Dear Microsoft,


I just wrote to you, and I know you haven’t had a chance to ponder everything I said. However, something else has recently come to my attention, which I think you should know about.

About two months ago, the Windows XP installation on my beautiful dual-boot system got corrupted. Even though Ubuntu is very good at playing the scapegoat for Windows’ errors, Ubuntu was actually not at fault: “Microsoft Windows XP” was available in my GRUB menu, and loaded enough to show me a DLL error. My Windows Recovery Disk was in the wrong continent, and frantic ransacking of your official website and Google proved fruitless. I drew a deep breath, and started using Ubuntu full-time.

Recently however, I came across an ingenious workaround: using a product called BartPE to launch winnt32.exe from my otherwise-dead C drive. This enabled me to reinstall Windows. I now present my humbly constructive criticism of the process, with examples of how the GNU/Linux world does it better.

*The disk itself. Now lookie here–I am a legal Windows owner. I have a product key and everything. Mistakes happen, and I find it unreasonable to expect that every single Windows owner is going to keep their disk in good condition (and easily accessible.) You should have an option to download the .iso from your website, and only make it worth anything with the product key and activation. No, I would not like to pay the OEM to send me another one. Now that I think about it, I don’t even want to waste time/money having it  come through the mail–a simple burn is all I need. Take GNU/Linux: Lost the CD? No problem, it’s easily burnable, and you don’t even need a product key (though I understand it’s necessary to prevent piracy)(which Linux vendors don’t have to deal with.)

*Setup. When I installed Ubuntu, I started Setup, selected a few options: time zone, keyboard layout, language, partition and username/password. Then I hit a button, and everything was done at once. I could go have a cup of coffee while it worked, and come back to a beautifully installed system. Whilst installing Windows, it was something like this: Select, wait, select, wait, reboot, select, wait, select, wait, reboot. This is not efficient. I won’t even get into the sheer ugliness of the text-based installer, when you could load a pretty graphical one. And I have yet to figure out why you don’t use (or clone) gparted for partitioning–it’s very convenient to see how your parititions are laid out, not just take an educated guess based on seemingly arbitrary numbers displayed on the screen.

*Drivers: The first thing I noticed was that my beautiful widescreen had been compressed to something the size of my fist–something I would like to use against whoever made the driver decisions at Redmond (the fist, not the beautiful widescreen.) However, I took a deep breath and said, “No problem, I’ll just download it from Sony’s website.” That’s when I discovered that neither wireless nor wired networking was working. And I can’t install the appropriate drivers because they control the internet, and I need the internet to get them, and you see where I’m going. Great. Luckily, I had a backup of the previous, driver-full XP install, and Windows was gracious enough to recognize my external hard drive. I forget if I used the Device Manager or the Add New Hardware wizard to install the WLAN driver–I just remember being frustrated by both, and having Windows search through the “Drivers” directory more than a few times before it found the appropriate file. Once the internet was working, I fired up Internet Explorer 6. I immediately wished I hadn’t, but I realize that most of my complaints have been realized in IE7, so I won’t vocalize them. Whilst navigating to and through Sony’s website, I realized that the right side of my touchpad didn’t scroll. Frustration. And I especially needed to scroll since the screen resolution was so shrunken. I finally got and installed (a time-consuming process in itself) all the appropriate drivers. Let’s compare this to Ubuntu, where the only thing that didn’t work out of the box (er, burned CD) was my sound, an issue easily rectified through a simple graphical utility, appropriately labelled “Sound Preferences.” I’m still not sure what I would’ve done if I didn’t have the backup of my old (driver-full) install. I’ll give you a hint as to what probably would’ve happened–there’d be one less NTFS partition on my hard drive.

*Updates. I understand that XP is on SP3. My installation was slipstreamed with SP1. I had to update once for security reasons. Reboot. I had to update a second time to get SP2. Reboot. I had to upgrade again for security reasons and IE7. Reboot. I haven’t gotten to SP3 yet, because I ran out of free time to reboot in. I also was getting kind of crotchety about the repetitiveness of the whole thing. The only ‘booting I would like to do at this moment is that which involves my foot connecting with something squishy and stress-relieving. Meanwhile, Ubuntu lets you select one of three options:

1. Show a small, noticeable-but-unintrusive icon when updates are available, and let the user download and install them in one click. Only reboot if the kernel itself is upgraded. If rebooting is necessary, allow it to be postponed in one click, and not pop up every ten minutes with a countdown timer.
2. Show a small, noticeable-but-unintrusive icon when updates have been downloaded, and are ready to be installed in one click. Only reboot if the kernel itself is upgraded. If rebooting is necessary, allow it to be postponed in one click, and not pop up every ten minutes with a countdown timer.
3. Download and install updates in the background. Only reboot if the kernel itself is upgraded. If rebooting is necessary, allow it to be postponed in one click, and not pop up every ten minutes with a countdown timer.

