Dan Warne16 November 2007, 11:39 AM
Just how thick is Microsoft? Everywhere you go, there are advertisements for how unstable Windows is. They're big. And blue. And deathly.
Just how thick is Microsoft? Everywhere you go, there are advertisements for how unstable Windows is.
You can see the ad on train arrival displays, airport screens, on the LCD display in elevators, on video games in entertainment parlours, on massive projections on the sides of buildings or even while Bill Gates is on stage demoing Windows.
 BSOD in Times Square: high profile advertising for Windows |
 Your bus is arriving: but you'll need to run CHKDSK /F first to find out when |
 Stable. Reliable. Dependable: as demonstrated by this Vista PC right here... |
 Thank god: Boeing doesn't use Windows to fly the autopilot. |
Yes -- you know what I'm talking about: the dreaded bluescreen of death. Or if you're really behind the times and still running a beta version of Vista, you might even get the infamous red screen of death.
It's when Windows just throws up its hands and ditches its slick-as-spit Aero GUI altogether, in favour of a stark DOS-style text-mode screen that reels off some technical data that is largely unintelligible to the average user, like "0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED".
There's a whole group on Flickr dedicated to public bluescreens of death. There are some fricking huge examples. Like whole sides of buildings showing the bluescreen for days.
 World's biggest BSOD?: Toronto's The Bay department store |
It has been giving Apple's Fake CEO endless material to work with.
Case in point from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: "See here. This woman says Dell shipped her a defective machine and when she complained they sent her four more, all of them also defective. The "defect," which still plagues her fifth machine is that her computer "goes to a blue screen, which indicates a serious error that requires the PC to be restarted." Poor lady didn't realize, apparently, that in the world of Windows this is not a defect. It's normal operating procedure."
Or this, also from Fake Steve, about the massive Toronto department store bluescreens above: "A few people have sent me this and asked if this was our work. They think maybe we rented these screens and did this on purpose. You know what? We didn't. You know why? We don't have to. That's the beauty of Windows. The wow is now. As in, Wow, that OS is wicked unstable, isn't it?"
It's confounding that Microsoft hasn't twigged to what an image problem the BSOD creates.
For all its multigazillion dollar marketing campaigns dreamed up by the "wow is now" geniuses, nobody at Microsoft seems to have twigged that the best thing they could do is do away with the ubiquitous bluescreen.
Nothing says "sloppy programming" better than a tech-dump bluescreen which says "yeah, ok, somebody's crummy software caused our kernel to fail, but we couldn't handle the fault elegantly enough to actually stay in graphics mode."
Apple twigged to this years ago in OS X, introducing an unassuming semi-translucent charcoal screen overlay that says "you must reboot your Macintosh" in multiple languages. Simple. Unintimidating. Actually quite visually attractive.
 Kernel panic: much less panic-inducing than Microsoft's bluescreen |
Admittedly, Apple's relatively elegant handling of a total system failure is a first in computing terms. It used to have a "sad Mac" face if there was a boot problem, and in really bad cases, the Mac would actually have a black screen and make a very alarming car crash noise.
The Amiga had "guru meditation " -- a cryptic error message upon total system failure
It seems to be a running joke among software engineers to make system failures either humorous or full of technical info to help the infinitesimally small proportion of users who happen to be software developers debug their software.
But I ask again: how thick is Microsoft? Seriously, nobody likes to get a BSOD. Isn't it time it was replaced with something slightly less offensive?