Indie 2.0

Yesterday Microsoft launched “Office Live Workspace”–it’s response to online office applications like Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword. The free document sharing and collaboration service part of it is in beta and English only, as reported in this TechNewsWorld article. <Rant on> This article’s headline hits the nail on the head, suggesting a deeper truth: Microsoft wants to keep us tethered to

• an expensive Wintel anchor (which Moore’s Law forces us to upgrade every 18 months)
• fat fees for the oxygen we breath (OS) and
• multiple copies of expensive MS Office.

How come Bill Gates is trying to solve malaria and Microsoft wows us at TED and does brilliantly perceptive satires of the current state of advertising, but my two XP installs crash daily and I routinely get byzantine error messages like this?

What the heck is normal.dot and why are we still tethered to that metaphor? And why do we routinely get asked ontological non sequiturs by Microsoft like this in the 21st century? Didn’t we learn in kindergarten: finish one project and clean up, before going on to the next? What if you built an operating system, but nobody came?

I hear the rumble of millions of feet, voting. I hear the sound of straws being grasped. And someone’s lunch being eaten. Ah, I hear my doorbell. It’s the delivery man with my new MacBook Pro, which (guess what?) doesn’t come with Vista, but will come pre-installed with iWork, so I can give presentations in Keynote.

Try to tether us all you want, Microsoft. But the days of “ball and chain” buggy bloatware are numbered… (sung to the tune of The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Ballon”) <Rant off>