forced. tr.v.

1. To compel through pressure or necessity: I forced myself to practice daily. He was forced to take a second job.

2. To gain by the use of force or coercion: She forced a confession from the suspect.

3. To inflict or impose relentlessly: He forced his ideas upon the group.

Why the language lesson, you ask? An associate of mine recently said

“If MS did things that harmed users then the users wouldn’t buy the products. Nobody is forced to buy [their] products; people can and do buy offerings from IBM, Sun, Oracle, Apple. They can choose to run LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP] freeware. In some cases they do. In other cases they don’t. People buy products because they meet their needs.”

My associate was rght, of course: Microsoft has never said “if you don’t buy Windows XP we’ll kill your daughter”. (Well, not that I’ve heard, anyway.)

Yet the comment showed a distinct lack of understanding of the word “forced”. Certainly, people and companies can buy what they want: it’s their money. But like a magician who seemingly allows you to choose freely from a deck of cards, while in fact pushing a particular card into your fingers, sometimes having a choice and being able to freely use that choice are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

There are thousands of people who use Microsoft products—specifically Windows—because everyone in their particular universe uses Microsoft products, and to use their freedom of choice would result (they believe) in an inability to operate effectively within that universe. This is one of the main reasons Microsoft continues to hold such a large market-share: people use it because “everyone else uses it”.

To be sure, there are some people who buy Windows and x86-based hardware because it’s the least-expensive system they can get from a brand-name company; or because it successfully meets their current and future needs; or because they genuinely like the OS and the hardware it runs on.

And then there are those who purchased Windows on an x86 machine because all of their clients, friends and business associates were using Windows, and that made it difficult (though not impossible) to buy a machine that, from everything they may have heard or read, was incompatible with Windows.

They may have wanted to do things that are difficult on a Windows machine; they may have wanted hardware or software functionality that doesn’t exist or is expensive on Windows. They may have wanted spiffy-looking hardware that meshed with their decor.

But if doing so would make it hard to interoperate with the machines that exist within their universe, they had to make a different choice.

Was that consumer “forced” to buy a Windows machine?

Let’s rephrase that question with one of the definitions from above.

Was that consumer “compelled through pressure or necessity” to buy a Windows machine?

Without question, I’d have to say, duh! The “pressure” comes from “everyone else is using it” (accurate or not); the “necessity” is from the need to easily interoperate with “everyone” (again, ignoring the possible inaccuracy of the statement).

My associate then questioned why so many people are using Windows if it’s an inferior product, implying that people don’t buy inferior products, or that they don’t stay in the marketplace very long, and that “most people prefer Microsoft software as a computing platform”.

In reality, people make all kinds of decisions having nothing to do with quality. If people could, a whole butt-full of them would prefer to drive a BMW or a Mercedes, but they can’t afford them, so they drive a Kia or a Honda.

They would like to have a new car every year or two, but they can’t, so they drive cars that are 15 years old.

Now, you’re probably saying that if a BMW were cheaper, more people could afford it, but you’d be missing one important point: BMWs cost more because they provide higher quality: they’re better designed, with better parts.

Jetblue, which I have flown and enjoyed, keeps their fares low by not providing food, having fewer planes and a smaller crew than American Airlines. They pay their crew less than American, and have they have less experience.

Jetblue is making money because people are willing to put up with some inconvenience if it sames them a significant amount of money.

It’s a trade-off people have been making forever.

Even with computers.

People often choose their computers based on cost and compatibility: firstly, it’s the cheapest computer they can afford (and damn being able to do certain things with it); and secondly, it’s the seemingly-most-compatible (and damn being able to do things faster/easier).

And then there are those who don’t get to choose their computers at all, like my friends the teachers whose school gave them Dell computers, which Dell gave the school at no cost (that’s “free” for those playing along at home).

In giving away computers, Dell makes it near-impossible for people to make an informed computing choice. By giving away a wintel computer (“WINdows-inTEL”, or machines that have Intel-based chips (generically x86) and ship with Windows OS), it extends the wintel cartel by convicing other people to then purchase a wintel machine to “be compatibile” with their friends, family and business associates.

My friends, who might have otherwise considered a Macintosh because it met some of their needs, rejected Macintosh because Dell gave away computers. They never got the chance to make an informed choice, yet they count among vast army of “Windows users”, making it more difficult for others to make real choice. Now, sure, they could have “chosen” to spend $1000 and get a laptop from Apple, but that’s a Hobson’s choice, “an apparently free choice that offers no real alternative.”

