GooppleTube and the Death of Microsoft

Yesterday on BBC's deranged and now psychotically genial Breakfast show, there was a scare story based on the BBC's own research showing that online PCs were attacked once every 15 minutes. A BBC expert suit solemnly told us everything we must do, including visiting Microsoft's site for checks, downloads, whatever, getting updates, checking firewalls blah blah blah. What he did not offer was the one-stop solution to all these problems: buy an Apple Mac. That, I guess the BBC would have said, would have been advertising. But they DID advertise Microsoft. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Zune music player is heading for failure and its Soapbox Beta is hopelessly outclassed by YouTube which, as we know, now belongs to Google. Having no inside knowledge whatsoever, I assume the arrival of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt on the Apple board means he is the successor to Steve Jobs and, in time, Google and Apple will merge to form GooppleTube or some such. Microsoft will then be finished. I once interviewed Bill Gates at length and I liked him. I also think his charitable foundation is one of the most impressive stories of our time and should earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. His software, however, is crap. It has probably held back computing by a decade. I still stare, nauseous, at my IBM Windows laptop. It became more or less unuseable within less than a year. In spite of all the most hyped protection systems, it had been raped by bugs, spyware and an HP printer that, for reasons best known to itself, had decided to kill it. Everything was wrong with this horrible machine. There is nothing wrong with this beautiful Mac. Microsoft is dead; long live Bill Gates.