I have reached one of those seminal watershed moments in my life. Besides recovering from major surgery – as soon as I got home from an almost 2 weeks stay in an ICU unit – my personal PC along with my wife’s just stopped working! An update from Microsoft killed both of our PCs. I just snapped. I asked myself why waste more of my own time repairing what Microsoft clearly does not ever care to fix? Worse yet – with the coming Smartphone’s maturation cycle, which will replace the majority of uses of PCs, why should I waste more of my time working on dead technology?

I had spent almost my entire adult working career using x86 technology and developing solutions for it. When I say I am done with x86 technology personal type machines and will move to Smartphone’s – I am talking about moving off of no less than NINE active machines (6 different OS’s), while another five are sitting dormant in my office (used when needed but not on 24x7 as are the other 9). There is a green aspect to all of this as well.

Had the folks in Redmond just made an architecture which became rock solid – they likely would have kept the mondo x86 gear heads like me. Had they just instantiated one way to install Applications on their machine – this could have easily been achieved. I have fought my way through many Windows bugs before. I have had some of my solutions published in magazines. I was the guy who your family, friends neighbors called for Windows and Networking problems. I am sorry to say that I am not going to be that guy in future. Call Microsoft, Apple or whoever you bought your PC from will likely have to be my response.

The hassle of switching alone stopped me from moving in the past when the choices were Linux or Mac. Now with far far less mature platform – this will likely be excruciatingly more difficult to switch. But if the Microsoft Mob doesn’t care than why should I continue to waste any more of my life refining support solutions for their deficient technology dumps? Answer – life is to short and after 30 years – they had plenty of time and cash to fix the stability issues.

Onward and upward – laying out what will be needed to dump x86 in the recycling facility is our next stop. The process of moving to utility type reliability (Smartphones, Cloud etc) will be the subject for this blog: lboeckl.Posterous.com. As I know Z E R O about Smartphones - the hill in front of me is quite steep! Out with old and in with the new!