I’m a geek, reformed. It’s been close to 25 years since I last did anything beyond the desktop level, and wouldn’t know a server protocol from a hole in the ground. All I use my computers for are various applications, nothing terribly dedicated, but a lot of different things with different people. Which I suppose makes me “dumb.”

I also am the family “tech support guy”, dealing with a lot of parents, aunts, uncles and older siblings, most of which predate television, much less computers, or whose only experience with a computer is what they are used to seeing at work. I guess this makes them “dumb” as well.

But, we ( I ) don’t adopt windows editions early. I leave the “bleeding edge” stuff to guys like Kelly with the time, money, and strange masochist tendencies 😉 It will probably be a couple of years before Vista becomes an issue in my life. By the time I adopt a version of windows, and my family follows suit, most of the obvious functional bugs are beaten into submission. For what we use it for, security issues are manageable, if not desirable.

Put simply, windows is stock. It is a standardized product that is familiar to everyone that is going to use it, it has a vast array of applications for it, and it does what we need it to do.

Does that makes us “dumb”? Perhaps. What it certainly does is make us “consumers”. Not tech guys, not programmers, not security analysts. When I buy a car, I buy as a driver, not as a mechanic, engineer or stunt driver. Operating systems are no different. Windows products may be the minivans ( or perhaps SUV’s ) of the operating system world, but last time I looked the roads were full of mini vans and SUV’s.