The Windows of Life
Back in November, 1985 when my 42-year-old son was three years old, Microsoft launched what is now its ubiquitous and comprehensive personal computer platform/application called Windows. Since then, Microsoft has had a stranglehold on the business application business that no one, even Apple, has been able to unseat this behemoth from its lofty perch overseeing almost all of our daily business lives. We are all pretty much joined at the hip by Microsoft Windows and its full suite of applications from Word to Excel to Outlook to PowerPoint to Teams. I think its safe to say that Word, Excel and PowerPoint are solidly entrenched without any serious competition. The others like Outlook are only sometimes used and Zoom did a good job during COVID of not only sidelining Teams, but pretty much putting Skype in the grave.
When I think of Windows, I tend to think mostly about Excel because in my 45 year business career, the spreadsheet has more impact on me than any other application. I know that I use word processing more than spreadsheets, but word processing feels only somewhat different from typing on an old electric or manual typewriter, mostly because the QWERTY keyboard entry mechanism is largely unchanged despite many efforts to improve on it. QWERTY was invented and patented in 1870 by Christopher Latham Sholes of Kenosha, Wisconsin and was based on what is called the Bigram letter-pair frequency, which was used to establish the most likely letter usage in typing. At some point it seems likely that speech recognition will fully supplant keyboarding, but there is something about using the hands and the pacing that creates that matches the speed of the human brain in composing prose. But when it comes to spreadsheets, they were invested in 1979 by Daniel Bricklin for his Apple II based computer application called VisiCalc. For those of us who were growing up in the business world in those days, especially in a numerate area like finance, we all remember VisiCalc and its successor, SuperCalc, which begat Lotus 1-2-3. Those iterations all pretty much happened between 1979 and 1985, when Microsoft launched Excel right before it launched its full Windows Suite of applications. Once Excel came out, all the other spreadsheets fell by the wayside except that Apple still uses Numbers and Google has Google Sheets, but those are weak sisters in both functionality and ubiquity to Excel.
Those of us who grew up with spreadsheets are pretty facile at developing models and, more importantly, understanding models that are shown us on spreadsheet outputs. A person who grew up with spreadsheets is never totally comfortable just looking at paper output, and generally wants to review a spreadsheet online so as to enable drilling down into the cells to see how the machinery is working. I can look at a spreadsheet and tell almost immediately if it is correct or something is amiss. It has happened many times and it goes to the fact that spreadsheets have hanged the way finance people think about numerical manipulation. I have often said that spreadsheets have done more to shape the world of finance in the past fifty years than anything else. Practitioners at ground level have a hard time disagreeing with that statement.
That all said, I am not so sure that most of us think about Windows as something that governs our lives because it has succeeded in becoming part of the wallpaper of modern life. Few of us go through our days thinking about the wallpaper, no matter how much it surrounds us.
As I sit in my living room on this sunny Sunday morning on the hilltop, I am surrounded by a different kind of windows. It is one of the spots in the house that I like most because I can look east and west simultaneously. To my left are two large picture windows out to the front lush gardens with tree yuccas, palo verde branches, rosemary bushes and agave blooms set amongst the the front boulders. To my right is the vast panorama of the hills that roll between us and the ocean. We have five large picture windows (actually the three middle ones are picture windows and the outer two are sliding doors) and then the deck with its glass railing. So what separates me and the world on this hilltop (at least when I’m sitting indoors) is a lot of glass. Glass has been with us for 4,000 years, but it went through a serious refinement in the 1930s when someone invented the thermopane. It was that insulating invention which allowed residential glass to go from a small affair to a large picture window affair. You can now still have lots of glass and keep heating and cooling more rather than less inside the house. Despite those improvements, glass still gets dirty and there are few things more annoying than glass which is dirty and less than fully transparent. In fact, less than perfectly clean glass can be a major annoyance to someone who likes a well-ordered lifestyle.
Yesterday I arranged for Handy Brad and his pal Omar (along with his unnamed cousin) to come over and power wash my two palapa awnings. These white durable fabric sunshades get rather filthy and moldy over time and need cleaning with a power washer every two years or so. Its a tiring and messy business and its impossible to not get drenched in the process, so I let the worker crew go through that process even though I have my own power washing machine. After two hours of it, Handy Brad, who is more or less my age, threw in the towel and left the rest to the younger and heartier Omar. Handy Brad is a perfectionist and Omar is less so, but he did an acceptable job of it, but not without completely dirtying the deck panoramic windows. With Handy Brad, I never have to lift a finger to get things back as they need to, but with Omar I was left with a patio to rearrange this morning and a set of living room windows to clean.
A few years ago I bout the best Italian window cleaning equipment on the market. This is the stuff the pros use, so I broke out that gear today and cleaned up the mess on the living room windows. There is something fulfilling in seeing a clean window, so I am feeling very robust this morning after my little chore. In the process I noticed that one of the two front picture windows that i thought was dirty is actually “broken” in the sense that the thermopane seal is shot and the window will be needing replacement. I have already called Renewal by Anderson and they will come tomorrow to give me a bid on replacing the large piece of glass and all its distorting gaseous interior layer. Its at moments like this that I am reminded that being as one with nature on this hilltop is only as good as the walls windows and ceilings that separate us from the elements. I like seeing the world through my windows, but only if they are clear and clean while keeping the cool and the warmth in.
Windows in all their iterations in our lives are important things that keep us connected with the good aspects of life and yet apart from the uncomfortable things. I don’t want to see the raw operating system of my computer any more than I want to see all the worms and bugs in the garden up close and personal. That makes windows one of the hallmarks of civilization even in their hypocrisy. Reality is great right up until it becomes scratchy or inconvenient. I want to be close and engaged, but not get my fingernails dirty in the process.