Why Microsoft is Losing–Nag Screens

This has been a big year for me. Aside from the birth of my first daughter (ok technically within the past year), I finally decided to give up my PC habit. It was hard. I loved my PC so much. In fact, I think I was practically the only person in Los Angeles who ever defended them, in fact I loved antagonizing everyone I could down there with how PCs were better. And I am a graphic designer, but I swore to it. I even was giving Sony Vegas (a video editing program) a lot of my time.

But then Music with a capital M came into my life. I tried soo hard to do it on a PC. No way was I going to pay twice the money for a Macbook that only had two USB ports and one Firewire port (they don’t even have the Firewire anymore, which is amazing since USB 2.0 was invented because of Apple’s expensive licensing costs for Firewire). I tried to make music with my HP Laptop, you know the shiny one circa 2007 first decent looking HP laptop that came out. Well, it looked good, at the time, but God do I hate that thing now.

So, I was at SAE Institute in Los Angeles (Sound and Audio Engineering) taking a course on becoming an Electronic Music Producer. There were 15 DJs there, all way more experienced in music/djing than me and all but one dude and the Russian (“in my country they call Macs toys”) were on there Macs. The teachers, both of whom were super hard core computer dudes, were on Macs. I was holding out, I realized all I was doing was technical trouble shooting, not making music. And believe me, synthesis, buses, reverb, dynamic plug ins, EQ, etc. is no walk in the park to learn without constant OS computer troubleshooting issues for just plugging in a USB cable that was powering a keyboard or hard drive or whatever. Which leads me to why I began this post.

Nag screens. Of all the things about Microsoft that I miss the least (and believe me I do miss some things, especially the finder and cut and paste in the OS), is nag screens. Macs for the most part basically don’t have them, or they are extremely rare. So, I am writing on my Mac and so why should I worry about nag screens. Well, I decided to go to Microsoft.com just for old times sake (my goodness, I actually worked there as a contractor in 1996/97 for 8 months (coincidentally through MacTemps). So, I arrive to there site through Safari (I’m kind of over the “browser wars” it was a big deal when I was at MS and it was Netscape 3.0 vs I.E. 3.0, but kind of over it now for the Firefox freaks) and what am I welcomed with:

A NAG SCREEN.

“We detect you have an older version of “Silverlight” (yes Netflix did get me to install it), if you want enhanced version… and you will be taken away from here.” Hello Microsoft. Well, I am typing in Safari, in a PHP post, on an Apache server. Give me a break, the pop up balloons every time I turn on my computer, every time, I plug something in, every time I don’t go online (I know, I don’t have internet at my house!). I even tried the registry for the Pop Up Balloons and it didn’t even work. Just leave us alone. Though I got my Mac, switching was painful. Fifteen years of CTL+X CTL+V is not condusive to Command where Alt should be, but it’s worth it to not be nagged. I even had a DUO boot to Windows XP and Parallels for a while, I just couldn’t give up my Outlook going back to 97 and my Synced Windows Mobile Device and my fonts and my Photoshop Plug-Ins, and I still have a few of you kicking around (meaning PC laptops). But when I accidentally dropped my Mac three feet and it miraculously stayed together except fried the hard drive. There’s a simple program called Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac that’s pretty cheap or free and it actually works and it’s actually easy to do, so I got to upgrade from my 320 gig to 500 gig laptop drive and I had to decide, well, I can’t even find my XP Service Pack 2 (required for Bootcamp) disc that I actually bought and then had to register (it kept saying it was a new computer at the beginning when I would switch to Parallels and have 1.2 gig of RAM instead of 3 gigs of RAM when I was in Bootcamp mode. And I am like, you know what I am ready to be Windows free and nag free and backup free and easy. For a while I was carrying around two laptops instead of having two in one, but then I finally got my e-mail and outlook converted, and no looking back. It was great to work there, but once Bill Gates left with his billions to give away, strangely they came up with the Windows Genuine Advantage nag screen for the world. And they set up the gates even tighter even though he had become the richest man in the world, and they dominated the world.

People don’t want nag screens. They just want the computer to work.