“Microsoft has a problem—the whole industry has a problem,” John C. Dvorak writes for PC Magazine. “Everyone needs Windows 7 to be a huge success.”
MacDailyNews Take: Not quite the whole industry, John. 
And, not everyone needs Windows 7 to be a huge success. In fact tens of millions of us don’t even want, much less need, Windows 7 – or any version of Windows – at all.
Dvorak continues, “In the past week, even Intel has been bemoaning the fact that nobody is upgrading machines like they used to… The real problem is the idiotic Windows Registry and the architecture developed around the idea.”
“Apparently Windows 7 has changed enough so that you cannot drop it in as a new OS and expect it to run anything that has been previously installed. In the past, this upgrade-in-place was always feasible, although it was never as good as a clean install. The reason it was never as good as a clean install is because the Registry is a mound of data that is never actually cleaned up by the OS. It becomes a pile of junk clogging up the machine. Garbage-collection programs such as System Mechanic and others address this problem, but the problem should not need addressing. It should not exist as a problem,” Dvorak writes. “Why can’t Microsoft bring itself to dump the Registry?”
Dvorak writes, “If programs were self contained within a single folder that could be transported from machine to machine without the need to re-install the entire program, none of this upgrade malaise would be a problem. In fact, some programs are distributed this way. But most install and rely on the Registry and will not run without the Registry information available. Move the program alone and you get a slew of annoying and mostly cryptic error messages that do not give you enough information to even jerry-rig a Registry entry to get the code to work. It’s ridiculous.”
MacDailyNews Take: If you build a billion-ton ugly-ass McMansion upon a crumbling, ancient foundation, don’t be surprised when it collapses.
Dvorak continues, “At some point, maybe soon, the Registry will be the death of Windows. At some point people will simply refuse to go through this sort of upgrade process to accommodate what is essentially a mediocre architecture based on ideas from the 1980s… With this sort of lackadaisical attitude on the part of Microsoft, people are going to look closer at fully switching to Linux or the Mac and giving up on these guys.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, Linux. In the last 5 months, Linux on the desktop has gone from 1.01% to 1.05%. In the last year, it’s up 0.16, from 0.89%. In other words, don’t hold your breath; ice ages occur slightly more frequently than do Windows to Linux switchers. Linux on the desktop is a pipe dream; it figures that Dvorak still thinks people might switch from Windows to Linux. Outside of the server room, it’s simply not happening. People are switching to Apple’s Mac, not Linux, whether Dvorak can bring himself to fully state that fact or not.
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