Imagine if your house had Windows

They don't have bathrooms, because the designer said that it would interrupt the flow of the house, and that no one uses them anymore. "But we need them", the home owners said. "No you don't," the developers replied. The residents have grown accustomed to it and use buckets and sinks instead.

The house has no Windows, so you can't see the Real World. After spending years saying "You don't need to do that," the Developer finally responds that you can hang pictures on the wall of what the idealized Real World looks like. They offer to also sell you a second home over in the Windows development area, but you're either squatting or paying full price for it.

Recently, the Developer replaced nearly every front door in the community with a garage door. "It gives you faster access to everything!" he explains. It opens seemingly at random, and looks nothing like the rest of the house. It's uncharacteristically gaudy. Most of the residents hide it or pretend it isn't there.

Every street in the development is named after cats, but there's no sequential logic to it. When the ISP explains "You need to live north of Tiger to get high speed internet" in their ads, most people have to pull out a map to figure out if they can. People have taken to numbering the streets, but those numbers aren't written on the street signs. Fortunately, it's relatively easy and cheap to move to another street, but in most cases nothing changes. The residents claim they know the order, but when anyone comes to visit from out of town, they are confused and quickly lost, since most of the streets look the same anyway.

Every 18 months or so, many of the residents bulldoze their entire home and replace it. They look down on those who don't. If someone hasn't bought a house recently enough, the developer won't even bring over new furniture, and the street cleaner begins skipping their house.

All the cars a elegant and beautiful works of glass, wrapped in large, often gaudy rubber bumpers. Some people even cover their entire car in a bumper (except the windshield, which gets a gummy sticker). Early buyers of the glass car need the bumpers to cover a hole where fuel leaks out, but for most, it's because the glass cars might shatter.

But all the residents of the Orchard are happy. They're a bit stuck up about how much their homes cost, despite that most people living in the "other" complex could easily afford it. They write long missives in their local paper about how bad it is to live in the other community, how they "just don't get it". They believe the home that suited them is clearly the best choice for everyone, even businesses. The talk with pride about how much money their Developer makes, even bragging that he has the highest margins in the industry, and wear their credit card debt as a badge of pride. To everyone else, they're an odd but mostly harmless group. But in their echo chamber, they're the smartest, most progressive, most intelligent and affluent people in the world, for whom the defining characteristic of their life is who they bought their house from.

And somewhere, off in the hills, the Unix monastery (which designed and constructed much of the infrastructure for the Orchard, free of charge, for the betterment of everyone) lives in hand-built homes, constantly adjusted and tailored to their needs and whims, and occasionally stripped down to the foundation and rebuilt just for fun.

I think Microsoft would take it as a compliment that they release too often. I also think Windows is one of the most backward-compatible systems out there.