An Open Letter to Microsoft

I'm a PC user. The siren voice of the Mac calls in the distance and has most of my working life, but I am a PC user.

My working life has spanned the rise of the PC. When I started we had dumb terminals accessing mainframes. I worked at my desk off green and white stripy printouts. I wrote stuff by hand and had a typist.

Then the PC arrived, complete with MS-DOS, running Lotus 1-2-3. What a revelation. I was never a real computer geek but I could write basic scripts in MS-DOS (until we were stopped from doing it). Then we were given Windows and Excel (running on an MS-DOS environment of course, but still point and click). Amazing.

Okay, so PC's froze and crashed. You saved your work every 5 minutes, but it was still a marked improvement on where we had been. The screen looked like hat you were going to print (as long as you could write the MS DOS printer driver line correctly to print landscape).

Then I got my first home PC, nearly 20 years ago, running Windows 95. Amazing. It still crashed, of course, but home computing had begun properly (I'd been using an Amstrad for w/p before that. Never crashed, but never really did anything else either). I had that PC quite a few years (it was a Gateway 2000, I think). Put in an extra hard drive, and upgraded the BIOS myself. Installed an internal modem as well, and got on the internet. Oh my. Virus city, with virus checkers delivered via a works programme on diskette, and the start of interminable downloads to fix bugs taking ages, messing up your settings, crashing the PC. Blocking the phone line.

Eventually I upgraded it to another machine, and ran Windows 98, I think. The children came along and got PCs for "school work", so we had three in the house, with various versions of operating systems, which I supported. They were mostly stable, but they still froze and crashed. But you put up with it, because that's what any Windows OS did. You learned to live with it, but each upgrade (which you  had to pay for or came with a new machine ) got a little better.

Then finally came Windows XP. It was stable. I can hardly recall it crashing. It was fast, it was easy to use. It did what I wanted. I could leave the children's PCs pretty much to themselves. After all the crap before it, I think I earned Windows XP.

And I use it still. Not on this machine (Windows 7, with the last machine upgrade), but on my Netbook. It's perfect for me. I can write my blogs, I can produce magazine articles, I can do spreadsheets. I can even browse the net with it.

And now you've said you won't support it any more. Hackers will be all over it you say. Upgrade now. XP is the past. It won't support touch screen technology.

Well, I have to say the best way of getting text into a screen is still a keyboard, not touch screen, so I say "So What?". I don't want to touch the screen when I'm typing, thank you.

It's not an original comment, but when you released the software you should have tested it properly. Any vulnerabilities being found now were in it when you first produced it. Any one else who produced any other product that now became a risk, regardless of how long ago it was developed, would take responsibility for it. You don't. You just tell us to upgrade to an operating system that won't really run on hardware that is actually perfectly adequate for its purpose. Windows 8 will cost me more than my Netbook is worth, and it'll probably run like a dog, and I'll have to upgrade it myself.

And I do all of this to stay where I am. I get no benefit from this apart from security from bugs you'll now publicise with your new software but won't fix.

It's immoral. You know it is. And you can afford to support XP. How much per annum to run the XP team? $1 million or more? Unlikely. You can afford it. It isn't obsolete. It's the perfect operating system to run on simple PCs.

Thank you for not listening.