annealer

An enlightening article by Andrew Wooden is making the rounds today, featuring some choice quotes from a certain Simon Aldous, who seems to be some kind of Microsoft marketing hotshot in the UK. I love when someone gives a soundbite that can be refuted by four seconds with Google and eight seconds of stepping back from the monitor, straightening your jacket, and beginning to perceive correctly.

Is Windows 7 really a much more agile operating system, in terms of the specific uses it can be moulded to?

The interesting thing is, it’s basically the next version of Vista. Vista was a totally redesigned operating system from XP.

Let’s take a trip down dictionary lane.

Now I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consider building an OS on top of a kernel that has its roots from circa 1989 a “total redesign”. I mean, if you’re going to be English, speak English. There’s nothing at all wrong with the fact it’s built on the NT kernel, by the way. Just don’t call it something it isn’t.

We’ve improved upon Vista in that way. We’ve stripped out a lot of the code, we’ve made a lot of it much more efficient, it sits on a smaller footprint, it operates far more quickly, it’s far more agile and effective in terms of the calls it makes. I saw an article recently that described it as ‘Vista on steroids’, and in some ways you can absolutely relate to that.

Agile is my favourite new buzzword. I sure hope they agilely developed agile software that makes agile calls in their Department of Agility over at Agile Microsoft (the software company formerly known as Microsoft). What does he even mean? Did they hire an entire team to hand unroll loops and make function calls tail recursive? Dear Simon, if you’re reading this, please quantify said statement. Otherwise I’m adding it to the list of “things I’ve heard that make no sense” right underneath the statement from a kid in grade school who told me he made a jetpack and car out of sticks.

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

Because in the arena of popular operating systems, the one that’s known for immense amounts of stability is Windows. Right. Mac OS X isn’t perfect by far (hey thanks Snow Leopard bug that forces all my keyboard input to one application until I reboot the machine), but I don’t recall the press around Vista being “man this thing sure is ugly, but at least it’s stable”. Your FUD is embarrassing, and I see right through you.

So you’ve taken the style of the Mac platform and built it on the more solid foundations of Vista?

What the fuck, Andrew? I’m not exactly a journalist, but I really don’t think taking a contentious statement from the guy you’re interviewing and then reinforcing it by reusing it in your own question is exactly a shining star of journalistic integrity. Up your game.

We’ve taken everything that’s good about Vista, along with the core infrastructure of the operating system, and we’ve made it faster and slimmed down the code to make it more effective.

You just said the good thing about Vista was the core infrastructure of the operating system. Essentially the same statement was made twice. Also, please quantify the usage of the term “effective”, in five hundred words or less. I don’t know what you mean by “effective”. You’re throwing words out there like a malfunctioning Speak and Spell. Forming coherent sentences doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. I’m sorry.

We’ve also tried to listen to what customers want in terms of a much slicker user interface and the ability to engage with it far more intuitively. That’s the product that we’re delivering.

I wish they’d fire this dude and deliver a new marketing guy an interviewer can engage with far more intuitively (and “effectively”). Is this seriously the best you can come up with, Microsoft? I don’t even mean Windows 7, I’m talking about the total stooge you sent out to shill it.