Imagine you’re driving your car with high speed on the highway and all of a sudden the engine is cut off and a message on the screen or a voice asks you something about the pressure in the tires or the carburetor or the oil filter. You are as good a mechanic as a three-year old kid good at writing a popular science book. You don’t know the answer and your car gets slowly but surely off the highway and stops for good. You can do nothing about it and you have to cancel all your plans and call the towing company or the mechanic for an advice.

Here’s another exercise for you: imagine  you have a four or five-year old car that you’re happy with. It might not be the fastest or the slickest in the neighborhood but it does its job. You even have a nice garage to keep it sheltered from the bad weather. But there is a weird thing going on lately: your car gets bigger and slower.  Your car turns from a nice useful good-on-gas pickup truck into a sort of a tank, a huge shapeless, slow automobile that drinks gas like a thirsty student on his first party away from home, burning so much gas that would make a Hummer owner happy about his car’s mileage for the first (and probably last) time in his life. You wonder what happened and you discover that your car dealer or the car manufacturer accessed your car every night and added bits and parts, changing it and adding stuff that you have never requested. So one day you realize your great car that you were once so proud of turned into a four-wheel useless monster that requires you to spend a fortune to operate. You call the mechanic and the car dealer and they both agree you need to purchase the new 2010 model just released by the manufacturer. “This is a conspiracy” you shout in vain. “I never asked anybody to change my car!”

The two scenarios look like (bad) science fiction stories but this is exactly what happens now with our computers. We purchased a decent, nice computer a few years ago, running Windows XP with Microsoft Office XP and today we can hardly use it. Every time we go online that software connect to the company’s servers and downloads updates, patches or new versions. I installed with my own hands Acrobat version 5 and now I have version 9. The problem is it used to be 30 MB and now it’s 250 MB. And I only use it to open plain simple pdf files! I start Word or Excel to create a document and all of a sudden I get bombarded with strange messages about filenames, extensions, versions and other crazy things I never knew they exist (I know this stuff, but I’m a specialist, what about poor ol’ user – or better say victim?). You start a program and nothing happens. The computer freezes and you feel like throwing it out the window. In reality, the computer connects to the software producer’s servers and looks for updates, downloads and installs them. And you have no clue! Not only that they didn’t ask for your permission, but they didn’t even think of letting you know what’s going on. To make things worse, the new version tries to sell you something, uses more resources and pushes your computer to the limits. They didn’t ask you if you want or even need the new updates or versions; they took over your computer and made you the last and insignificant link in an out-of-your-control chain. But rest assured, they will offer you the way out: buy a new computer! Let me tell you something: I really don’t want anybody to mess around with my dear ol’ 1995 Mitsubishi. It works fine!

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