Ahh, Wintel freedoms
Here's the first half of a statement I saw quoted the other day:
"We have a system in which anything you do is either forbidden or compulsory..
I thought this perfectly applicable to modern organizational PC use - not the kind of hobbyist personal computing touted by people who push Wintel, but the kind of thing you see day in day out in larger organizations everywhere: fully locked down machines, access rules and limited logins on everything, ever tightening controls, and endless waits for anything to happen.
My guess is that most readers here don't work in that kind of environment, but nine out of ten business PC users do. If there were a silent scream in computing these are the people it would be coming from - people using PCs as necessary parts of their jobs in every kind of role from the receiving clerk denied email access to the lawyer whose PC automatically monitors his chargeable time via numbers dialed, files called up, and appointments scheduled - and in that process becomes his master while denying him both phone privacy for personal calls and any kind of unstructured internet communication.
A lot of people, including many who work in IT, deny that the PC has become, for most larger businesses, as locked down and inflexible as a 1970s 32XX terminal. Now, if you're in that camp I have a challenge for you: go find out for yourself, talk to some users. Step out of the power relationship to talk honestly with ordinary users in companies other than your own. You'll see that technologies sold as personally empowering for IT people have the opposite effect on users - like communism, Wintel is sold as personally liberating but has the opposite effect: sellers become winners, users losers.
Take a walk through any large organization's administrative support areas and ask yourself what the desktop PC does for the user that an IBM 3278 dumb terminal didn't in 1980 -and then ask yourself whether the reality doesn't conform to the advertising in just about the same way cigarette ads do: the selling image for the Marlboro man is one of personal freedom and health, the reality that of economic addiction and cancer.
All of which brings me to the bottom line: that quotation, from an article in The Economist in praise of Cuban communism, has a thought provoking second half:
...perhaps we need to change that to become more efficient?"