Marcel Winatschek

The Perfect Medium

Someone in Japan started selling toilet paper printed with the Windows Vista logo, and I can’t think of a more appropriate use of both the brand and the substrate. Vista was the OS equivalent of a polite but firm refusal—it demanded hardware you didn’t have, asked permission for things you’d already given permission for, and delivered the general experience of being slightly worse at your job than you were six months earlier. The toilet paper makes the relationship explicit in a way Microsoft’s own marketing never quite managed.

I spent about a year on Vista before giving up and going back, which is its own kind of humiliation—the operating system that made downgrading feel like a victory. At least the Japanese toilet paper has a use.