Programmer Pete Wright has undergone an awakening and is now no longer with Microsoft:
Good bye Microsoft; Pete has now left the building!
In 1991, I installed Windows 3 on my desktop PC at work. Work at the time was indentured servitude at a construction company in my home town where they massively underpaid a naive but talented guy (me) a measly 4 grand a year to write Progress applications and maintain Cobol stuff on an ageing mainframe. As I recall, I had more disk space, processor and memory on the Amiga in my bedroom at the time than the mainframe had.
When I installed Windows I was stunned. At last, PC's seemed capable of displaying a graphical user interface on a par with the Amiga's own Workbench. I was a young hacker who at the time used the somewhat embarrassing mantra of "Work for a living, live for Amiga". My boss, a former accountant who happened to be in the right place at the right time when the construction company considered a mainframe, was not so impressed. I got an official warning for installing a 'game' on my work computer. I distinctly remember him bellowing at me that Windows was a "toy" and would never see the light of day in any workplace.
He talks about his experiences with programming, coming from database maintenance and creation, moving up from various companies to becoming a top programmer at MSFT and Peter finishes off with these paragraphs:
I'm writing this on my Mac using NeoOffice Writer while the PC under my desk is, for the last time ever, removing Windows and all the trappings that go with it to install Ubuntu Linux. My Microsoft career is now officially over.
Microsoft don't innovate, in my opinion. Vista looks like a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX. Their software is buggy, overpriced, and stress inducing. Their development tools are staid, designed and developed by committees to solve every problem you could ever conceive of, while being ideally suited to solving none.
The people that write code for a living with Microsoft technologies (by and large -- not all, and if you're reading a blog about coding then you're probably not included in this generalization) are day coders. They code to pick up a pay check -- they have no passion, no drive, little talent and create environments filled with tedium and political bullshit.
Today, I've resigned to leave that world behind forever, and I couldn't be happier.
Microsoft are the new IBM, and Microsoft customers are just like the huge corporate suit wearing monoliths that bought into the whole IBM mirage back in the 70's and 80's. I don't want to work for IBM. I just want to write cool software with talented passionate people, and make a difference in the world. I want to push the boundaries again like I did in the 80's and early 90's. I want to have fun and come home with a smile and a hug for my wife and kids instead of trudging through the door burdened with stress induced by boredom and corporate ineptitude.
Add this to the post about the true cost of Windows Vista and this makes Linux a lot more attractive to the newbie...
