Windows Task Manger is the reason I hate Microsoft
An example of why I absolutely despise using Windows:
Imagine that the apartment building you lived in created a new rule that you HAD to follow, there is no way around it…the rule is that every time you open your front door you MUST touch your nose with your finger. It’s not a big deal right? How hard is it to touch your nose before opening the door? Of course, it’s a bit annoying if you have arms full of groceries, but that’s rare, so you can deal with it. It’s also annoying when you forget to touch your nose and nearly break it running into the door when it sticks shut…but you’ll get used to it eventually.
Now, there are those that would accept this rule and learn to live with it. Then there are those, like myself, that would say “fuck this noise” and go find an apartment building that didn’t create arbitrary, useless, annoying rules.
Windows XP (and no doubt Vista) is FILLED with examples of these arbitrary and random rules. Clearest example I know is the Windows Task Manager. If you need to find out what process is using all your processor, how many times do you click on the “CPU” header to sort the processes from high to low? Answer: twice. Why twice? Well….there really is no reason. At some point in the design process for the Task Manager window someone had to make a decision. And they devoted no time or effort to thinking about this decision. They made a choice to have the default sorting order be low to high, which makes no sense. And not only did this designer make the exact wrong choice, but their bad decision was never fixed. XP has been around for about 75 years (these are OS years: 1 human year ~ 7 dog years ~ 13 OS years), why has nobody fixed this?
Now, a person can argue that who cares, this doesn’t matter. And they’d be right, it doesn’t really matter. Honestly, the double clicking is not what bothers me. What bothers me is that someone at Microsoft who was faced with a simple decision made a poor choice. This does not happen at Apple. I don’t claim that every decision Apple makes is correct, they have some very big and very notable blunders in their past, but one thing that they do not do is ignore the small choices. They care about the details, they sweat the details.
Everyone knows the saying, “It’s the little things that matter.” OS X is filled with tiny, wonderful little details that make me happy, make the time I spend using my computer more pleasant. Windows XP is filled with horrible little details that show an utter contempt for their user base.