The Linux Extremist

There is something deep in the British psyche that helps us to get accustomed to waiting. We wait in queues at the Post Office. We wait in line at Tesco. We stand and wait in the rain for buses. Perhaps the most elegant expression of this aptitude for patience is how we’re able to simply let restiveness wash over us, more or less, when waiting for a train. When I had to take the train to get to work, I was used to the idea that there would be a delay or cancellation; so were my bosses - if I was in late, all I’d have to say was “train”. They’d say “oh”, and that was the end of the matter.

I’ve noticed that this is not an American attribute. Whenever I go to New York I’m still astonished at how the “Time waits for no man” philosophy prevails, even if it does mean that one is risking death in one of their taxi cabs when it blasts through an intersection at Warp Factor 11.

Given the latest delay to Vista, I can only assume that Microsoft wants their users to become more British. It’s as if they’re telling us that the Vista train will be arriving soon, after delays due to signal failures near Southampton (the Bermuda Triangle of signal failures) and leaves on the line. Given the 2% drop in their share value yesterday, it appears that the New Yorkers on the Stock Exchange are still telling them to hurry up. It will be interesting to see what the result of this tension will be.

The investors should not be surprised that Microsoft is late. I was a beta tester on what was known as Windows NT 5; when I received my copy, I was warned by a colleague that it was a “bit of a dog”. Typical understatement: if it was any more of a dog, it would have carried fleas, kept me awake with howling at midnight and left copious excretal presents on the carpet. It thoroughly destroyed the test machine I used. I didn’t bother filing bug reports as it was difficult at times to tell where the errors ended and functionality began. In the end, NT 5 was so late that Microsoft’s marketing department could only put a happy face on matters by calling it “Windows 2000″.

That said, perhaps investors should be grateful that Microsoft has being delaying Vista’s launch; a hastily released product might be like Windows ME, in other words, it might become laughably infamous for being buggy and unstable.

All of this is good for Linux users. We can laugh at Microsoft’s timescales, because the delays to the last release of Ubuntu Linux were measured in weeks rather than Microsoft months, and Debian 4 is going to hit its target of being released by Christmas. We can laugh at Windows Vista’s claims of greater security, because these been blown to pieces by Symantec’s suggestion that it is going to be even more unstable than XP. We can laugh at the idea that Vista’s performance will be better than its predecessor as it’s clear that it is going to require even more powerful hardware to run.

We can also chortle at the fact that while Vista is caught in the mire, Steve Ballmer is making ridiculous statements such as “I want Microsoft to be in all of the good important big growth businesses in the world”. It’s about as preposterous a nation as the rail companies in Britain wanting to build cars when they cannot even get the trains to run on time.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the latest delay is that it only precipitated a 2% drop in Microsoft’s share value; given the proliferation of alternatives to Windows, you would think that investors would be less British, more New Yorker about Microsoft’s prospects. For the moment, though, they seem to be more or less shuffling about on the platform, reading their newspaper, cursing the delays. However unlike when a train arrives at a British station, all may not be forgiven with a sign of progress; when Vista turns up, patience may have finally run its course.

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