The Blue Screen of Death Returns
(But was it ever truly gone?)
The logo used was an article describing the evolution of the Microsoft logo from https://logo.com/blog/microsoft-logo.
Yesterday, I overheard some people say that Bill Gates is brilliant.
Many years ago, I had lunch with Bill Gates. He treated the Philadelphia Computer Club to lunch, which was very nice of him. As I was having lunch with him, I was assessing whether this man was one of the most brilliant men in the country. I came away unimpressed. That opinion has not changed in all the years that have passed.
Fast-forward to the recent worldwide outage of computers using the Windows operating system. Comments made by the press seemed to indicate surprise that our computer infrastructure is so fragile. Somehow, I think our collective memory has failed us when we think about anything that was not a good experience.
Back when Windows was introduced, it was called buggy. Hundreds and hundreds of bugs were reported to be a problem with Windows. On many occasions, the Windows operating system would crash and display a blue screen, indicating there was some error the computer encountered. Those people, usually called hackers, who wanted to compromise Windows did. Over the years, we accepted a continuous stream of failures and catastrophes caused by the Windows operating system. The "we" I am speaking of is us - the customers of Microsoft. Who was ultimately responsible for these failures? The answer is Bill Gates.
Yesterday's worldwide failure of Windows reminded me that it has always been unreliable and buggy—apparently, it still is.
The explanation of why the failure happened seemed unsatisfying to me. A third-party security company (Crowdstrike) wrote a patch (correction) for a low-level kernel driver. The patch turned out to be wrong, meaning the patch was incorrect. The problem was so severe that it caused computers using Windows to crash, and in some cases, the computer would display the blue screen of death. It is odd that the patch was so problematic that it caused the outage, or so they said. Is this possible? Yes, it is. But that answer is quick and simple and explains very little.
Image of the Blue Screen of Death for Windows 11 from https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/windows-blue-screen-of-death-render.jpg.
Image of the Blue Screen of Death for Windows 11 from https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/windows-blue-screen-of-death-render.jpg.
Perhaps there will be those who would argue that the bugs in Windows were not Bill Gates's fault. It was the fault of the programmers who created the code that made Windows function. Windows has always been buggy. Internet Explorer was always buggy. Microsoft Word is buggy. Microsoft has a history of building buggy software. Where did this legacy originate? None other than Bill Gates.
I have always believed that any organization wanting to ensure their software worked properly could and would ensure this when the software was released. The correct operation of the software depends on the problems (bugs) written into it by its programmers. Software testing is an expensive and time-consuming task. Sometimes, an organization will cut corners when it comes to the testing aspect of its software. As we saw the other day, this could be disastrous.
More than ten years ago, I owned a computer support company. I traveled to clients and repaired their computers regardless of the particular problem. I can't tell you how many times I had to reinstall Windows to fix the issues my clients would encounter. In many cases, that was the solution to fix a problem. It would take between 12 and 14 hours to reinstall that operating system. When I closed the business I decided I would leave Windows and the PC behind. I switched to Apple and their computers. Installing OSX, Apple's operating system, usually took up to a few hours. Another benefit was that hackers did not focus on Apple computers as the target of their actions.
Bill Gates is not an innovator or terribly creative. Many of his so-called innovations were acquired from other companies. However, I will give him credit for his business savvy and his ability to make significant amounts of money.