Windows. 8 seems to have taken a macabre turn into a tale of woe and horror. One could dismiss this OS a exemplary of the old adage,"the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Well, save for the fact that there weren't any good intentions brought into play, certainly not in the area of foresight.
In the present tense, the M$ board of directors needs to snatch a page from the old, original Star Trek episode, "Mirror, Mirror", and assassinate their way into Captain Kirk's, whoops, I mean Ballmer's job.
Mr. Ballmer has all of the arrogance, and is at least as overbearing as Steve Jobs, but lacks any of his vision, or a speck of his talent.
The present, inept attempt, at turning a smart phone OS, into a viable platform for a professional work station OS, rivals that of Doctor Frankenstein's travails and failure.
I think the whole project went sideways, when M$ abandoned the good, true and loyal, customer base they had been courting for more than a decade. At that point, the demographic included, "almost everybody". Unfortunately, M$ suffered a psychotic break, brought on by excessive brain flatulence during a corporate group think session. This manifested itself with paranoid delusions of grandeur, with intent on iWorld domination, and embraced a new demographic, which now included everyone, even those legally brain dead, and on life support.
Simply put, they already were well on the way to a "fool proof" operating system. Fools such as I were at peace with our computers. Then inexplicably, M$ went of on a bizarre tangent and elected to court a wider category of mental defectives, "the imbeciles".
Well, as it appears to be turning out, you actually can make something, "fool proof". Windows XP achieved that lofty pinnacle. However, in targeting a new goal of being, "imbecile proof", M$ has seemingly rendered its new OS, "fool proof" in the meanest, most literal, and ironic sense of the word. I'm going to coin a more proper descriptive term for it, "fool repugnant", or in a bit of a lighter vein, "fool repellant" OS.
So, something that is "fool proof:, (in the ad-speak sense), has the handicap of being imbecile proof, (in the literal sense), and tragically, something that which is no longer imbecile proof, (in the ad-speak sense), no longer interests, appeals to, or is even accessible to the workaday fool.
So, where the educated and articulate "fool", might pride themselves on being, "great at multitasking". The ploddingly dull of wit, would likely find that one task at a time was almost too demanding.....and another Windows 8 customer reaches vestigial self awareness. That of seeing, and of course being infatuated with, his own reflection in the glass of his new Surface tablet. The little Windows 8 user that could, albeit just barely...!
I'd be willing to bet that many new tablet owners could sit for hours, looking at their own reflections without turning the damned things on. Afterwards of course, they'd be bragging to their friends about the, "astonishing battery life"!
Huxley predicted impasses such as this in "Brave New World". You couldn't send a Beta+ out to do a Delta-'s job, it wouldn't be feasible. They were trained for far different functions, or if you will, "castes" of society.