Delegating

Great idea, delegating. Finding the right people who can fill-in the bits and pieces while a suitable someone co-ordinates the big picture is awfully efficient.

Whether social, professional, technological or scientific, great things can be achieved: public services, the EU, MacOS and CERN exemplify such.

However, a certain rot sets in with some systems which counter-acts gains in efficiency and brings the entire system flopping into a quagmire of betrayed potential.

The Windows operating system, one of Microsoft’s three cash-cows, is a perfect example of how to get delegating wrong. Let’s follow some dominoes falling onto each other.

MS delegates hardware to other companies like Toshiba or HP. They, in turn, delegate component production to factories such as Samsung and Hon Hai. MS also delegates software customisation to the hardware makers who often outsource coding to contractors. Third party developers are another tentacle of the delegation octopus. Further still, component manufacturers have their own software to delegate.

The upshot of this maelstrom of wriggling tentacles is an operating system begging to crash due to programming errors and incompatibilities.

The graphics driver of one company has software which is not integrated with the operating system, the hardware maker’s customised layer, the drivers for the CPU, the DVD drive, et cetera.

Delegating is a fine way to accelerate production, and is also a fine way to dramatically increase end-user hatred of the end product.

Resetting this bloody laptop has now exceeded 50 hours. A labour of love, to be sure, and positive reinforcement of my decision to never use Microsoft or Android products ever again.

Apple perfect? Ha! But no Mac I’ve ever had has ever needed a reinstall which deleted all the hardware drivers which then needed to be tracked down for each component.

Delegation is failure to integrate.