From the alt.destroy.microsoft newsgroup.
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                        Douglas Adams on Windows '95

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                              The author of the
                             Hitchhiker's Guide
                               to the Galaxy
                             takes on Bill Gates

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[W] HAT on Earth is going on? Have we found intelligent life on other
planets? Abolished war and famine? Have we even devised a better way of
using computers? No. All that's happened is Microsoft has remodelled its
operating system so that it's now more like the Macintosh.

As part of last week's billion-dollar festival of smoke and mirrors,
chairman and chief executive Bill Gates has apparently paid the Rolling
Stones millions for the right to use Start Me Up, the song which is better
known for its catchy refrain "You make a grown man cry".

               This is a phrase you may hear a lot of over the next few days
               as millions of people start trying to install Windows 95.
               Even the best designed systems can be a nightmare to upgrade,
               but whatever things Microsoft may be famous for, good systems
               design is not, as it happens, one of them.

               Let's dispel a few myths. There's one which says that the
               original PC operating system was a brilliant feat of
               programming by boy genius Gates. It wasn't brilliant and
               Gates didn't write it. He acquired it, "shrewdly", from the
               Seattle Computer Company and then immediately licensed it on
               to another, larger, outfit called IBM. When the IBM PC was
               launched into a market which had hitherto been serviced by
               garage companies named after bits of fruit, it carried the
               imprimatur of a world-renowned name and sold a zillion,
               making Gates's operating system a world standard.

               IBM had failed to realise that any fool could make
               the boxes, but the hand that owned the software ruled
               the world. Big Blue had given the kid Gates a free ride into
               the stratosphere and then, astoundingly, found itself
               starting to fall away like a discarded booster rocket. Sadly,
               this new world software standard was actually a piece of
               crap.

               MS-DOS, as Gates called it, had started life as QDOS-86, or
               the Quick & Dirty Operating System, which told you all you
               needed to know about it. A whole generation of people
               doggedly learned to run their businesses on a system that was
               written as a quick lash-up for hobbyists and hackers. Was
               there anything better around? Of course.

               In the 1970s Xerox had funded a team of the world's top
               computer scientists to research the man/machine interface.
               They devised a graphical system, using windows, icons and
               mice. Oddly, Xerox failed to follow this up, and the research
               was taken up and brought to market by Apple Computer as the
               Macintosh. After a shaky, underpowered start, this machine
               matured into a well-integrated system which was not only very
               powerful, but a real pleasure to use.

               The Microsoft line on all this was that windows were for
               wimps. The truth was that plain old MS-DOS couldn't actually
               do them. Graphics, mice, networking, and a whole lot else,
               had to be added to the basic core of QDOS as one afterthought
               after another, which is why Wintel computers are so
               fiendishly complicated to set up and maintain.

               Gates, however, had always known which way the future lay,
               and for years Microsoft managed the awkward juggling act of
               rubbishing Apple's user interface while simultaneously trying
               to devise something like it that would fit on top of the
               bloated clutter that MS-DOS had become.

               However, the Macintosh is not the last word in interface
               design, and if Microsoft had been the innovative company it
               calls itself, it would have taken the opportunity to take a
               radical leap beyond the Mac, instead of producing a feeble,
               me-too imitation.

               An awful lot of people who try to install Windows 95 will end
               up having to spend so much money buying extra RAM and
               upgrading their peripherals to get features that Mac users
               have enjoyed for years, that they might just as well give up
               and buy the real thing.

               The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in
               shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of
               technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he,
               by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in
               the first place. -- The Guardian