However, Microsoft is—rightly, we think—viewed as an ugly American in much of the world. There are many reasons for this, but two are paramount: the ugliness of the company's practices and the ugliness of the company's products.

Redmond is notorious for its predatory actions in the marketplace—its "embrace-and-extend" methodology is well-documented over the years. So is its penchant for blocking competition with proprietary technology, a practice that Greg Olson of Sendmail Inc. covered trenchantly in last Sunday's New York Times "Money & Business" section. (Oddly, this article does not appear on the Times Web site. Or maybe not so oddly, since the Times is an unabashed booster of Microsoft's business prowess.) Microsoft has always tried to use its power to destroy competition, and this philosophy is very much in evidence on the Internet. ActiveX, Jscript, Microsoft Java and NetShow all represent attempts to preempt competitors adhering to open, cross-platform standards; these and many other proprietary Microsoft offerings have caused developers no end of headaches. Yesterday's appointment of the blustery Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's president is only going to harden the company's stance.

Redmond is also notorious for ugly products, and this is another consequence of the company's "embrace-and-extend" concept. The most famous example, of course, is Windows itself. Here is a product so buggy and inelegant that it took the better part of a decade, until the release of Windows 3.1 in the early '90s, to gain acceptance. Here is a product which has evolved at a snail's pace ever since, through the release of Windows 95, with its jagged splash screen logo (which could be somewhat ameliorated by purchasing a $50 add-on product, "Microsoft Plus"), through the many iterations of Windows NT and its incessant, bug-repairing "Service Packs," through this year's release of Windows 98, which finally puts Mickey Mouse on our desktops. (Editor's Note: this progression would change, strikingly, with the release of Windows 2000, which, despite its well-documented bug count, strikes us as a superior, high-performance product.)

The company's other software follows this pattern as well. Microsoft will imitate someone else's product with a hasty, bug-ridden offering, then leverage its market share to attack and destroy the superior product. (The company does—gradually—improve its software along the way, albeit in the context of the proprietary, standards-sabotaging policies noted above.) This has been the pattern with Microsoft Office, which is now virtually free of competition, and it has very much been the pattern with Internet Explorer. In just about every case where Microsoft enters a market for the first time, it does so with a product that is strikingly inferior, both aesthetically and functionally.

Yet, as we all know, Microsoft usually wins. Why? Why do people, and Americans in particular, put up with or even relish products that don't work as they're supposed to, and look bad in the process? Is it because we admire Bill Gates? Because we're afraid to be different, or to buck a trend? Because we're simply stupid, in the manner of H.L. Mencken's Boobus Americanus?

There has to be a better way, and we'd like to propose one.

While the Justice Department tackles Microsoft's business practices—against the odds, most Americans believe—we humbly suggest a solution on another front. Let's redesign Microsoft—literally. Let's assemble a team of our best architects, artists and designers to rework the Microsoft look and feel. We'll aim for a purely cosmetic fix. Perhaps we'll wind up with an impressionistic release of Office, or a fauve version of Internet Explorer. Even Windows itself might appear somehow ... cleaner.

We can't escape Microsoft in the marketplace, and we can't do anything to guarantee that Microsoft products work properly (except stop buying them, which we seem loath to do). Can't we at least have Microsoft products that look better?

(Reviewed July 22, 1998)