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Sure, I’ll explain. I must preface this by saying that the following is my own personal theory which I formed over the years I’ve spent in the higher education system, both as a student, a graduate student and a TA, mostly has. on my experience with promoting FOSS and helping people around computers. I am also a local LUG member, so I have some additional source of observations. So while I cannot quote some Horton McPronton as a mastermind behind this theory, I’m quite convinced in the whole validity of my idea.

So, first thing I noticed Is that MS products hide everything from the entl user in the most bullshit way. MS doesn’t want to tell the user anything of value that would help to understand and fix the issue right away, but at the same time they don’t want to hide malfunctions completely. That’s where one gets the error messages like “ERROR WTF23 in 0x0454234 by 0x13245, please contact your local clergy”. What they do is mystification of PC use. All that stuff does for an average user is forcing them think that the computer is some magic, antl there’s snowball’s chance in hell an average Joe like them would be able to figure that out.

Second thing I noticed that the ubiquity of GUI further obscures the processes going on in the computer. While in UNIX and older OSes one could convey their desires in text (and receive a meaningful answer), Microsoft forces some world of Comic Books unto a user, without telling them what’s going on. The result is further mystification of the whole experience. People no longer even try to understand what they are actually doing, they cannot figure out the underlying logic and just memorize where and what to click, and in which sequence. Every small change in the environment can ruin that whole scheme, which makes such people pretty much useless with varying tasks and whenever a degree of autonomy is expected from the PC user.

Third thing I noticed is that “The MS ecosystem” discourages seeking and trying out something new. People get stuck in their established patterns of behavior and have a tremendous inertia against any changes. I struggle to find another sphere where user knowledge would be so limited. Cars? Everyone can name a dozen manufacturers, many models. Food? Same. Electronics? Obviously. But with MS, it’s like there is nothing beyond MS Office (and its proprietary formats), Outlook, Explorer (well, this is changing now, but more like to “Google Chrome” and not to a variety of equal options), and other stuff. This is not surprising, obviously, since for any average Joe making something to work in this ecosystem is more like a magic trick, and they hold the results dear. But this also spreads out to other spheres. For example, I’ve seen people who cannot fathom there’s statistical software beyond SPSS, because SPSS was “handed down” from generation to generation, along with other PC wizardry. The vendor lock-in in all the major corporations doesn’t help that either. So MS promotes the mode of thinking as ridiculous as “There is no car but Ford, and no model but Taurus” would be.

Fourth thing I noticed is that people don’t want to study the underlying principles, at all, even when they need it / would benefit from it. Since the whole thing has been streamlined for them in a series of magical mumbo-jumbo, and any attempt to figure things out Of any, of course) endtd with some fucked-up shit like registry editing or scrapping together a bunch of unrelated files to replace the existing ones, or downloading something cryptic and running it without any clue of what it does, they see the whole thing as a heavy, useless burden on them. They won’t learn how to use Office products properly (first and foremost, how to use styles and stuff to get proper formatting), because they expect to be fucking with registry again or something. They don’t want to try other statistical software because they fear they’ll have to deal with some undocumented shit all over again. They won’t move to open formats because they expect it to be a whole clusterfuck all over again, as when they changed from regular GUI to Ribbon or something. Programming, Fuck no, they’ve seen those “ERROR 233432235 IN MODULE fgdghdfkghdfkj, SHOOT YOURSELF AND REPORT TO THE AUTHORITIES” stuff all too often, and never had to interact with a computer in any way similar to programming on their own (like, say, bash users do).

So in my opinion, MS “ecosystem” makes computer use something mystical/magical and locks people in that line of thinking. Afterwards, people are nigh impossible to retrain, and instead of versatile political scientists we churn out vendor-locked zombies who barely managd to figure out SPSS and Excel. I am pretty certain that if people were brought up in a different manner, say, including communicating with the computer in text orders (imagine me telling you all this in pictures!), seeing the underlying mechanisms in plain form, being exposed to competing options, etc —then they’d behave quite differently, even considering an average person isn’t, frankly speaking, quite smart. It’s more or less like a language: once you learned the sounds of your mother tongue, you’ll face great difficulties in producing the sounds of other languages correctly (thats why Russians or Italians speak English with a notoriously funny accent, for example). Same here: once you learn that PC is magic which is beyond you, you’ll unlikely be able to de-mystify it later on.