Please pass
the insecticide

by sonya hammond

I'm certainly not Bill Gates' biggest fan, but it seems to me the Department of Justice is suing him over the wrong thing.

While there is plenty of room for argument as to whether or not The Bill, in his bid to become omnipotent ruler of practically everything, has been thwarting the competition's attempts to scoff up their share of the technological pie, practically no one will quibble that he deserves to be punished.

Take Windows 98, for example ... Please! Not that I would be so vindictive as to recommend that anyone actually do that. I merely suggest that W98 is a perfect example of The Bill's true sins and omissions, and far more worthy of litigation than his having the temerity to be richer than the government.

We are told, by MS pundits with perfectly straight faces, that we must have W98 because it fixes the 3,000 bugs with which our old W95 was diseased, by Microsoft's own admission, from the day it was perpetrated upon us.

Now if an automobile manufacturer put out a model with 3,000 bugs, 16 federal agencies, armies of outraged consumers accompanied by rabid attorneys, and Ralph Nader in full attack mode would carry their lawsuits all the way to the Supreme Court.

W95, on the other hand, was greeted like some sort of electronic Viagra. Never mind that we would go crazy trying to make it do even half of what it was supposed to; we had to have it.

In all fairness, old W95 was an improvement over Windows 3.5, although that's like saying extracting a tooth is better than a root canal. But while a dentist would be sued for malpractice for making 3,000 errors, The Bill was free to open the door to another upgrade.

So after a couple of years of R & D, and the pitiful ploy and pointless punctuation of MS Plus!, Bill announced the $99.00 W98 'fix'. When cars or toys are recalled for defects, they are fixed for free, but the Big B was building a house with the approximate square footage of Alaska, and somebody had to subsidize it.

We might not have minded this quite so much if W98 had actually fixed something. OK, maybe it fixed a few things, but they were the bugs we knew and had learned to live with. We had even learned to zap some of them all by ourselves, although droves of nerds had built lucrative careers on ridding us of W95's more virulent infestations. Now we've got bugs we didn't know existed, Species 98.

W98 was supposed to make things easier [than what ... climbing Everest?], more reliable [than, maybe, the Post Office?], better than ever [and 'ever' was ... when?], to say nothing of fixing stuff we didn't know wasn't working and completely ignoring stuff that would actually make it worth the price of upgrading to it.

Like we really can't live without turning our desktops into facsimiles of a web page? MS should stop telling us how to decorate and start telling us how to debug without paying for the advice.

The Bill's idea of a new troubleshooting 'resource' is a button on W98's 'help' menu that enables the disabled to connect instantly with MS 'support' on-line. This is true, sort of.

The button does connect to a site that promises help, providing we fill out an application form that will initiate us into the fraternity of the helpless. This membership entitles us to choose options for various types of support ... from a 'frequently asked questions' site [where nothing you would ever ask is answered] on up to talking to an actual MS expert, a privilege for which you will pay by the nanosecond.

In my quest for help, I chose the option to plead on-line, and was rewarded with a row of neat little boxes into which I was expected to type responses.

No.1 was easy: 

"Define your problem."

No. 2 was such a no-brainer, I admit getting a bit testy:

         "Explain what you expected to happen."

But they went too far with No. 3 [I am not making this up]:

"What do you want Microsoft to do?"

I considered telling them, but on the remote chance they might solve my problem, I restrained myself.

I guess Microsoft's troubleshooters were all busy in court, since no one ever answered me, but I really didn't care. I solved my problem by uninstalling W98, or at least those portions of it that The Bill didn't permanently wire to my system when I succumbed to his upgrade.

There's no question the guy is sneaky, but while squashing him may appease the government's newly found sense of moral indignation, it won't do a thing to eliminate inexplicable error messages, disappearing files, and frozen programs.

Let's let the punishment fit the crime ... Make the guy read all the on-line answers to the burning question "What do you want Microsoft to do?"

In the meantime, anyone know a good exterminator?

©sonya hammond 1998

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