Tom Scott has been, among other things, the UK organizer of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (as "Mad Cap'n Tom"), student union president at the University of York (as "Mad Cap'n Tom"), a prospective parliamentary candidate (also as "Mad Cap'n Tom"), and a TV presenter (not as "Mad Cap'n Tom," but alongside Colin Furze, who might just be slightly mad).
It's on YouTube, however, that he's really hit his stride, and my favourite video of his may well be this one, about the time be built an Emoji Keyboard. Yes, really:
At one point in this video, Tom is describing his approach to solving a thorny technical problem which might involve doing a bunch of research and then writing (and thus debugging) his own code, when he stops himself. "No," he says. "I run Windows. Someone will have done this before."
Sure enough, they had, and the resulting adventures in marrying AutoHotKey (a Windows program) with LuaMacros (an obscure scripting language used by hard-core flight simmers) is highly entertaining. It also serves to illustrate the true strength of Windows, and the reason that it's so dominant in the OS marketplace.
Windows has been the operating system, with at least an 85% share of the OS market, and sometimes as much as 95%, for decades. Basically, everybody runs Windows. No matter what you need to do, there's an app for that... or, to be more precise, there's a Win32 executable for any task you need to tackle.
This makes Windows enormously useful, because you can use it for anything. If you can imagine it, someone, somewhere, will have done it already; you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to figure out what wheel they used, and then tweak it slightly to fit.
Windows 10's Universal Windows Platform has none of these advantages.
This is, I think, why Microsoft's push to freeze out Win32 applications, and limit Windows 10 users to UWP apps purchased only through the Windows 10 Store, is fundamentally doomed. Windows' legendary backwards-compatibility and enormous catalogue of existing applications is the platform's single biggest strength, and Microsoft is doing their level best to throw it all away, apparently in the hope of monetizing a user base who won't have a compelling reason anymore to run Windows. They're discarding their greatest competitive strength, and replacing it with advertising.
I get that Microsoft want to be Google, or Apple, or both, but their attempts to emulate their competitors aren't just inept -- they're fundamentally wrong-headed. Microsoft clearly have no idea how to be Google or Apple, and crucially, they're also forgetting how to be Microsoft in the process. The loss of their customers' trust and goodwill is problem enough, but this loss of identity may well prove to be more crippling. Windows without Windows' back-catalogue... just isn't Windows, anymore. Not really. Strip away Windows' huge library of existing applications, and it may as well be Linux.
Which is one reason why I'm seriously considering switching from Windows 7 to Linux, when the time comes. I'm still hoping that I don't have to, and I'm lazy enough to not want to, but I will, if Microsoft succeeds in stripping Windows of everything that makes it worth using. Because, at that point, we all may as well be running Linux.