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412 points conanxin | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mxwsn ◴[] No.41084928[source]
This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...

The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

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1. bitwize ◴[] No.41092622[source]
The way I explained my continued loathing of Microsoft to a friend was that back in the day, it was like having two choices of car: a Ford Pinto, or a pickup truck. Not everybody needed the heavy transport capabilities of the pickup, but their only choice if they didn't want the added bulk and fuel consumption was the Pinto, which had dangerous failure modes. Later, the Pinto would be withdrawn and replaced with a Ford Taurus, a serviceable but not particularly fun or performant vehicle which worked fine usually, but was based on a transaxle design, so when it did break you had to dismantle the entire front end of the vehicle in order to repair it. And now imagine that there were roads you couldn't drive on and places you couldn't go unless you had one of these three vehicles, simply due to Ford's market pressure on infrastructure planners, not for any good reason; and besides, people mocked you for wanting something else.