The Magickal Mr G. and The Flip

Mr G.

I must tell you about the magic of Mr G.

But first I must tell you who Mr G. is.

His first name is apparently William, known to most as Bill.

Love him or hate him, he has an unreasonably large amount of media coverage. Not bad for some-one who apparently dropped out of University to start a software company.

There are some key insights about our man Bill that wikipedia, the internet and most people will not know. In fact I don’t know if anyone shares my insights and to be honest I would be quite upset if they did.

Unlike the alternative media I am not going to point the finger at Bill and call him out for causing all this trouble that humanity is in right now. Quite the opposite actually. I am going to congratulate Mr G for gradually and unfalteringly achieving the impossible.

He is quite the man. For selling ice to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabs and well water to the Irish. He is a ‘superman’ like no other.

I first used Microsoft products in 1993 when I was at College studing Computing. This would have been the mighty Microsoft Office 3.0 suite of programs. As a yardstick for anyone not up to speed with the last 30 years of Microsoft products, the current version of Office is now 2021 or version 16.0.

Few people will want to remember just how impressive the mighty word processing abilities of Microsoft’s flagship product ‘Word’ were.

At University, in the Computer Labs in the mid 90s you would often here people curse out loud at just how inept it was and how easy it was to lose hours of work to the ‘removing your floppy disk bug’.

Floppy disks were like currency back in the 90s. Everyone had a friend who would want to borrow your disk to save their work on. If you made the mistake of not saving your work before taking the disk out then you lost your work.

It would serve you right for being kind.

Office 3.0 lead to Office 4.0 and then the mighty 4.2 which was the first and only version I bought. Albeit a dubious copy for £50 from a bloke in Bristol.

This was 1996. I missed out on the Office 95 fanfare and jumped to using Office 97 whilst on placement year at Hewlett Packard.

Two years later Office 2000 became the norm, followed by Office XP two years after that then Office 2003 two more years later.

Can anyone see a pattern here? Am I the only one brave enough to suggest that there can’t possibly be enough groundbreaking changes in how one writes a document to warrant a whole new expensive suite of programs every 2 years?

Oh I am so cycnical.

I invested myself in the 2003 version, with lots of advanced trainings and programming. And it added to all the keyboard shortcuts and tricks I had learnt in the last 10 years. My ego now classed myself as a super-pro, expert developer!

And then in 2007 something weird happened.

Really weird.

Although the excitement didn’t rock my world until two years later: at a job I took in England for a green electricity company.

When the IT department were setting up my new computer, they asked me what version of MS Office I wanted. “2003” I said. They laughed at me.

Word got around to my new team.

They laughed at me too.

Hadn’t I heard. Office 2007 was the new kid on the block and it was awesome. It had a ribbon and everything.

Apparently Microsoft had done a user survey with a couple of hundred students and built a version of ‘Word’ around what they said they wanted the word processing software to do. This meant no more searching for the functions you needed. Everything was now up front on the ribbon. Wow! Amazing.

Well. Now I had been told.

This was the sound-byte that my new team reeled off for me anyway. And it was unsurprisingly the headling in all sorts of online articles as to why Office 2003 was destined for the dump.

Microsoft had reinvented the wheel and now it was a shit triangle shape.

All my keyboard shortcuts were worthless, all my secret expert knowledge and tricks now useless because of the user-survey of some 200 students. Somewhere. Now presumably £50 better off each.

Thank you Microsoft.

Now they could sell the same word processor to the same companies and customers all around the world all over again. And people would be just as plain lost and confused as they would be trying to type a letter using a hair dryer.

MS had changed and moved everything. I remember asking someone in the team how to print. That worked wonders for my street cred! Here was the new Senior Analyst who was apparently IT illiterate. Oh how they laughed.

“Would you like a typewriter New Guy”?

My come back was to point out what I thought was the obvious. They had just put lipstick on the pig and sold the same crap to you all over again. In fact if Microsoft made cars they would now have 5 wheels, the accelerator would be in the back and the brakes would only work if you put money in a slot. And that slot was on the roof.

I had Microsoft’s number. And with each new version they did the same and proved me right. Change the last version round a bit more, fix a few bugs, sell a whole load of training and support products with it and threaten to ‘remove support’ of the old product very soon. Then cite a few scary virus statistics.

This I came to know as something called a “Business Model”.

But what has this got to do with healing or the current spiritual outlook in the world?

Well, we are getting there. We took the scenic route in this article…

x-x-x

To understand the bigger picture in this story I need to include a brief chat about something called ‘backward compatibility’. This is when documents and files that you save in the new version of Office don’t open in the old version.

This creates a gap between the companies using Office 2007 and those still in the dark ages of Office 2003. The message and solution is simple for smaller companies: If you want to keep doing business with us, you’re going to need to reach for your company credit card and upgrade everyone to 2007.

