I'm a Windows desktop user, XP, 7, and 10. That's what I want, a DESKTOP. I don't have a smart phone. I may soon buy a $20 mobile flip phone. I have nothing from Apple.

For my own general purpose computing, I want Windows desktop especially with its backwards compatibility.

For business, I'm doing a startup which for the users is a Web site, and I wrote the code on XP and will run it on 7 as my server until I switch over to Windows Server.

I've done nothing with Unix or Linux.

In the past 10 years, I've typed in about 400,000 lines of text as software, with about 100,000 program language statements. For the compiled code, it's essentially all Visual Basic .NET with ASP.NET for Web pages and ADO.NET for getting to SQL Server database. I like VB.NET. I did my startup Web pages with ASP.NET -- seems fine to me although they are my first Web pages and I;m no Web page expert. E.g., I wrote no JavaScript although ASP.NET writes a little for me which is optional.

For a cloud, for now I'd be concerned about cost, startup time, and security. Later I'll be concerned about security.

I tried Visual Studio for a few minutes and gave up on it. I've used no integrated development environment and have no desire to.

My two most important tools are my favorite text editor KEdit and my favorite scripting language Rexx. I type my code into KEdit and have a lot of KEdit macros to help me with the code. The code for my Web site is about 100,000 lines of typing and about 24,000 programming language statements -- I had no trouble debugging and never wanted anything like Visual Studio.

I wouldn't use Visual Studio for free -- too much botheration for too little need.

When I looked at Visual Studio, I could find no reasonable, usable, competent documentation, and no way do I want to take out months to figure out like a puzzle and document Visual Studio for my own use. E.g., Microsoft keeps talking about "intelisense" as if I should already know what that meant and would like it. Of course, I can't look up intellisense in a dictionary, and absolutely, positively, with feet locked four feet down in reinforced concrete will Microsoft refuse to document, describe, and explain what they mean by intellisense. It is as if their gibberish not in any dictionary has self-evident meaning and value -- it has neither. Grotesque, outrageous, inarticulate, incompetent, sick-o communications.

It turns out, ASP.NET is super easy to debug -- just give the .ASPX file to a Web browser and let ASP code do its things.

For Office and e-mail, I use my legal copy of Office 2003 with Outlook. Now that I have good, extensive notes on how to adjust the settings and options on Outlook, I can do the setups in an hour instead of the several days as before; it's fine. There are some improvements I could think of, but I doubt that Microsoft would be interested. It might be that I could program the improvements with the old VBA which might be able to read and parse an Outlook PST file, but so far I've never tried VBA and when I did want to try it didn't have a copy. For Excel, I use it to draw simple graphs and otherwise regard it as worthless -- I'd much rather write code in Rexx, VB.NET, Fortran, PL/I, etc. and then use Excel to draw the plots. My understanding is that now there is much better graph drawing software, likely with API's, or better API's, than Excel.

For high quality word whacking, I use D. Knuth's original TeX and love it. I hate Word -- used it some, got okay with it, but hate it.

Lessons: To me, for my personal computing and for business, I want the full power of a good desktop computer. I place high value on backward compatibility, e.g., back to Office 2003, an old Watcom Fortran, an old IBM OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library) to be called from Watcom Fortran, KEdit, Open Object Rexx, etc. For business and software development, VB.NET is fine.

Far and away my greatest gripe with computing, the computer industry, and Microsoft is documentation -- on average, the quality of the documentation is awful. To me, the biggest problem in my startup, by far, is poor documentation. Broadly the poor documentation has commonly taken me 100-200 hours to do things I should have been able to do in one hour. So, I DO write my own notes and then AM able to do the stuff in one hour. The bad documentation is close to killing my startup. Long since I should have been sending six figures a year to Microsoft for licenses on their software, and the main reason I'm not is their documentation. E.g., it took me two weeks of full time mud wrestling JUST to find a connection string that worked with SQL Server -- should have taken 10 minutes. Recently I spent 80 hours full time getting simple file sharing, as a first time user, between my 7 and 10 systems. I wrote up notes for myself that will solve the problem for any first time user in less than an hour. I posted the notes on TechNet. Responses from others were awful, e.g., kept talking about Workgroups and Homegroups and some Windows password tool, ALL of which are just irrelevant down to next to useless. Apparently nearly no one still actually knows how to use the simple, well designed, command line NET commands to set up first time user file sharing. The old NET documentation is also awful, gets a grade of flat F in just simple Bachus-Nauer syntax notation 101 and totally omits anything about semantics, meaning, usage, understanding, security, consequences, timeouts, etc. I had so much trouble with even simple things with SQL Server that eventually I got help, really simple answers, from some high up SQL Server executive.

To me, the most serious problem blocking information technology, computing, Microsoft, and my work is BAD DOCUMENTATION.

When Microsoft learns how to describe their work, then I'll start to consider if they are a competent, functioning company with a bright future.