A rhetorical question but, as you’ll see after a short techno-rant, one that opens a door into a basic truth about the world.
For an older guy, I’m pretty tech savvy — early internet adopter (Usenet, anyone?), longtime Linux user (and reformed distro jumper), Python/machine learning dabbler. So the fact that the Windows operating system is still, after how many years now (well Windows 95 was a big thing, remember, and that’s more than 20 years ago), as slow and clunky as it is.
I have two machines at home, a desktop and a laptop, with comparable hardware. The desktop runs Windows 10; the laptop runs Linux — Fedora 24 with the Plasma 5 desktop (a sweet distro by the way, beautiful, stable, and highly configurable). The Linux laptop boots up in about an eighth of the time as the Windows machine, and, unlike the Windows machine, when the bootup is done and the desktop appears, you can actually start working right away without suffering through the Windows experience of clicking an icon and then waiting an uncertain amount of time additional for the hard drive to do whatever the heck its doing before deciding to open the program.
Updates are where Windows takes the worst comparison hit. Linux updates download and are installed entirely in the background. In contrast, a couple of weeks back I spent an hour and twenty minutes waiting for Windows updates to download and install on my desktop computer, and an equal amount of time waiting for the same process to happen on my work machine. Close to three hours of unproductive time.
For my non-tech readers, Linux is a free “open source” operating system, which runs an entire ecosystem of free, open-source applications, all of which are as good as (and in some cases better than) the equivalent Windows versions. Software for word processing, photo editing, playing and organizing music and videos, spreadsheets, presentations, and all variety of web connections is available at zero cost. And, unlike Windows, Linux systems allow the user infinite options to customize the computer desktop experience.
So why is it that the expensive operating system continues to be inferior to the free one? Why is it that Microsoft, with its hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues and its huge stock of bright, capable employees, hasn’t been able to put out a better product after all these years?
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When I was younger, in the face of a proposal to fundamentally change something in the world — laws, institutions, morals — part of me always reacted negatively, out of a belief that, having developed over time, the world must have already sifted out good ideas from bad ones, that the laws, institutions, and morals of the existing world were entitled to a presumption of “best fit,” that a sort of natural selection must have occurred in human history, with disadvantageous systems dying off and effective, useful systems surviving. I believed, too, in the impossibility of human intellect to grasp the complexity of the world, to really know whether or not a new idea might have unknowable negative consequences. A fundamentally conservative mindset, based on a faith that it simply must be the case that we mostly live in the “best possible” world.
With age and experience, I no longer believe that. The edifice that is the combination of human-created social, political, economic, and moral structure was created in layers. New ideas don’t get to work on a blank slate; they have to glom onto, fit and mold into, the already-existing structure. Only in extraordinary circumstances does a new idea remove or “sand down” the surface of the existing edifice. And the new ideas don’t necessarily represent progress — there’s a randomness to the world that our order-desiring minds don’t want to contemplate.
The result is a cobbled-together world, a lumpy, unattractive edifice, layers on layers, that is the way it is largely because of the way it was. The best analogy from science isn’t natural selection, it’s geology — slow accretion and sedimentation over time, punctuated by random, unexpected volcanism and asteroid strikes.
Human institutions are extraordinarily sticky. They remain in place even when their negatives outweigh their positives.
Windows still sucks for the same basic reason. Originally built on a less-than-optimal, already largely deprecated operating system (MS-DOS), once the Windows system became dominant, and third parties started writing software using it, it became impossible to overhaul it. Too much was invested in it, too many other elements relied on it, the danger of unintended consequences from major tweaks was too great. So most of the computer world slogs on with an inferior, expensive operating system infrastructure, even though a free, better system is available for anyone to download and use.
I no longer presume we live in the best possible world. We just live in the world we have.
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