hy is it so fashionable to hate Microsoft? An article in the current issue of The New Republic by David Shenk explores the issue in detail. Some people blame Microsoft's aggressive marketing techniques and ruthless competitive drive. Others say the hatred is grounded in the fact that billg@microsoft.com is the richest person in the world.
But after spending most of last Saturday afternoon reformatting my computer's hard drive, reinstalling my copy of Windows NT 4.0 (service pack 3), and reinstalling a dozen or so applications that I use on a daily basis - and then doing it all again - I'm increasingly convinced the hatred stems from the poor design of Microsoft's operating systems.
I don't like spending my weekend spinning CD-ROMs and typing activation codes, but Microsoft didn't give me much choice: My system became unusable as I was taking out a Turtle Beach sound card and installing a Creative Labs SoundBlaster AWE64. (Turtle Beach's new card doesn't work with my speech-recognition program.) Something went wrong with the deinstallation procedure, and instead of getting the standard NT login screen, I got something that's known as the Blue Screen Of Death - a solid blue screen covered with lots of incomprehensible hexadecimal gibberish.
I tried to recover, but to no avail. Then I reinstalled NT, but the system still wouldn't boot. So finally, I took drastic action: I reformatted my hard drive (losing some important data in the process) and started with a fresh slate.
By evening I got everything working again. Indeed, now my system runs better than it did before I started. The reason, I suspect, is I'm getting better at installing NT: In the last two months, I've installed the operating system at least six times on the same system.
I'm not the only person who has had to install NT numerous times. A friend in Silicon Valley tells me this is common at his firm. He jokes that each time you install the operating system, ''the bits get pressed down a little harder on your disk drive.'' Eventually those bits take hold and work properly, the way Bill intended.
I had another run-in with Microsoft last month, when I was trying to install Office '97 Professional on a laptop that I was reviewing. It turned out my Office CD-ROM was scratched. To its credit, Microsoft does run a media replacement service for exactly this situation. Unfortunately, the CD-ROM had been back-ordered for more than a month, and it would be at least another three weeks before a replacement could be shipped.
Stuck without the CD-ROM, I tried to do something that's normally frowned upon in the Windows world: move a working copy of Office '97 from my desktop system to my laptop.
As many Microsoft customers know, you should never attempt to move an application from one computer running Windows to another. The reason has less to do with copyright and more to do with Microsoft technology. Windows applications are messy: When they install, they put some files into your WINDOWS directory, they modify some entries in your Registry, they update some of your DLLs (Dynamic Linked Libraries), and they make all sorts of other changes. It's impossible to track down all these changes and replicate them on another system.
Impossible, at least, for a human. QuarterDeck makes a program called CleanSweep that is supposed to rectify this problem. Besides uninstalling programs from your computer, CleanSweep is supposed to be able to move applications from directory to directory and between computers. I ran CleanSweep with my fingers crossed. An hour later, Office '97 announced that it was finished. The program told me to rerun Setup and reinstall Office from the CD-ROM.
I think it's frustrations such as these that are behind the anti-Microsoft trend. Over the past decade, the computer-using public has become steadily more sophisticated. Instead of blaming themselves, people are realizing the problems they are having with their computers are a direct result of design decisions that have been made by product managers at Gates HQ in Redmond, Wash. People want retribution for their countless hours of wasted time.
None of the problems I have described would have bitten me if I had been using a Macintosh. The Mac doesn't have a Blue Screen of Death. In an emergency, you can even boot your Macintosh from the CD-ROM, then drag the offending device driver to your trash can. You can even perform a ''clean'' Mac OS installation without erasing the other contents of your hard drive.
But like many other Mac users, I've been forced to switch to Windows because many of the programs that I want to run aren't available anywhere else.
As the scrutiny has increased, people have found more reasons to hate Microsoft. A few years back a weekly newspaper in Seattle ran an expose about how Microsoft had hired prison labor to package and shrink-wrap all of those millions of Windows 95 boxes.
And then there's an article in the current issue of Mother Jones that details how Microsoft has gotten the Business Software Alliance to serve double-duty as Microsoft's overseas sales force, by bringing copyright infringement lawsuits and dropping them when the alleged offender agreed to switch from competing products to Microsoft.
With all of these fine reasons, it's no surprise so many people hate Microsoft. The surprise is that so many keep buying the company's products. And the irony is that many people must belong to both camps.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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