Robert Pogson

Life does send us slings and arrows. We take a hit and move on. Sometimes we learn from the experience and avoid the next hit.

Here’s an example. A fellow buys a notebook from BestBuy which fails under warranty a few months later. Infant mortality. We can understand that. It’s not anybody’s fault. Nothing can be made perfect if it has enough moving parts… What’s really strange is that BestBuy arranged repairs and returned the notebook without an OS. That takes some serious gaul, I would say. Isn’t that about the best way to lose a PC customer?

Furniture guy:”Here, we fixed the scratch on the table-top”
Consumer:”But!?! Where’s the fourth leg?”
Furniture guy:”We took the legs off to refinish the top and lost one…”

BestBuy claims they sold a notebook and not an OS and offered to install one for $130. Isn’t that cute?

The moral is clear. Never buy a working/complete PC from BestBuy if you know that time is money. Installing an OS from a restore CD can take hours. Probably BestBuy did not have a ready disc image and saw all its profit flying away. Maybe BestBuy should quit dealing with M$ so they can more quickly install a working OS. Even my old ones can do a nearly fully automated installation of GNU/Linux in 20 minutes and a newer machine is just a few minutes from a disc image.

This is yet another example of how much that other OS costs people. Its value is negative, folks. Best to avoid it.

The Register has a thorough review of Phoney “7″. It reveals the future of mobile IT as envisaged by M$. 1984 is here, apparently. The platform is very restrictive, an imitation of the iPhone that way. The phone must have this and that. It is a closed system, folks. M$ and its “partners” get to do things on the phone denied to third parties. The phone steers people to FaceBook, for example… What if, for the majority of us, FaceBook is not on the radar? This is either a niche product or a feeble attempt to lock people into M$’s cloud. On top of the interesting features and the lock-in, the system is buggy and easy to use once configured but not easily configured. Suppressing error messages? That’s so 1984 (is this trying to undo the “harm” of UAC?). Unless they get birth certificates issued with one, this turkey will not fly. By the time they get the bugs out Android will have a monopoly. At least Android is a flexible platform which is what people want with IT.