Giving something away will often get people to use that thing, even if it doesn’t meet all of their needs. If Kia gave away their cars, there’d be more Kias on the road. That wouldn’t make Kia a better car.

(The difference, of course, is that driving a Kia doesn’t make it more likely that others in your universe will also drive Kias, because there is no perceived compatibility problem — your friend can drive your Kia as easily as her Beemer.)

And as for “most people prefer[ing]” Microsoft, that implies that, given two machines at the same price, and the same marketshare, and no disadvantage for choosing one over the other, that people would pick Microsoft.

I don’t think there are very many people who would make that choice.

I recently got into an, uh, discussion with an associate about Mac OS X. The gist was Mac OS X hides “useful” things from people. He was told to try (from the Terminal command-line):

% grep 90210 /usr/share/misc/zipcodes

and enjoy the results. He then tried looking for that file using Finder, and Sherlock, only to get no results. Upon realizing this, he exploded:

“This is where OSX makes me CRAZY, and every little pulsating blob of blue glass on the screen just makes me want to PUNCH ITS FUCKING FACE IN that much more. Where is this file? Why can’t I find it?”

For those of you familar with Unix, you know that the file “zipcodes” is in a directory structure starting at “/usr“; this directory us part of the Unix heritage of Mac OS X, and as such, is hidden from “normal” users.

We went on and on for hours, hashing out the “it’s hidden from me and I don’t like that”, “It’s hidden from you because it’s Unix and you can easily access it anyway” argument.

He was pointed to the Terminal. “Terminal’s no friend of mine,” he retorted. “What, exactly, was wrong with The Finder? All I want to do is locate and open a file.”

Get to know your OS, I told him, directing him to the Go > Go to folder menu in the Finder, where he could enter “/usr/share/misc” and have the folder open.

“I really don’t like the idea that it’s the GUI that’s restricting my access to files,” he exclaimed. I reminded him that Apple made a concious decision to hide the Unix-y part of the OS as much as possible, but gave full access to the system for those who insisted on it.

He claimed Apple was acting as though their user-base was evenly divided “between butterfingered grannies and Unix ninjas” and that Apple was preventing the “average user” from accessing useful information. I pointed out that the vast majority of Apple’s Mac OS X users were anything but “Unix ninjas”, and could care less about the Unix side of things. I also noted that while those some of these files are indeed “useful,” they certaily aren’t “essential”, and still, the Finder will allow you access to them.

I felt that had he been aware of how to access these files, he wouldn’t be complaining that he couldn’t get access to these files; it irks me when people aren’t familiar with their tools and vocally display their ignorance.

Having (admittedly round-about) access to the files wasn’t enough. “What I’d really like to do is poke around inside to see what’s there,” he submitted. “Trust me to tell the difference between user-servicable parts and things I shouldn’t touch. Is there really and any differences from OS 9, where there’s something in my Extensions folder called “N065U Library” which my spidey sense says Don’t Just Trash It?”

So let me say this to everyone out there using Mac OS 9 and looking to move to Mac OS X.

This Is Not Mac OS 9.

Over the last two years or so, i’ve heard that complaint a million times, in fact, early on in my OS X career, and occasionally since then, I’ve made that complaint myself.

This Is Not Mac OS 9.

It’s a brand new operating system, based on Unix, with much of what made Mac OS 9 one of the easiest user interfaces available for computers. Note that i said “much”, not “all”.

This Is Not Mac OS 9.

Much of what is “hidden” in /etc, /usr, and so on are things that either didn’t exist in Mac OS 9 (and are there only as legacy bits because it’s Unix, and thus could be safely ignored by folks who don’t give a whit about Unix), or items that were previously subsumed by things like the System and Finder files. Those files were large, and contained many things that you couldn’t easily get to.

This Is Not Mac OS 9.

It’s Mac OS X, and it has its own quirks to get used to. Certainly, it hides some of what’s “under the hood” from 99.99% of the users, but it’s “under the hood”, it’s supposed to be hidden from 99.99% of the users… why should a user care about the Unix bits and all these extra files that they know nothing about? And yet, and yet, Mac OS X allows those who do care to get to the files! How much more flexibility do you need?

That’s what’s wonderful about Mac OS X. For those who don’t care, they can successfully use their machine without being encumbered by thousands of extra files on their system. For those who do care, they can get extra power from their system, at very litle cost, just by changing their expectations a tad and learning a just a bit of Unix.

Mac OS X makes it possible for people to use their machines as they see fit. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you can at least give them options.