Bill Gates is obviously a very worried man. Despite being one of the richest creatures on the planet - in terms of monetary wealth - it is not clear if he is indeed the most content or happiest person - he must be afraid. Very afraid. That someone in a slum in India or a shanty town in Africa; or a terraced house in a forgotten northern English city…isn’t using Microsoft products. “Accumulate, accumulate; that is the moses and the prophets”.

Well I’ve just bought a cheopo Dell laptop which ‘recommends Vista’ and I have never had such a cr*p computing experience in my life. This is sub Windows 98 or whatever it was called. How…how??!! is it possible after years and years of experience to create something that is worse than something you created 10 or 20 years ago? Did the cathedral builders in 13th century England work like this? No. Each cathedral they built was bigger, better, braver. Each new version of a cathedral, from Durham to York, to Lincoln to Peterborough, to Salisbury, was better technically and more beautiful. But with Microsoft, despite the enormously larger amounts of working capital, this process is reversed. Each new version - from 98 to XP to Vista …is worse and worse. I can only put this down to psychosis and paranoia. I fail to find a rational material analysis as to why this should be. 

Any organisation that is still going down the M$ route should be destined for failure. Any organisation that thinks like M$ should be destined for failure on the basis that eventually the hard facts of real life will cut through the most powerful ideologies. 

“Look on my works, ye mighty and despair” ……an ode against corporate capitalism (?)

 

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away