As you can see, only one action is required to make a dinosaur system fully updated.

As I told you before, I’m sure I can find many more grievances, but I think these are the most important ones.

Have a nice day, and best of luck,

Timmy Macdonald
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Dear Microsoft,

First of all, I’d really like to thank you. MS Office is, in my opinion, the best office suite on the market. Windows has made many contributions to home computing–first and foremost instilling the concept that computers are for everyone–not just socially deprived nerds. Though Windows remains a fairly effective way of getting things done, I decided to switch to GNU/Linux this summer for reasons of my own. I really like the view from there. That said, I’d like to ask after some basic features implemented in Windows that are standard (as free, open-source software no less) in GNU/Linux.

*Updating. Updating Windows is a painful process–the OS itself tends to pop up unexpectedly, chew up needed bandwidth, and restart at inopportune moments. What’s more, individual pieces of software must all be updated individually. This is, quite frankly, a pain in the neck. It can’t be difficult to integrate ONE, all-inclusive, non-intrusive updating utility. Yes, it might be an extra step for application developers. No, I do not sympathize with them. Please do this.

*Workspaces. Workspaces aren’t a very big deal…but they’re darn handy. Yes, I know I can download them for Windows from your “PowerToys” section, but there is no good reason they’re not included on a vanilla install. And I can’t really think of a reason it doesn’t include transition effects when you move between them.

*Themes. I believe there are 3 legal themes for Microsoft Windows XP. This has got to stop. Yes, I like blue. No, I don’t like it that much.

*Sensible administration privileges. I really like the concept GNU/Linux has which is that programs run on the lowest permission level they can. This is instrumental in stopping spyware. I feel unsafe when I’m logged in as a Windows administrator. Is that the attitude you want?

*Filesystem. Ext* (especially Ext3) is better than NTFS. No defragmenting, more reliable, please switch. There is no shame in this.

*Open document formats. Both releasing all of your own document formats, and adapting MS Office to include Open Document files. Natively.

*System resources: Why is it that my Ubuntu installation runs faster than a friend’s Vista installation…with 8 times the RAM, and ~double the processor? And functionality is debatably the same, to boot.

*Internet rendering: I know you can convince IE to pass the Acid3. It’s OK to shamelessly copy & paste Firefox/Chrome’s source code, that’s what it’s there for.

Please take these suggestions (and I’m sure there are more that I have yet to think of) into consideration. For the good of your product. For the good of your company. For the good of your millions of users. Please.

With warm regards,

Timmy Macdonald

I think GMail has made an error.

No, it’s not a big error, and yes, it’s still my favorite web-based email service.

But they still messed up with GMail Labs.

It’s a great idea, so far it’s giving off great fruit, and I would be a sadder person today if it did not exist. That said, I was kind of interested in how to develop for it. So I went to the Labs portion of my Settings page, scrolled to the bottom, and was told:

Looking for something we don’t have? Suggest a Labs feature or join the Gmail team and write your own!

Lame! There are probably hundreds of people who would love to get a development kit from GMail and write their own Labs features, host them externally, and suddenly POOF! GMail would have hundreds of plugins, and it would suddenly be just as awesome as Firefox or gedit or vim! I’m not saying GMail needs to release its source. All I’m saying is that they should release enough of it for developers.

FAQ

Q: How would this help Google?

A: It would make GMail much more powerful, giving it an edge over the competition.

Q: How would this help me?

A: It would provide you, the GMail user, with a much more powerful interface.

Q: Why do you keep using the phrase “much more powerful”?

A: Because it sounds better than “powerfuler”.

Q: That was a terrible answer.

A: And that’s not a question. Are we even?

Q: But, couldn’t you just submit a feature request?

A: Yes, but it’d have to be an exceptional idea for the official GMail staff to make it. Opening it up would provide a lot more people willing to code, which would make the good ideas happen too.

Q: What if this crashes GMail?

A: They already have the option to open GMail without Labs.

Q: What about privacy?

A: I’m sure there’s a way to give developers enough control to develop, but not enough control to feed them your personal information.

Q: What about Better GMail/Greasmonkey? (Thanks, Peter)

A: First of all, native is better than third-party. Second of all, a LOT of end users don’t know about/care about Better GMail/Greasmonkey. Third of all, Better GMail/Greasemonkey only works on computers you install it on, while what I propose would be universal for your account.