Background:

Let me be upfront about this -- I loathe Microsoft. Every privacy-violating, money-grubbing, crappy-software-writing jack-booted millimeter of it.

Perhaps a little story will illustrate why.

My company used to build computers for clients. Nothing major, just a dozen a year or so. We registered with Microsoft as an OEM, or Original Equipment Manufacturer, which gave us a discount when buying bulk packs of Windows 95 install disks. We did everything by the book and were scrupulously honest.

Eventually, we found the hardware end of the business to be unprofitable, and stopped building machines. Having no more need for Windows 95 install disks, we stopped ordering OEM packs.

Six months later, we received a letter from Microsoft in which they informed us that we were not ordering enough OEM packs, and therefore were under suspicion of software piracy! They actually had the gall to threaten legal action. The whole problem would go away, they implied, if we simply resumed ordering OEM packs at our previous level.

Let me spell this out: Microsoft threatened to sue because we weren't purchasing as many copies of Windows 95 as they thought we should.

That, kids, is called extortion.

Anyway, this is my response to a piece appearing in the New York Times in which Microsoft is portrayed as having coined every bit of computer slang since WWII. This was not long after the Los Angeles Times revealed that Microsoft had been paying for pro-Gatesian editorials in newspapers across the country to create the illusion of a grass-roots upswell of support.

Personally, I hope the Justice Department breaks Microsoft up so small you'd need a scanning electron microscope to see Bill Gates' paycheck.

This was my first letter to the New York Times.