The moron factor

As Rupert Murdoch has demonstrated time and again, the dimmer your customer, the easier he is to sell to. By selling things that actually intensify the dumbing down process - one thinks of Sky or the Sun - it is possible to create a virtuous circle of stupidity and sales. Mr Murdoch is not the only tycoon to have mastered this technique. Mr Gates has grasped it too. In Microsoft's case, however, the circle is given a rather more subtle spin. Here it is not so much that the products appeal to baser instincts but that they gradually lower the customers' expectations of what is possible and acceptable in a piece of software. If expectations are set very low, it follows that they will be easy to satisfy. By way of example, consider the introduction to an editorial on the winfiles.com, a collection of Windows related bits and pieces that lives on the Web. The capital letters - used by not very bright people for emphasis - are the author's. "WELCOME. FINALLY! I DID IT! All of the computers in my office and house are now running Windows NT Workstation. It's great. It's wonderful. It's finally stable! I haven't had to reboot a machine in almost two weeks." Two weeks, eh? Marvellous. That means we can start installing it in air traffic control systems, operating theatres, nuclear power stations ... Another satisfied moron. And there's worse. (Warning: if you have only recently had breakfast or suffer from a heart condition you are strongly advised to skip the rest of this paragraph.) Last week, Bill Gates spoke at a conference in London. After he'd finished and the time came for the obligatory Q&A, up popped a man from a company called USA Global Link. "On behalf of the human race," said the delegate, "I would like to thank you for making the lives we live today possible." In the unlikely event that anyone in the human race wishes to be exempted from this touching display of global gratitude, perhaps they would like to write to Mole with alternative thank you messages. An example might be: "On behalf of the human race, I would like to thank you for an operating system that has overwritten all my DLLs and rendered all my existing applications useless." The sender of the best suggestion will win a Mole sick-bag or a prize of similar value. Progress continues to take its toll. The once mighty Borland, purveyor of fine programming languages, is now faced with the extinction of part of its user base. Despite the best efforts of Wintel to ensure compatibility between the Pentium II and the installed base, applications written in Borland Pascal have been left behind. Most of these are running on past generations of x86 processor but as more companies replace their ageing hardware with millennium-compliant PIIs, the programs have nowhere to go. The problem appears to lie with a bug in Borland's run-time libraries and the best the company can do is point users in the direction of the Internet from where they can download one of the unsupported patches on offer, cross their fingers and hope for the best. Among other reasons to fear the approaching millennium, there is the threat of ever more ludicrous attempts to scare people into buying insurance they don't need. The latest example of Year 2000 brand snake oil comes from that most highly respected of computer product catalogues, Innovations. The supplier of the #19.95 Date-A-Fix gives a colourful but not altogether accurate account of the threat to unprotected machines: "Your personal computer is probably 'infected' with the Millennium 'Bug'. Even with new PC hardware and/or compliant software your PC hardware could today, or at any time in the run up to the year 2000, suddenly start 'creating' false information or even cease all functions, thereby rendering all software, games, etc. inoperable." The advert carries an endorsement from Secure Computing Magazine which, it claims, awarded Date-A-Fix a "star rating in an anti-virus feature". Not bad for a product designed to deal with something that couldn't by any stretch of the imagination be called a virus. If the company is really concerned about the spread of "false information" perhaps it should give the machines used by its copywriters the once-over with Date-A-Fix. Or sack them. While he is in Roger Cook mode, Mole is pleased to note that CompuServe has been brought to book over its entertaining but dishonest claim to offer 750 "free" hours online a month for new customers. As Mole pointed out some time ago, anyone online for this long would only get six hours sleep in the entire month and would rack up a phone bill running into hundreds of pounds. Not a terribly realistic scenario. The Advertising Standards Authority has finally reached the same conclusion, because it has told CompuServe to withdraw the ads. On his way home, Mole takes pity on one of London's homeless, dropping a pawful of loose change onto a soiled blanket as he passes. "On behalf of the human race," the owner of the blanket begins, his bloodshot eyes filling with tears, "I would like to thank you for ..." Unable to bear it any longer, Mole scuttles off down the steps to the underground, leaving the last of the old man's words to be carried away on the evening breeze. Show your gratitude to Mole by dropping him a line at mole@pcweek.co.uk.