When I ordered a laptop from Dell (my advice - don’t) I had this intuition it was going to be a bad experience.  And it has been throughout. It is well documented how poor Dell customer support is. Only by using it, can you experience the true uselessness of talking to someone who cannot get beyond the script they have been trained to parrot.

Then there is Vista.

This is truly the most vile and horrible thing I have ever dealt with on a computer. The genuine question I have however is - why? It can’t just be that Microsoft are a giant and faceless company. So is Apple. So are loads of companies that manage to produce good industrial and aesthetic design. They too are gigantic faceless competitive and ruthless companies, often dependent on cheap labour working in factories where unions are not allowed and with poor wages and conditions. (I note with interest that sections of the commentariat - ie idle chattering classes - in the west believe that the Chinese economy might pull the world economy out of the current mess - this just adds another layer to the inherent contradictions of capital accumulation - but that’s another story).

So back to the question of why Vista is so horrible. It’s not because Microsoft don’t have some smart and clever people working there - they do. The company surely wants its products to be useful (they must have use value as well as exchange value). Do they make much money from producing faulty software only to re-coup vast sums in support charges? I don’t know.

Liz Orna talks about information management (and by implication many other things) as being an expression of underlying values. Maybe my underlying values just differ so much from Bill Gate’s underlying values that I don’t get where he’s coming from, or what the software is an expression of. Maybe it’s true that Microsoft has such a dominant position that the primary aim of the company is the realisation of exchange values and they don’t need to care too much about use values.

Also, they have an extraordinary monopoly on PC software. Open source is making some in-roads into this and you would think that this might spur Microsoft into creating better, bug free and easier to use applications, but no. The tension between Microsoft and open source is going to be develop in interesting ways. Particularly in times of economic recession. There will be a lot of companies thinking ‘can we afford these day rates from this company? And do we want to be paying all these licence fees for applications such as Microsoft Office (and the latest version is also horrible) when we might as well just get Open Office for free?

The recession is certainly going to impact on the computing industry and the current business models are not necessarily going to be the ones that will survive. After all, who wants expensive, bloated, difficult to use software in lean times?