Archive for January, 2009
A More Perfect Union
January 19th, 2009
Today, in honor of Martin Luther King day, I’m not going to post one of Dr. King’s famous speeches, because I’d like to honor not just Dr. King himself but his legacy—and, considering that tomorrow America’s first black President, Barack Obama, will be officially sworn into the office, I’d like to present to you the video and transcript of Obama’s masterful speech on the current (and, hopefully, future) state of African-Americans in the United States. Let’s keep moving forward, people. And remember: Dr. King may have been one of the first to get the ball rolling, but it’s up to us to keep it rolling.
So here’s the video of Soon-to-Be-President Obama’s speech given at the Consititution Center in Philadelphia. And if this man doesn’t go down in history as one of the greatest American orators, I’ll be shocked.
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild.”
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.
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Windows 7 Beta: Microsoft’s Back in the Saddle Again
January 12th, 2009
A lot of people want the Windows 7 beta that good ol’ Microsoft released into the wild on Friday, 9 January 2009. Considering how hotly its been discussed in every tech-blog on the Internet, how much stir even screenshots of the damn thing have made, and how many tens of thousands of times a simple technical preview of the damn thing has been downloaded via BitTorrent…well, one would think that MS would have had a clue that officially releasing the beta into the wild would draw lots of attention. But, as usual, the public launch on Friday didn’t go as planned because they “underestimated” the number of people who’d be interested in downloading the beta. Their servers simply couldn’t take the beating and went casters-up within minutes of Friday afternoon’s delayed and delayed and delayed release.
Now, by way of “apology,” Microsoft has said, “Ah, to hell with limiting the beta to only 2.5 million downloads—all’a’y’all can have at it until January 24th! Enjoy!”
Regardless of whether this was just a typical Microsoft oversight or a deliberate ploy to drum up even more talk and excitement surrounding their forthcoming flagship release, it seems to me that the Ballmer Brigade knows exactly what it’s doing this time around. Microsoft has learned a lot from the Vista debacle, and it shows not only in the testing/marketing of Windows 7 but also in the actual construction of the product itself.
First, before we even get into my first impressions of Windows 7, let me say a few things about Vista. Vista is not a bad OS. Today, at least. In mid-November, I decided to invest in a new desktop computer, and because I’ve had good luck with HPs, I purchased a new one with a whopping 600gb hard-drive and 8 gigs of RAM. I was a little wary of it at first, because it came with the 64-bit version of Vista, and I’d read many a horror tale online (especially concerning music-related soft/hardware) about poor 64-bit driver support, endless software issues, and possible incidents of daemonic possession concerning Vista x64. However, all that storage plus 8 gigabytes of RAM for under $800? Hell, if any of my musical *ware didn’t work, I could always return the machine and look for something else.
Turned out my fears were mostly baseless. True, I have a few 32-bit VST plugins that won’t work on Vista x64, but they’re not even ones I use very often; everything else has worked just fine. And Vista x64 runs a thousand times better than Vista x32.
Of course, the different in bits—plus the quadcore processor, plus the RAM—certainly gives Vista a lot more room to work on this new computer as compared to my old one (dualcore processor, 300GB hard-drive, 2GB of RAM)…but Vista just flat-out works better on the new machine, in ways that have nothing to do with greater physical resources. My old machine didn’t originally come with Vista; it was born an XP machine, and just never took to the OEM version of Vista x32 that I put on it when Vista first came out. Even after the release of SP1, Vista on the older machine was unstable, cranky, and flatout more trouble than it was worth. Program crashes were an hourly affair. Sometimes it would recognize my pathetic M-Audio MobilePRE USB soundcard, and sometimes most of the time it wouldn’t (though I suspect the problem here lay more with the fact that the device was a complete Piece O’ Shit*). Anytime I tried to put the computer to sleep—or even change the screensaver: BSOD.
Even after two years of availability, my experience with Vista was so disheartening that I fully expected to wipe it off the hard-drive of my new computer and throw XP x64 on it.
Instead, I have not had a single problem with the Vista installation on my new computer. It is just as stable as XP ever was. I have had no hardware problems whatsoever. And, for that matter, no software problems aside from the aforementioned handful of VSTs. Vista 64-bit is a smokin’ awesome OS. At least I think so. Now.
Vista has finally matured into a decent step up from XP…even if, ultimately, it’s not that much of a step up. But just as it’s coming into its own, it’s going to be utterly eclipsed by Windows 7. Just as Windows ME was eclipsed by the vastly-superior Windows XP.
The problem with Vista—which Microsoft is most certainly not repeating with Windows 7—is that MS bungled the production and the launch of the OS. When the first beta of Vista came out, I was eager to try it, and really liked it: the new Aero look was sleek and pretty (I admit, I’m a sucker for eyecandy), and there were quite a few interface tweaks—especially in Explorer—that I quickly found indispensable. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why or how it took Microsoft five years to produce the OS, but…at least it seemed pretty decent. If, of course, they worked the bugs out of it before they released it. But hey, that’s why you do widespread beta-testing, right? To scare all the insects to the surface and swat them as they come crawling out of their holes.
When Vista went Golden in January of 2007, though…it was actually worse than the beta. I’d had some minor problems with driver support using the beta, but nothing to write home about. You expect that with a beta. The driver support in the final release of Vista was nothing short of execrable, however. It was a demonstrable step backwards from the beta. And rather than get better over time, it got even worse. Somehow, the patching process kept making Vista worse rather than better. Who the hell ever heard of an OS that gets worse and develops more problems over time? (Well, Mac OS X Leopard did, too, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
Simply put, Microsoft rushed the damn thing out the door. They’d spend five masturbatory years dicking around with the code and suddenly found themselves facing being left behind as Apple released another major upgrade to their OS. The OS was a Gordian nightmare of needlessly convoluted code accreted over five years by developer teams who clearly never knew what one another were working on. It was a bloated resource hog that demanded more power than a lot of computers then could handle. But even worse, the company knew it had a shoddy product on its hand and threw together a shoddy, last-minute promotional campaign to go with it.
