Poor old Microsoft. In their defence, I sometimes think they get a raw deal – they’re like the first men on the moon, no-one has ever been in the position they’re in with Windows. Who can say how they should proceed? If they stagnate, people will condemn them. If they go too far and push Windows beyond the reach of the common man, people will condemn them. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Then consider this quote from Linux head-honcho Linus Torvalds…

“An operating system should be completely invisible”

Linus actually started off the discussion having a pop at Apple’s OS X Leopard – as the article says “he poured scorn on the modern trend to treat a new version or update of an operating system as a cause for major celebration and marketing.”

And I suppose he’s correct – an operating system is just plumbing, albeit complex and requiring careful handling. This started me looking for an analogy – you wouldn’t have the water pipes in your house on display and so richly decorated, they’re just doing a job and shouldn’t be noticed. Pete Hampton then chimed in with the prospect of Microsoft Pipes needing patching twice a month, and the fact that Apple iPipes would look great but would only connect to an iRadiator and an iTap. Most amusing.

With this in mind, it seems that the knives are still out for Vista (or Vaster as Pete calls it). Ten months ago Dell reconsidered it’s policy of Vista-only on new computers and re-instated XP as an option. All these months later things don’t seem to have changed much. Today it’s 143 days until Microsoft stop selling XP, and it comes to something when someone launches a petition to keep the operating system in the market. That’s what InfoWorld have done.

Earlier in January I commented on the fact that the BBC’s news site was giving Bill Gates and his company (the name escapes me for the moment) a lot of air-time, and seemed to revere Gates as the saviour of the universe. So I was very interested when the following headline popped up in NewsFox (an RSS reader extension for Firefox).

‘MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft’ – as featured in the site bookmarked by every good IT professional, The Register.

“At last” I thought, “someone has noticed”. However, the story isn’t about the BBC giving so much airtime to Microsoft (oh yeah, that’s the company name I was trying to remember) or worshipping Bill’s every move (or movement) – it’s about the BBC’s iPlayer service. iPlayer allows you to catch up on programs you might have missed… a bit like Sky Plus but cheaper and more reliable.

Liberal Democrat John Pugh MP accuses the BBC (a public body) of “handing a commercial advantage to that company [Microsoft]“. The problem is that the iPlayer is only fully-supported using Internet Explorer on a Windows operating system. Well yes, that does seem a tad Microsoft-centric, doesn’t it?

Pugh continued “What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.”

Visit the iPlayer in Mozilla Firefox and you’ll see the message “Sorry, downloading BBC iPlayer programmes is currently only available in Internet Explorer”. You can actually play the content in Firefox, but you can’t download it. A link takes you to a page which explains the issue further:

“ActiveX, an essential component in making the BBC iPlayer Download Manager communicate with the BBC iPlayer website, only functions in Internet Explorer which is why you must use this browser.”

Well, balls to that – no-one is going to tell me which browser to use. The Register article goes on to discuss the fact that Linux and Mac users don’t have the option of begrudgingly opening Internet Explorer. If they’d used Java, then all three communities would be given a chance to use the technology.

But remember, the BBC are impartial.

This is something I’ve never done before… posted an entry and then changed it completely later the same day. The following is a re-thought entry about the same topic, but a bit more balanced.

I like to peruse the technology news page of the BBC’s news site as I find it one of the best ways to find out what Microsoft are up to and how it’s being positioned to the public. I do subscribe to a couple of Microsoft-centric newsfeeds, but the BBC’s news site is one of the most read on the planet, so it’s important to see what’s going on there.

We’ve had several heated conversations in the office about the fact that Microsoft seem to get a lot of coverage on BBC News… too much, way too much in my opinion. Around the time of the launch of Windows Vista it seemed that BBC News was like Microsoft’s own PR agency and news service rolled into one. To be fair, some other companies get a lot of focus… Apple for example, and I’ll admit to double-standards and say that I don’t have a problem with Apple getting a lot of airtime. IBM get very little coverage in comparison to Microsoft, and the Lotus brand get next to nothing (do a search on Microsoft and IBM and compare the results).

I took this conversation further on a couple of occasions. Shortly before the launch of Sametime 7.5 there were security restrictions and all kinds of problems at the airports in the UK, and I considered how relevant real-time collaboration was. Surely the market leader in real-time collaboration bringing out a new version and tackling some of the issues of business travel was news-worthy. Well, apparently not, yet at that time Internet Explorer 7 was getting a lot of coverage.

The drivers behind what the BBC decide to cover have been explained to me – basically what the BBC think their readership would be interested in and what has a broad appeal. Microsoft and Apple are news-worthy. I was told that “the BBC don’t do product announcements” but I blatantly disagreed with this. Have a read of this article and see if you think it’s tantamount to a product announcement. And to be fair, Apple get the same treatment. Think about that idea of what the BBC’s readership would be interested in… are they given the opportunity to be interested in other options when other software vendors aren’t granted an equal shout? Lotus Symphony, a free alternative to Microsoft Office, should be of interest to consumers and businesses – not just because it’s free but also because of the importance of the Open Document Format. However, there has been no coverage of Symphony.

The one that really had me ranting (I know, hard to believe) was a few years ago when the Beeb ran a story about Microsoft outlining the future of e-mail. They mentioned that Microsoft would introduce e-mail which couldn’t be forwarded or copied to another recipient. At the time of that article that capability had been in Lotus Notes for a few years already, yet Microsoft were getting the credit for a future vision. Microsoft the great visionaries? No, just a case of Microsoft getting the airtime.

So, with this in mind (and here’s the point of all this), they’re offering you the opportunity to post questions for Bill Gates, “one of the most important men in technology over the last three decades”. The man who invented oxygen, food, television and, of course, the internet.

The BBC deliberates your line of questioning… “Perhaps you have always wanted to know what the inspiration was behind Windows. Maybe you want to know what it is like being one of the world’s richest men. Or maybe you are more interested in the philanthropic career he has planned after he steps down.”

I know the answer to what was the inspiration behind Windows… it was the Apple Mac operating system. And as interesting as all those other questions sound, I’d just like to know about the roadmap for Microsoft Exchange (as it’s clearly too big a secret to share with the world). And actually I asked that one (can’t see it being selected), and just for fun I also asked “how many Zunes have you sold and when will you admit that Apple are just completely kicking your backside in that market?”.

The BBC have a charter which includes impartiality, so surely this means that Sam Palmisano will be next week’s guest question-answerer, followed by, oooh, perhaps Larry Ellison the week after. Maybe Steve Jobs (well, that wouldn’t surprise me). But probably not.