasted is up for heated debate. You see, your PC machines allowed me to catch my first glimpses of the computing world. Nevermind that it was like seeing grayscale, unless I was confronted with the ever-dreaded Blue Screen Of Death.

You should've seen it coming. With your service packs, your nagging, your holier-than-thou-ness, your 1993 clipart gallery, your desire to rent us your software, your bugs, your software conflicts, your backdoor deals, your easter eggs, and your unwillingness to play nice with others. I should never have to restart my computer under the reason of "it got confused". Machines don't get confused.

You were smug enough to act like that's just the way it is and that I simply had to sit back and take it. You were arrogant enough to assume you could ship shit product and call it a finished one. You were dismissive enough when consumers got angry. They responded by deeming your software a worthless-but-necessary evil and refused to pay for it, pirating it instead. Rather than fixing the problem and improving your PR, you simply retaliated with kindergarten-like vindictiveness, implementing a mommy-may-I strategy in order to activate new versions of the OS. And of course, you engineered it so that we couldn't simply stop upgrading.

Yeah, let's talk about that upgrading. Hearing the horror stories of Windows 95 and 98, I hung onto Windows NT as long as I could. When Windows 2000 came out, we went ahead and migrated, having seen the writing on the NT wall. As you know, we immediately needed service packs just to make Windows 2000 run properly. Once we had Windows 2000 tweaked to our liking, we hung onto it, refusing to change while you released Vista (which was a poor excuse for an OS and you know it), and Windows 7, which is wrought with its own problems.

The last straws have been all the viruses. I've gotten more in the last 2 months than I have in the past 10 years. I know, I know. Macs get them too. (PC aficionados are always quick to point that out.) But let's face it - Microsoft shoulders the lion's share of the virus burden, because there are exponentially more security holes in the average Microsoft-based system. Remember the Windows Service warnings circa 2003? The trojans? The worms? Yep, figured you did.

Honestly, if money were no object, I would've sold all computing machines contaminated with your chaotic code for scrap parts and used the money to help replace what I spent on new Apples. That's Apple's drawback: they're not cheap. But hear this: you get everything you pay for...and then some. That's more than I could ever say for a Microsoft product.

I really think you're going to go down on this one. You were Too Big To Fail before there was such a dastardly concept, and you indeed ruled the world, controlling about 95% of all computer market share. But even the mammoth fell and became extinct, as did T Rex before him. Kings of the Jungle do expire, and you're foolish to believe you're different. Every dog has its day and every day has its way of being forgotten.

See, Apple is way ahead of you, easing the transition. They've installed themselves at the M$ prison entrance, built a bridge across the protective moat, and are helping people across. They've thought of everything you failed to do. They built their entire platform on intuition, common-sense, and ease-of-use--concepts you never considered or cared about. They developed classes for noobs so that we can meet with experts one-to-one and steer the course of our learning based on our unique interests. Those applications that serve as answers to major Microsoft software save files in either Apple or Microsoft formats - or even generic formats like PDF. And for those in a lurch who have software for which there IS no Apple version? Apple took care of that too, with programs like Parallels, which allow people to run their Microsoft-exclusive software inside a Mac window, without even having to reboot their computer in M$ mode.

Enjoy your demise. I know that many of us, as we watch it happen, will reap what would be a sick satisfaction if our feelings weren't so justified and well-deserved.

Signed,

Sexy Apple Mama