Why We Love to Hate Microsoft

It was April 28, a Friday, late in the afternoon. I was standing in the service department of one of the few Apple Computer dealers left on the planet, waiting to pick up an iMac I'd brought in earlier for repairs. The technician -- a soft-looking guy in his 20s or 30s, an anti-static strap around one wrist and junk-food detritus spread out on his workbench -- was so excited you'd think he'd just discovered a lost episode of Star Trek.

Earlier that day, the Justice Department had announced it would seek to split the software giant Microsoft into two parts, with one company getting Windows, the other getting everything else: the Office suite (Word, Excel, and the like), Internet Explorer, MSNBC, Slate, and maybe even a few remaindered copies of Bill Gates's hilariously awful 1995 bestseller, The Road Ahead.

Six weeks would pass before federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson would give the break-up his imprimatur. It could be years before Microsoft exhausts its appeals. The next president, whether it's George W. Bush or Al Gore, may flinch at the prospect of destroying our most successful company and instead order his Justice Department to settle on the cheap. Yet the Apple technician was having none of that. To him, the Microsoft split was a done deal, and it had come not a moment too soon. Chortling with nasal alacrity, he prattled on and on about how it was all over for "Bill" -- that "Bill" had dictated what the computing landscape looked like for far too long, and now it was time for "Bill" to toe someone else's line. I wish I'd been taking notes, but you get the idea.

Later, I was struck by the unreality of our exchange -- or, to be more accurate, his monologue. In the first place, there we were, two people for whom computers are an essential part of our daily lives, and neither one of us was the least bit dependent on Microsoft. I use precisely one Microsoft product -- the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer -- and certainly could get by almost as well with Netscape Navigator were I afflicted with the same purist tendencies I'm sure my technician was. "Bill" has surely done plenty of dictating over the years, but he hadn't done any to us.

More important, though, was the level of fascination that moment revealed. Yes, Bill Gates is an asshole -- an arrogant, screaming, humorless workaholic who, despite his carefully nurtured reputation as some sort of uber-geek programming genius, is actually a mediocre software developer who built his monopoly by stealing others' work when he could, buying it when he had to, and threatening to destroy companies that tried to do business with anyone other than Microsoft.

But so what? I mean, go watch Erin Brockovich. There you'll learn about a utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, whose toxic dumping killed some people and sickened many more. Closer to home, air pollution from PG&E's two power plants in Massachusetts may be directly responsible for about 150 deaths a year, according to a recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health. Yet nobody knows the name of the guy who runs PG&E.

Of course, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and in a culture obsessed with wealth, that counts for a lot. Robert D. Glynn Jr. -- who is, in fact, the chairman, CEO, and president of PG&E -- is well compensated indeed, with a reported 1999 income of $2.3 million. But consider that Gates's net worth is an estimated $80 billion. Then, too, the computer industry is sexy, hot, celebrity-driven. Slate editor Michael Kinsley, whose paychecks are signed by Gates (ever the literalist, Kinsley notes that he actually is paid via direct deposit), defines the difference between Microsoft and PG&E this way: "Technology is glamorous. The electricity grid is not glamorous." Bill Gates and Microsoft are the most visible symbols of that glamour, regardless of how unglamorous Gates may be in real life.