My wife had a small epiphany a minute ago. I was having
her reboot her stupid XP machine yet again when she suddenly
had a very puzzled look on her face:

"Wait a minute - you aren't running Windows.. how can you
have different windows on your screen?"

I laughed, mostly because she's hardly the first person to
ever say that. People may say 'I need Windows", but that
may not be because they have some Microsoft only app they
need to run. It may just mean that they think they need
Windows to get windows.

"Why are you laughing? Didn't Microsoft invent windows?"

That's another commonly held misconception. I've had people
tell me that Bill Gates must be incredibly brilliant to have
invented all that he did.

Most of the time those people refuse to believe the reality that Bill
Gates and Microsoft have never invented anything.

I do have to admit that calling their OS "Windows" was clever, though
I doubt they realized that at the time. I'm not saying that a lot
of possible Mac or Linux users have stayed with Microsoft
because of this sort of belief, but I bet it's far more than
a handful..

So the next time someone says "I need Windows", make sure they
really said it with a capital "W". It may be that they just
want "windows".

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