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Tue, 17 Feb 2009

Microsoft touts "Life Without Walls"... again
Don't they ever learn? Microsoft's latest marketing pitch, "Life Without Walls", pushes seamless integration between the desktop, the laptop, the handheld/smartphone and... the web. That's just the wrong idea.

I remember an ad in the Wall Street Journal back in around 1997 where MS was saying "You won't know where your desktop ends and the Imternet begins". And they said it like that was a good thing. It was a continuation of the mindset that referred to the net as a "Network Neighborhood". You know, a nice, friendly place where you can stroll about without a care in the world.

Of course, most of us are now aware that the net isn't a homey small-town main street. It's an alley off 42nd street with muggers waiting behind every dumpster. I find it incredible that, even in the face of the continual security problems that Microsoft has had to address (and, in fact, created) over the past 10 years, they still want to paint this seamless integration as a good idea.

Let's face it. In this day and age, you want to know when you've stepped over from the relative safety of your own computing environment into the essentially lawless net. Seamless integration means you can't trust anything you see. Isn't it a better idea to paint bright neon lines at the edges of the trustable territory, so you know to sharpen your spider senses when you hit the street?

I grant that Microsoft has done a vast amount of work to make computing as pervasive as it has become, but let's not forget that Windows 95 originally shipped without internet capability. (Anyone who remembers Trumpet Winsock, raise your hand) MS didn't really discover the net until 1996. It appears that they still don't quite get it.

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