the tindog coffeehouse

The Internet is a funny thing. For all its apparent permanance, it’s often times a very transient thing. Technology changes. The way people access the Internet today is drastically different than the way they did a few years ago and is lightyears ahead of the days of dial-up. And the way we interact with the Internet is different, too. The first time I launched a website on this domain, way back in 1998, it was as a “home page”, which is to say a static HTML page (built with FrontPage 98) that had a few images and some text but nothing in the way of dynamically-changing content.

Today we not only expect dynamic content but social interaction as well. Every news article and blog post is followed by a comments section. Readers are prompted to like, tweet, and share it. It’s more than just about generating pageviews, it’s about cultivating a following.

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I said I wasn’t going to do it. I was adamant. No way. No how. Not gonna happen. I wasn’t going to upgrade to Windows 8. It’s ugly. Awkward. Confusing. Inconsistent. Disorganized. It feels like a version 1.0 product in every possible way.

And yet last week I found myself downloading it and doing the one thing I swore I would never do. How could this possibly happen?

My decision to upgrade was not a spur-of-the-moment one and not easy at all. Even as I kicked off the setup process, I had cold feet. I wanted to be excited about it but instead I worried that I would regret it, and honestly the first day or so I did. But I had arrived at my decision after two months of actively working with an eval version and thinking through every possible pro and con. I’m normally not an indecisive person, and it seemed silly to anguish over something so trivial as an operating system upgrade.

And yet I did. A lot.

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I might’ve been a little harsh. When I first played around with the Consumer Preview version Windows 8 in March, I hated it. The divide between the traditional Windows desktop and the new Metro (now called “Modern”) UI seemed disjointed, inconsistent, and altogether awkward. And honestly my opinion hadn’t changed seven months later when the final version was released. Although some refinements had been made to the operating system since the Consumer Preview, I had already made up my mind that I wasn’t interested. I would be sticking with Windows 7.

Then I actually used it.

I installed an eval copy of Windows 8 as a virtual machine on my home computer and decided to put it through its paces. More than just giving it a cursory glance and passing judgment, I wanted to use it thoroughly enough to be able to determine whether I should upgrade to it.

So after a week of living (virtually) with Microsoft’s newest OS, did my opinion of it change at all? Yes and no.

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Microsoft officially launches Windows 8 tomorrow. I won’t be upgrading.

On the surface, that’s not really that big of an announcement, but if you knew me, you’d know how significant it really is. You see, I’ve eagerly installed and run almost every version of Windows on my home computer since Windows 3.0, including Windows 2000 Server, Windows ME, and Vista. Not all of them have been winners (ME was by far the worst), but if it was the latest version, that’s what I wanted to have.

Until now.

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I’m not a Mac user, so maybe I’m not really qualified to pass judgment on Apple’s newest version of its OS X operating system, codenamed Mountain Lion.

But I can’t help but to laugh at all the negative reviews of it that I’ve seen in the last couple of days. It seems as though a lot of hardcore Apple fanboys just aren’t as impressed with OS X as they used to be, not because it’s not an adequate OS — which I’m sure it is — but because it’s only adequate.

If you’re keeping score at home, Mountain Lion is the ninth iteration of OS X (officially numbered 10.8) since 10.0 (Cheetah) premiered in 2001. Which means that OS X is actually older than Windows XP. Of course, a lot has changed since Cheetah, but maybe not enough. The problem is, since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has largely been coasting. Any new products have been merely a half-step better than their previous version, a gradual evolution rather than a bold revolution. Even the iPad for all of its success is really just a jumbo-sized iPod Touch, which is really just an iPhone without the phone part.

And then there’s Microsoft.

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Mat Honan at Gizmodo posted a long but interesting history of the photo sharing site Flickr (“from Yahoo!”) and why it sucks. Short answer: Yahoo! has no idea what it’s doing and is basically stuck in 1998 when it comes to the Internet. They bought Flickr in 2005 and then proceeded to do nothing with it, allowing Facebook, Instragram, and others to replace it. Where Flickr was once a thriving community for professional photographers and amateurs alike, it’s now a mere shell of itself. Many true professionals have moved on to sites like 500px, while most iPhone-toting non-photographers (myself being one) really only care about socialness and prefer platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

So if Flickr sucks so bad (which it does) and is basically a ghost town (which it’s not), then why do I still use it? Because there’s not a better alternative.

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