BWare

I’m still on OS X 10.10 Yosemite, not El Capitan, because 1) I am accustomed to iPhoto and Aperture, and both will stop working eventually on El Capitan, and 2) Exchange works somewhat in 10.10 (on my home vanilla system it works fine and always has; on the semi-fucked-up work release of the same OS it is semi-fucked-up but I’ve arrived at alternate solutions [1]) and I am unwilling to fix it if it can be held together with duct tape. Maybe it works better, maybe it works worse. So far Photos has been not impressive. And I neither want to learn nor pay for Lightroom until I have to.

I’m not seeing any advantages to El Cap that are making me want to upgrade yet, except that I ain’t new to this biz and it’s not lost on me that eventually I’ll have to if I want to have working computers, or to ever upgrade.

But not yet.

But another nail is in the coffin – Google has made Nik free, thus continuing their strategy of embrace, purchase, and abandon. Not for something better – basically they’re just dropping turds in the punchbowl. Ruining it for everyone else, same as they did with RSS. Picasa and Nik. Robots. Make it free, drive everyone else out of business, then abandon it.

I don’t see the strategy here. It’s not as though they are replacing these things with paid products or monetizing something equivalent for advertising revenues. They’re just killing these things for fun. Like my dogs did with that little mouse in the snow. The mouse might have found it less fun.

If I had a Nest or Dropcam, I’d write it off. I’m figuring their involvement in self-driving cars is probably the same sort of thing.

I still figure gmail is going to stay around due to the info it gives them about you, though it seriously makes me want to continue to transition my emailing back over to the private, non-advertising funded, accounts.

[1] Yes, Exchange and MAPI sucks, and it was a major fail that 1) work hired an ex-MS guy to be CIO, and 2) that he chose Mac-and-Linux-unfriendly Exchange over a standard IMAP server, in an environment that is more than half Mac-and-Linux. But Apple gets it right, and to compound the mistakes above, My Employer modifies OS X until it’s sufficiently borked that what works fine on my home computer doesn’t work with out jiggery-pokery on the identical work-issued system. Yay?