Kestrel Computer Project

I was recently asked, in casual conversation while helping relatives with computer woes, why I don’t run Windows on my computer at home. I responded, “Because of the problems you’re facing right now.” We had a good laugh; but, I don’t think the gravity of what I’d said hit home. I was actually being serious; “ha ha, only serious.”

When a company which has been outed again and again over the last 30 years as being expressly anti-consumerist in the construction of its products (despite their public rhetoric; that’s right – thirty years – that is not a typo) fails to make suitable changes to improve their relationship with their customers, it really makes me angry. I’m angered that my relatives have to endure an unnecessary “ignorance tax” for their lack of detailed knowledge of what goes on under the hood of their computer, and especially for how Windows works inside; and, I’m especially angry that Microsoft goes scott-free both legally and in the ostensibly free market. When you lack repurcussions for your actions, you can’t help but develop a sense of sheer contempt for your own customers. Pfeh, you don’t care — why should you? What can they do to you? Just think of how much money is wasted annually, both by corporate and consumer-level Windows users, because of deliberately poor systems design on the part of Microsoft.

And, don’t give me that bullshido about how they have to maintain backward compatibility, blah blah blah. That is, at best, a proximate problem, and it exists only because the actual problem has been allowed to go on for so long unabated.

Well, here we are, 30 years after the 1985 release of Windows 1.0, and yet again, industry leaders caught Microsoft red-handed treating their customers with nothing but sheer contempt through willful inaction.

To my family and friends in similar situations, I want to expressly apologize on the part of all computer software engineers that we are not all like this. We don’t all believe in creating trash. We don’t all believe in making software deliberately insecure, deliberately hard or obscure to use, deliberately pandering to the advertising industry.

It is my hope that my work on my Kestrel project will some day spark someone or a group into action to help restore a free market economy for both computer hardware and the software that runs on it. Linux is not the answer (yet) for people like my relatives, although it’s a lot better today than it was decades ago. We need more open source options sooner, not later. My Kestrel project is self-admittedly quixotic in scope (it is, by definition, how I envision computing should be), but if someone takes inspiration from it, then I’ll feel I’ve done my job.