I Am Suing Microsoft

I have a boring technical story to introduce this essay. You may skip it if you wish. Last night, I was using my computer to do something highly advanced and experimental, browsing the web. Since they haven't quite worked out all the bugs in Internet Explorer over the course of six versions, my computer absolutely locked up in the middle of downloading a web page: neither my mouse nor control-alt-delete worked. I decided to reboot the system by hand, and of course Scan Disk started up, just to make sure everything was alright. I pushed cancel, since it was late at night and all I wanted was to finish reading the page I was on. Then this morning, I was going to leave the house and thought it would be a good idea to run some maintenance software on my computer. I fired up Scan Disk, and it actually found an error, for the first time since I got this computer. I pressed OK to fix it, but by that time, the contents of the hard drive had changed, so it needed to start all over again. I closed out all my other programs, even pressing control-alt-delete to close all the things that weren't visible on the task bar, and I started it over. Again, even though Scan Disk was apparently the only thing the computer had to worry about, some other program couldn't wait thirty seconds to look at the hard drive. It eventually became apparent that I was caught in an infinite loop: it would find the error, and by the time I could respond to it, it would have to start all over. Interestingly, the same thing happened when I told it to just go ahead and fix the errors without my explicit approval. I needed somehow to get the computer to the point where Scan Disk was absolutely the only thing it needed to do, so that it could get through it uninterrupted, and the only way I could think of to do that was to shut down the computer improperly and let Scan Disk show up. If I weren't a person who has had a million computer problems and has had the patience to figure every last one of them out, I would have just had to let that error stay there, and then other errors would pile up, until I finally had to format my hard drive and start over.

The point of that story is that Microsoft's products are ridiculously stupid. Anyone with half a brain would include a function where maintenance software can override everything else so as to get its job done uninterrupted. Not Microsoft, though. No, they have to focus on making tiny little changes to the user interface so that they can justify charging for a new version, all the while letting stupid bugs and stupid annoyances pile up. If they had put half as much time into making their software not constantly lock up as they did into trying to put Winamp out of business with their Media Player, they probably could have fixed the most egregious bugs right away. Granted, an overriding focus on technical minutae might not be the best approach, since Linux absolutely never locks up but is also sometimes openly hostile toward users who don't have a master's degree in computer science. Microsoft needs to learn, though, that software is not easy to use if it can suddenly lock up at literally any time for no apparent reason, and it's not easy to use if their idiotic design makes it nearly impossible to fix problems in a reasonable manner.

My stupid way of fixing my computer today made me late to where I was going, but what if it was something more serious? What if instead of locking up while I was reading some news article, my computer had locked up while I was writing a paper, and the disk error didn't just make me late, but made me lose my work? Think of the time that I've lost, whether it makes me have to turn it in late or not. Professors know that such things can happen and are usually very understanding about it, but think of all the time that they lose grading my paper individually when they could have graded it with all the others. And what about the business world, where people's work actually has a direct economic value and it can be so easily lost? And even if the work itself turns out to be intact, what of the time that is wasted staring at the screen as the computer reboots? An older computer running the latest version of Windows could probably take up to five or ten minutes to reboot. If every employee's computer locked up once a week (a conservative estimate), imagine how many man-hours a large corporation could be losing. If the workers whose time is wasted are salaried, then the company can simply force them to work unpaid overtime to compensate for the errors, but that takes the workers away from their families.

Clearly, Microsoft's software carries with it not only an economic cost, but also a social one. As Microsoft's software costs working parents more and more of their personal time, it contributes to nothing less than the deterioration of the family, indeed of American society itself.

That is why I am filing a class-action lawsuit on the part of all computer users whose time has been wasted, whose money has been squandered, whose families have been torn apart by the scourge of Microsoft's bug-ridden, grossly negligent software. I encourage you to support my effort by your complaints to your congressman, by your financial contributions to my legal fund, but most importantly by your fervent prayer that this company that has visited wanton destruction on the economic and social structure of our great nation may finally be brought to justice.