I hope all of you get a chance to see the new Mac commercial. Not the news report one, but the one where PC is spouting that Windows 7 will have none of the problems Windows Vista had. It’s utterly hilarious. Not only because it points out the decades of fraud committed by Microsoft with “I think I’ve heard that before”, but because it is one of the few times you will hear Microsoft use the Vista name going forward.

Every American citizen should take a good look at Vista. This is what happens when you let your IT work be done almost entirely be an off-shore labor force. It is a shining testament to the skill level found in the $10/day labor market. Many of you reading the news reports and blogs of US IT workers may have thought it only sour grapes (as Gartner and others tried to make it sound) mainly because you had no frame of reference for how bad things were. Yes, there were companies getting de-listed by the SEC for covering up off-shore project failures, then being sent through multi-year audits and finally reaching settlements, but that always sounded more like an Enron thing to you than criminal fraud related to IT.

Vista has changed all of that. It has failed so spectacularly that Microsoft has even dropped the Vista name. Admittedly, Microsoft has some products which dug massive craters in the IT landscape when they arrived. Few of them fail so spectacularly that Microsoft wipes their name from marketing and memory. How many of you remember that “Microsoft Bob” product which needed a 4Ghz box to run but the current pride of the line was a 66Mhz 486? Bob didn’t completely go away though…Microsoft doesn’t completely throw out a bad idea. Bob got renamed “Clippy” and was the annoying resource eating “help agent” in the next release of Microsoft Office.

How many of you remember Microsoft Money? Now here was a product which was Microsoft’s standard method of operation. It sucked. There was no other way to describe it. Even after Microsoft got the Justice Department to let slide the fact they were stamping “ Operating System” on Windows 3.x boxes when it wasn’t an OS, nor was it even close to an OS, they could not get the Justice Department and the FTC to swallow letting Microsoft “give” Microsoft Money to Novell while Microsoft put out a bid to acquire Quicken. Nope, the Government stopped them cold. You see, lawyers may barely be able to find the power switch on that laptop they were issued and have absolutely no clue about was does and doesn’t legally constitute an operating system, but they do understand when a product which is supposed to manage their checkbook and brokerage account can’t get either to match the statements. You see, not only was Quicken entrenched, it didn’t use any Microsoft products during its development at the time, so, Microsoft tried to come into an existing market and completely re-write the rules…Accountants, they love computers, but they hate change…in fact they have rules about change and a lot of those rules have been written into laws passed by various levels of government.

Microsoft refused to admit their product sucked in ways the English language simply couldn’t adequately describe. They pumped huge sums of money into the marketing trying to get new users. Nothing could hide the fact the product sucked. On June 10, 2009, Microsoft announced it would discontinue sales on June 30, 2009.

The same stubbornness has had Microsoft pushing that pathetic thing called Windows. It never really worked. It has always had security holes which were roughly the size of the Grand Canyon, but they paid the Gartner Group tons of money to market it and several CEOs from other companies owned a lot of Microsoft Stock, so corporate America started to standardize on it. Then the fee increases, then Vista, then various government bodies started demanding OpenDocument format and MS Office didn’t support that. Now, corporate America is moving the desktop to Linux and home users are buying Mac products.

Btw, Windows 8 won’t have any of the problems Windows 7 does.

I knew that if I didn’t manage to stay away from the family farm this day would finally come, but I had kind of put it out of my mind. Today it hit me.

You would have to understand a little bit about the situation to understand why. I grew up on a family farm back when being a neighbor actually meant something. Some of my earliest memories are of when I finally became old enough to bail hay with him and his wife. Everybody had livestock back then So everybody’s kids had to follow the bailers around. His wife passed away a few years ago and has been deeply missed by those who remember her.

He was always quiet. His wife tended to be the one who did most of the talking, yet he could talk up a storm when she wasn’t around. I must admit I had heard people say he tried to make up for lost time when she wasn’t around, but only those who really knew them would say such things and they would be said with affection.

He had a dry, and kind of sly, quiet sense of humor. It worked well with his voice. Not a lot of people caught onto it at first, but it was quite entertaining for those who were aware of it.

We had a running joke for many years. Today would have been the day it would have been told. It wasn’t a joke most outsiders would get, but perhaps those who are farmers would understand. You see, the grain bin they had to hold soybeans simply wasn’t big enough to hold the crop most years. Every year that I happened to be home to help with harvest I would always get stuck with the job of hauling in. (Pretty much the worst job at harvest time. Hooking and unhooking wagons, in and out of the tractor 100-150 times per day.) Invariably, about the time the bin would be full, he could come over to chat.

“We got a little problem” I would say.

“Oh?”

“It’s not all going to fit in the bin.”

“Well jump up and down on it, that should help.”

“I did that already.”

“Oh.”

“I’m about to take this one down and bring back another wagon. Do you think you can climb up there and add another ring to the bin before I get back?”

“I’ll get right on that.”

Of course, if you don’t know what a “ring” is in a grain bin, or the fact they have to be added from the bottom, not the top, it’s probably not that funny to you. Probably means even less if you don’t know the man was in his 70s and shouldn’t have been climbing ladders at all.

Today, I was helping put the last wagon of soybeans in the bin. Today was the day we would have had our once per year joke. Today was the day I realized I missed him.