Leaner, meaner, bigger, bloater

I love speculating about Microsoft's internals. It's an occupation similar to the China watchers who used to perch in Hong Kong and try to deduce what was happening behind the Bamboo Curtain on the basis of the faintest and most oblique of clues.

In this case, once again I am persuaded that MS has a corporate culture that has led to loss of control by management. As a result, MS can't write lean, mean, smaller, unbloated software even if their lives depend on it. I don't know who, if anyone, is in charge. Possibly marketing has retained their baleful influence, but it may be that no one is in charge, no one has the power to say "stop that right now!" when the software types fuck up once again.

There's an old adage, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" and I begin to wonder if MS's repeated pratfalls the last few years are symptoms of an impending corporate failure. Sooner or later even the stupidest member of the MS customer base is going to bail out and either buy a Mac or install Linux, and then where is Redmond?

PS: in this household, printer sharing is the job of an antiquated e-Machines Win98 box, while file sharing is handled by an up to date Ubuntu box with a nice fat hard drive.