Brian Livingston (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ)

Brian Livingston has spent decades following Microsoft and the industry as a tech consultant, author of 11 Windows Secrets books, columnist and now editorial director and owner of the Windows Secrets newsletter. When we sat down at his office recently to talk for today's story about Windows Secrets, we ended up spending a lot of time discussing the Redmond company and the broader computer industry.

It was a fun conversation. Livingston wasn't shy about expressing his viewpoint on Microsoft or anything else. Continue reading for excerpts from his comments.

On Microsoft today: Let’s start with a different question. I cannot find one thing to criticize about Bill Gates’ new foundation. I am just so impressed with the way he’s spending his money. [Gates' departure from daily life at the company] deprives Microsoft of some of its heart and soul. Steve Ballmer is kind of a brilliant salesman, but you have to have a great product to sell. You can’t just be a great salesman. The product really should excel.

On Windows development: I didn’t write the book Windows XP Secrets. I just didn’t want to write a book about Windows XP because I thought it was not that different from Windows 2000. I had no idea that product was going to be the operating system from Microsoft for five years. That was just such a wakeup call, just such a distress signal. … They need to have versions of software come out faster, and the versions need to be tighter, and tighter and tighter -- more performance all the time. Maybe they’ll get there with Windows 7.

On Windows Vista: Little things changed. I still can’t sort the files in Windows Explorer by extension. I can sort them by type, but why do I need to see a column called "type"? Why do they continue to hide .exe, .pdf, .doc? That’s what I want to see. I can’t understand your little 16-pixel icons. I just want to see .doc on the end of the thing, and I say this is a Word file. Somebody in the development of Windows Vista who was not the most experienced programmer got involved in the project and many little changes were made that customers found frustrating.

On Windows 7: I think Microsoft excels when it has pressure to do well. The resistance in corporations to shifting to Vista has acted like a competitor to Microsoft. They’re not competing against Apple or competing against Linux. They’re competing to see if they can produce a product that’s better than what they were selling before. It’s a new experience. So I have a lot of hope for Windows 7. But I had hope for Windows Vista, too. So the proof is really when hundreds of millions of people start trying to use it.

On blogging: The people who think they can quit their jobs and blog need to know that they would have to have gigantic traffic to make a living from the ads going down the side of the page. It’s sort of an Alaskan Gold Rush. People in Seattle made a lot of money decades ago selling picks and shovels to the miners who were going to go to Alaska and make millions of dollars and be rich. So the people who are selling the picks and shovels usually make the money and the people who are going off and striking it rich usually don’t. So I look at the blog phenomenon as this incredible wave of self-expression.

On the PC industry: There is so much dirt in the computer industry that we’ll never find it all. I consider the computer industry to be one of the worst customer-service disappointments in the entire economy. When you think about products that don’t work, products that have bad security, it’s just endemic. It’s so disappointing to me. Even the car industry that has these terrible economic problems now, the automakers fought it, but you do have seatbelts, you do have airbags. You have, thanks to Consumer Reports, bumpers that don’t just crumble when you have a 5-mile-per-hour fender-bender in the parking lot. So cars are getting better. In the computer industry, we’re still in the Wild West. The bad guys ride into town on their horses and shoot everybody and they just ride away.

On Microsoft's software development process: Microsoft seems to have this problem that they’ve got this fantastic usability lab, and they bring in total novices, then their feedback is used to create the next version of Windows, but Microsoft dumbs it down based on the feedback of the novices. And the professional users, the ones who are then deciding what all the other people in the corporation will use, are alienated because the features that they liked, that they had gotten used to, have gone away. I still can’t abide the Office 2007 ribbon. I’m sorry.

On the appeal of computing: I learned FORTRAN 4 on an IBM 360, which was punch cards, 80 columns, and you had to fight the students to get time on the keypunch machines. That informs my career even today, being exposed to computers at an early age. Geeks like us – the idea that we could control something and it has to do what we say? That’s fantastic. Girls don’t do what we say. The other drivers on the street don’t do what we say. In this one area we can rule. ... Once you’ve got it right, the computer will do it that exact way, every time for eternity. What an interesting bit of power to have.