Remember back in high school, or in middle school or junior high, you found yourself in a class where the other students were so far below your level that you suffered through the painful, slow way of teaching that the teacher had to adopt to keep those kids from failing?

If you were really unfortunate, that class also had a bully in it who was not only dumb, but also influenced the other kids to pretend that dumb was cool, and smart was… something to attack?

That dumb bully is Windows, and the IT people who advise their companies to use Windows are the other kids in the class who follow the bully.

I cannot believe how many limitations and annoyances we all have to put up with because of Microsoft and Windows. And I also cannot believe that we’ve allowed this obscene level of stupidity to be forced upon us.

Although I can’t believe it, I can understand it. A wise friend of mine once said that a person’s choice of operating systems is directly related to their level of self esteem. Obviously, he was a Mac user.

I was prompted to write this particular Rant by a problem I had today with the ridiculous and unnecessary three-digit file name extension system that even Macintosh users now have to contend with: .doc, .ind, .qxd, .qxp, .psd, etc.

Let’s be honest: Microsoft never gave a squat about the efficiency, profitability, user experience, or enjoyment of its customers. If they did, they would have adopted (not created, as Microsoft never created anything innovative) a file system as sensible as Apple’s.

You see, up until recently, Mac users never had to think about which application created a document. That information was included in a small bit of metadata attached to the file, called a resource fork. Just double-click the file, and it would open into its parent application.

Conversely (and perversely), Windows users have always had to be vigilant about which three digits came at the end of their eight-digit file name. In Windows-land, those three digits determined which application would open the file. In Mac-land, no such thing was required. Pure elegance. (And eight digits for a file name? Why would Microsoft require their customers to name files so that it was almost impossible for the file name to indicate what was in the file? Mac users have always been able to use descriptive names for files — but that’s another topic.)

However, because Microsoft steamrolled over the desktop computing landscape, the elegance of Apple’s original file system now exists only as a grudgingly supported stepchild within Mac OS X. The original Mac OS X architects and programmers had never really used Macs. They were Unix programmers, with computing experience about as far as humanly possible from the creative users who depend on Macs: “Resource forks? We don’t need no stinkin’ resource forks! Real Men don’t complain just because they have to keep track of three cryptic digits at the end of every file name on their computer!”

I admit that most of the time, documents in Mac OS X will open into their parent application when you double-click them. Thank you, Apple. (”Please sir, may I have some more?”) But in far too many cases (Adobe? Quark?) that little three-digit extension spells the difference between a smooth workflow and files not opening at all.

And it pisses me off. It shouldn’t oughtta hafta be that way. So congratulations, Microsoft. Congratulations, IT people. Your attack on the smart kids continued into adulthood. Why couldn’t you have just grown up?

copyright 2007 by Jay Nelson