Children gather around – do you know why a PC is called a PC? It’s a Personal Computer. It means that once upon a time we used ‘dumb terminals’ connected to a server, and that’s where the applications were stored. You would ‘time share’ on the ‘mainframe’. We got rid of that shit. It was called the ‘personal computer revolution’. Children, do you hear them talking about ‘cloud computing’? Do you hear them say that some new revolution is coming, where we connect our machines to some mainframe at Google and do our work there? Do you say, but didn’t we get rid of that just 20 years ago, why are we going back to the old system again?
Because there are people that have decided they will make money by doing this, and they have convinced tools of the media that ‘old ways’ must go. And they want to dip into your private data.
But big, complicated operating systems such as Microsoft’s latest, Vista, aren’t necessary in the Web Age, where applications are delivered for free and on demand — often without users even being aware of it.
No, I do not want to write my documents on Google. No, I don’t want my health records kept by Google. No, I do not want them to have my CV, a photograph of my house, my shopping habits. I do not Google searching my photographs on my desktop or anywhere else. I do not see why my work should be sent on a round trip between the USA and my house, wasting time and resources.
I do not want any company having anything to do with me ‘without even being aware of it’.
And that’s the problem. As more and more of what Windows does moves up into the cloud-into Google’s always-on, give-’em-whatever-they-want-for-free servers-what becomes of the company that Gates built? The smartest move Gates could make right now is to get out of the way.
When a journalist uses a phrase like ‘moves up into the cloud’ to mean ‘data mined on a large corporation’s mainframe’, they should not be allowed to write on any matter of current technological culture. They are a tool, not only in their dull metallic clunk, but in their moronic enthusiasm to soft sell some matter of corporate warfare as a fluffy puppy shaped cloud.
He says ‘the Web Age’, completely mindless of how, like ‘the Space Age’, this kind of dog’s froth is the sad soiled remnant of some dead end fantasy, soon to be parodied. Try it yourself: say ‘A Space Age Product!’. Now say ‘A Web Age Product!’ and feel the mirth.
The smartest move this journalist could make right now is to get the fuck out of the way.