The Outer Limits

We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical, we can bring the picture into sharp focus, or fade to a blur. These were the famous words uttered by the narrator of that less famous thriller on television from the ‘60s. (Twilight Zone, and its narrator, Rod Serling, are far more famous today, but The Outer Limits was a very good ‘scary’ show from early television.)

While I was thinking about the frustration I was feeling today, during the time I was trying to customize the windows 7 beta, I began to think that this is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do. As I wrote about in ‘Have It Our Way, We Insist’, I believe that the software architects, and execs, of Microsoft see the public as something to be manipulated for their benefit and pleasure. There is also a measure of the ‘knowing adult’ protecting the small child from himself.

This is, as I now realize, why I rail so strongly against the Vista and Windows 7 interfaces. It reminds me of ‘The Outer Limits’ where, the audience (us, as the children) are given something pretty to look at, and be amused and entertained, while the all knowing adults (Microsoft, in our story) have complete control, with no intentions of giving any of it up.

This loss of control over parts of my life is no less a problem than the one of DRM. Both are at first, innocuous, and reassuring (‘Just think, with no control over such things as the menus, there is no way you can mess things up!’), but after a little thought, you realize how such a loss of freedom is nowhere near tolerable.

-