So from Microsoft’s perspective, to keep selling the same word processor to everyone every two years, you only need sell the upgrade to a pile of big multinational companies and the medium and smaller companies that do business with them, will upgrade by magic.

Now we need to mention the ‘removing support’ ticking time-bomb-stick that IT departments all around the world are beaten with.

All software has a shelf life. Buy Office 2021 today and by 2023 it’s been replaced and removed from sale. Then by 2026 MS have removed support for it. So if you’re a big company and have developed a big database or spreadsheet using the Office suite and it’s become mission critical. You’re going to feel very uncomfortable knowing that Microsoft won’t give you any technical help if that software grinds to a halt. And it’s supposedly now exposed to wild and free software viruses hunting you down…

‘Buying peace of mind’ is well known.

Ok. So here’s the key piece in the puzzle.

The computer virus.

This is one of the biggest reasons companies the world over will spend 100s of millions upgrading their software every few years. They see the news reports of other companies being attacked and wiped out by computer virus attacks. And they get scared that when support is removed for their ‘old software’, they are no longer covered.

Essentially ‘removing support’ means two things:

     1. They will no longer help you if you’re stuck, even if you throw money at them.

     2. BUT, critically it also means that they will no longer bug-fix any security vulnerabilities in their software when a new virus hits the streets.

BOOM.

You and your company are exposed and at the mercy of just how brilliant the new computer virus is.

I lived in the IT world for 15+ years and I’ve seen this business model weasel it’s way through the profit and loss accounts.

With one Irish company the first decision of the new IT department was to propose a spend of €1 million for software. This was for upgrading to a newer version of Microsoft Office and the MS Office operating system.

“We are exposed” they said.

And the sales pitch to the staff was “we will be more efficient and effective”.

“Wow, I can hardly wait” I thought.

“I’ve always wanted to be both of those things”

“In fact I was in 2003”, I thought, “albeit for a fleeting 4 years…”

A few months earlier, the old IT department had left, following a decision to outsource most IT functions to the global monster known as IBM.

And there it was, right in front of my face. IBM scratching Microsoft’s back. Doing the sales-work to the big companies of the world.

x-x-x

And then in 2013 Microsoft, not know for gardening, planted the Office 365 seed. It took a few years to germinate and grow throughout the globe, but it has now become commonplace. What sensible business owners did just a few decades ago was to buy a typewriter or an Amstrad PCW to write letters and invoices on. It was a capital expense off the shelf. You bought it once.

Now a business owner pays to use an online word processor every month. An easier spend, this time an operational expense. And in no time Microsoft will have you using all their fancy online tools, to make it harder and harder for you to jump ship and get off the monthly drip at any point in the future.

The Microsoft Office suite is now a service and not a product.

And there it is. That is the magick of Mr G. Love him or hate him, he has achieved the impossible. Over a number of years he has flipped a product into a service. Alchemised your £250 one time payment into a pay-forever £10 a month. All based around a word processor and the looming threat of the ‘computer-virus-bogey-man’ coming to get all those who are slow to upgrade.

x-x-x

Anyone see a correlation here? Anyone see the real message and the true moral of this story? My trip down IT memory lane, with the computer virus calling the shots?

Mr G. is now trying the same magick in his current role at The Vaccine Alliance (Gavi).

People who took the 1st and 2nd shot of the experimental injection are now expected to take the 3rd and 4th shot. Israel are leading the way with this. ‘Injection Passes’ around the world now seem to suggest many more than 3 or 4 are expected as part of the global-roadmap.

In a short space of time, the 1st and 2nd injections are quickly outwitted by new apparent viruses (virii), with dubious names. And whilst you can’t be forced to avail of the injection (which would be repugnant to the Nurembourg Code) – those choosing not to be part of the global medical experiment are finding it harder to shop, work or take part in society as before.

There is nothing to see here, we are just watching the same Microsoft magick, only this time with a medical product, being flipped into a service to combat those pesky invisible virus-bogey men (or women).

If you want to see even deeper into the connection here, you might even advocate that software companies have always been one step behind the computer-virus. And that was always the idea. To engrave the ‘computer virus concept’ into the hue-man psyche and our vulnerability to contract virii.

Perhaps God made a mistake with our blue-print right? 😉

Watch the global media space for exciting news of annual injections becoming bi-annual and then quarterly and then monthly. All at zero cost to you. To start with anyway. Much like the 90 days free Microsoft Office Trial. Then it will become a monthly payment. (I’m guessing here BTW)

Naturally we all trust Microsoft given their stellar history. For example the €899 million fine presented to them by the EU in 2008 and the €561 million in 2013. For things such as anti-trust and ‘unreasonable royalty-fees’ (posh name for bribery?)

x-x-x

When you see the dark, you can’t un-see it.

When you’ve sussed the agenda and connected the dots you just ‘know’.

Not everyone sees this and that’s ok.

As with everything I write, take what resonates and discard the rest.

The truth lies in your own heart.

With love and blessings to all

More From The Blog