When Microsoft released the betas for Vista, there was a lot of excitement about it. It was the first new version of Windows in half a decade, after all, and folks were excited to see what new innovations the OS would display. Basically, a shiny new interface and some GUI enhancements. But even though the expectations of many beta-testers were let down, the OS still seemed like it would be a decent product, provided, of course, that MS spend the time to debug the damn thing properly—something the company is not known to do. Well do I remember all the problems folks were having with XP when it first hit the market. But Microsoft’s philosophy has always been “Release it and we’ll patch it as we go along.” When you’re dealing with something as complex as a general-use operating system, that’s not necessarily a bad approach—if your initial release that people are actually going to pay for is stable enough and usable enough to be worth the investment.
Vista wasn’t. The version of Vista that went to manufacture in late 2006 was barely a release candidate, let alone an actual stable release. A lot of people complained that Vista just wasn’t worth the amount of money Microsoft was charging for it: after all, it didn’t offer that much more than XP already did—but every version of Mac OS X since the very first hasn’t really introduced anything revolutionary to that OS, and people still lined up for Tiger and Leopard even though they were merely incremental upgrades too. Vista immediately got a well-deserved bad reputation for being a clumsy bug-ridden dud.
It isn’t anymore. If you buy a new computer with Vista on it today, you’re getting a stable, decent operating system. Microsoft has finally patched and sutured and kludged it to the point where it’s just as usable as XP was in its heyday.
But thank the gods Microsoft has learned from the Vista mess. As soon as they realized that Vista’s reputation as a product as irrevocably tarnished, there were two things they could do: attempt to rehabilitate the product via patching and a new promotional campaign, and/or plan for its successor. Smartly enough, they did both…even though the rehabilitation campaign—the ridiculous “Mojave Experiment”—did more to prove that Vista was a black sheep than reform its public appearance. Fortunately, that rehab regime has resulted in a stable, good version of Vista to keep consumers happy until the follow-up OS is released. Fortunately, they’re doing that follow-up right.
Just a little over a year since MS first announced that they were actively working on Windows 7, I’m writing this using Microsoft Live Writer, which is running on the public beta of Windows 7. Of course, being a beta, the OS has problems still—I’ve had to install almost all of my drivers in Vista compatibility mode, for instance (but I fully anticipated that), and there have been a few stability bugs here and there. It’s definitely not ready for Prime Time yet.
But it sure as hell is close.
Even though there are, naturally, bugs in the system, the beta is almost entirely feature-complete. I’m sure some more stuff will be added by the time it goes gold, but the Windows 7 beta offers beta testers and early-adopters a chance to play with and test drive a lot of new features. Windows 7 is ultimately built on the same basic code structure as Vista, but 1) its developers have cleaned up the code and tightened the resource requirements considerably, and 2) the OS is full of notable advancements. I love the new icons-only taskbar, for instance; the compacted system tray is really useful, too; and the OS is packed full of reliability and troubleshooting utilities—many of which debuted in Vista, and have since become absolutely indispensable to me.
Excitement about Windows 7 has been growing since the first technical previews were demonstrated over the summer. This OS is clearly a step up from Vista, and an even bigger step up from XP. Microsoft has been releasing new screenshots, new demonstrations, and new information concerning the OS every chance it gets. Instead of hiring a million monkeys to pound on a million typewriters (or VT-100 terminals), the Microsoft development team has banded together tightly to release a lean, mean, fully-integrated machine full of neat new stuff…and Microsoft’s PR department has been busily letting the world know about it. After the Vista fumble, MS has rediscovered its focus. I’m surprised Ballmer didn’t come out on stage at CES this year chanting “WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN!” Because that’s prettymuch exactly what the company is doing.
And it’s working.
The public beta offering on Friday was originally scheduled to be capped at 2.5 million downloads, but it’s clear now that way more than 2.5 million copies of the beta are going to be DLed. And that’s not counting the copies that are already being traded on BitTorrent. This is a beta release done right. With this amount of beta exposure, Microsoft will have a unique opportunity to test out their new OS on a huge variety of machines doing an even larger variety of tasks. Every window in the beta has a convenient Send Feedback link in the upper right corner, and the feedback application that it links to makes it very easy to talk back to the development team, so consumers can not only report bugs but request new features and comment on others. If Microsoft even takes a tenth of those reports to heart—and I’m betting they will, considering how dedicated to this project they appear—then by the time Windows 7 goes gold (almost certainly this year rather than the original projected 2010 date), they may very well have their first revolutionary, rock-solid release since Windows 95.
So, if you’re a Windows user, are you doing your part to help MS shape and polish this beast? If you have a spare computer lying around, give it a shot. It’s 100% free! Here’s a nifty overview of the new OS’s most salient new features courtesy of The How-To Geek, and here’s a guide to setting up a convenient dual-boot Windows Vista-or-XP/Windows 7 system courtesy of Lifehacker. I highly recommend installing Windows 7 on its own partition so you can easily switch back and forth from a stable version of XP or Vista and the beta because, like I said, this sucker still has some warts and holes in it. It’s not production-quality yet, but it will be soon enough!
I’ll report soon on the features of Windows 7 that I really like, once I have a few more days to test drive it and kick the tires.
*Seriously, never buy M-Audio products. They are the Ford of the computer-music world.
