In an alternate universe where you can go through a wormhole, you will find an Earth with a difference. There exists a very powerful corporation called My-crow-shaft. It’s a company that believes in one philosophy for all. It doesn’t discriminate between itself and its users.
The great operating system—actually it should be the great-great-grandfather of operating systems—that the company built and made popular tells the story of its philosophy, which says that perfectionism never achieved anything and everyone has equal—and some have even more—rights to succeed.
It’s not that you only survive when you’re good or excellent at something. The pro-people company (where ‘pro’ stands for ‘produce and then force people to use’) believes that even the mediocre and the below average have the right to succeed. All you need is good muscles, which you can flex, and a lot of monopoly.
This corporation created Windows to prove the point—its success is the proof of the philosophy it believes in, which is: everyone has the right to succeed.
Now, you know that most people use doors to enter and exit. Everyone knows what kind of people use windows to enter and exit. There is a big industry manufacturing alarms that prevent people from breaking in through windows.
This company, My-crow-shaft, has products that need regular reboots. It believes in: “Always take a nap during work; it increases productivity.” So does its operating system—make sure you reboot and reformat it as and when you can, before it forces you to.
This year, just like every other year, the company reformatted and then rebooted its online search business—Live is dead, and Bing is its latest fling.
There is something interesting about Bing! It is trying to become our moral police, for us Indians at least. My-crow-shaft loves highway patrols and control.
This time it is enlisting parents. The firm wants to make sure that the next generation has free access to the required information. At the same time, parents should be happy their kids are not getting access to the wrong information.
If you enter the word ‘sex’ (on the Bing India portal), it will warn you with a message that reads, “The search for ‘sex’ may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms.” But if you are looking for specific information and key in something like: ‘sex stories of”, it will give you all the results you are looking for.
If you enter the most popular F-word (and no, I don’t mean ‘free’; I meant the other four-letter word), it will again warn you about ‘sexually explicit content’. But if you enter something like, “You are a F****”, it will give you all the desired results.
Now, according to Wikipedia, the word ‘sex’ is explained as follows, “In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialisation of organisms into male and female types (or sexes).”
My-crow-shaft has issues with that? Oh! They want to keep a check on population explosion. So, if you are a researcher and want to write a chapter on sex education for kids and search for ‘sex’ on Bing, My-crow-shaft will warn you that this could be an offensive search. [Yes, in India—people are still debating whether sex education should be even allowed in schools.] But ‘they’ have no issues if you are a pervert and are searching for sex stories. They will not let an innocent professor get dirty by searching that word, but will give the ‘right’ information to the one who wants it. Remember the saying: “Seek and ye shall find.”
Now, this is something beyond the understanding of my pea-brain.
My-crow-shaft is proving time and again—first DRM and now this censorship—that it will decide what is appropriate and what is not.
Oh! I forgot. Another beauty of Bing is that you can easily search for the first name of the former US vice president from the George Bush regime. My-Crow-Shaft is funny, ain’t it? And people say it’s a dull, boring company.
Hey, you just don’t know how much fun Bing is going to have. Wait until next year—the following version might be called Fling.
If you know My-crow-shaft well, you can see it coming.
