Category — Building the web

Something happened today that I never thought would happen, or atleast not happen this quickly. I am actively considering ditching Google as my search engine. I have not made up my mind yet, am currently shopping for an alternative. Microsoft’s Tafiti and Ask.com looks promising. But that’s not what this post is about. Its about Google. Google is everywhere, like a bad commercial that keeps repeating everywhere. And I need a break or a break up with Google.

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There was a time when Acrobat Reader was easy to use, quick to load and never crashed. Unfortunately, these days Adobe’s Acrobat reader is a pain. I use Acrobat 7.0 and the latest version has a download file of 22MB! Only 4 years ago, the Acrobat Reader download file was less than 2MB. Its sad to see such a great program become so bulky, slow and buggy.

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I have used Microsoft software through out my computing career and am no fan of it. In fact my expectation for software had been pretty low. I would be happy if it crashed only once a month. With marketing factoids like how many millions of lines of code Windows has, I was lead to believe that software design is rocket science, no even more complex and its just not possible to build good software. Things changed dramatically in the last few years thanks to amazing software like Google search, ajaxwhois, backpackit, etc. Its as if someone lead me out of a bubble, except this bubble was filled with crappy software. That is when I started building a resentment against Microsoft. All along they could have built good software but for whatever reasons they shoved junk (like Windows 9x, Windows 2000, XP, etc) down our throats. It was made especially worse considering Microsoft employs the best computer scientists and programmers in the world.

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Web development has produced some of the most elegant software I have ever seen - things like wordpress, backpackit, ajaxwhois and even this widget to the right side of this blog that shows real time visitors to my blog. Such exquisite software - easy to use, pleasing to the eye, elegantly responding to mouse movements, focused functionality - cannot simply be a result of great coding skills. It must be driven by an underlying philosophy.

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