Reply #18: How timely, Windows losing Market Share, and Intel promoting ESP

[Grinchie]

I used to be a real Microsoft enthusiast. Writing software for the Platform was easy and relatively painless. Then Microsoft decided that it needed to follow the Automotive industry of planned obsolescence in order to drive annual growth.

They started down the path od annual upgrades that exponentially doubled the number of uprgrades, patches and bug fixes required to keep a system running optimally. Then, when growth stopped in the consumer sector, they starting bleeding the Developers that put them on top by charging for tools and information that was once free. They also turned MSCE into a money making channel that initiated a worldwide glut of training centers who now had control of who would work for who, generally driving out the innovators and the researchers that saw through the MSCE title as nothing more that Rote learning and another name for exclusionary licensing practices. Not to mention the addition thousands of dollars wringed out of professionals while at the same time their jobs were being shipped off shore.

We trained the H1-B's how to think with real world logic and they promptly grew tired of the American dream and went back home with all of their knowledge, only to start up companies like Tata and Infosys, which actively courted american corporations with the seductive promise of low labor costs.

I was looking at Intel Corporation today, researching their current trends after seeing their stock at an all time low of about 12 bucks.

I used to work there, and I have a great admiration for the smart people that work their. However, it appears that Intel has lost its way, and is trapped in the rampant Consumerism and Planned Obsolescence model like Microsoft.

One of their current research efforts is ESP or Environmentally Sensitive Computing. Some of the examples they use are being able to identify a particular individual by the way they handle a TV remote, using accellerometers and other sensors to gather real world information for machine recognition.

I cannot tell you how invasive this technology could become, coupled with the already disturbing push to use RFID tags everywhere, including the small farmers dozen or so chickens if he ever wanted to sell them at the market.

I still use Windows XP, and I was one of the 380,000 people that petitioned Microsoft to keep XP alive and fix it, instead of scrapping it for new, untested drivers, written in some boiler room in Mumbai for devices that were never seen there before 5 years ago.

The lack of accountability in todays Corporate world is incredibly worrisome, and it pervades every major investment we deal with, where it be consumer electronics, Automobiles, Water Supply, and most insidiously Insurance companies, which apparently can change their policies at will, and then refuse to discuss it with you, because they can't explain it themselves.

MS and Intel are on the same path as GM, and although they did not kill the Electric Car like GM did, they are well of their way of becoming obsolete in this crisis of confidence that Technology makes our lives better. It can, but today the enormous resources of computing are exploited by the Corporations and mass media to dumb down the Sheeple.