An Affectionate Hatred

It’s been a rough few weeks for the company I love to hate. Jim Allchin, the chief developer of Windows Vista, admitted in public that he’d buy a Mac if he didn’t work at Microsoft—which is the kind of testimonial you simply cannot recover from. Then someone noticed that Microsoft had quietly lifted icons directly from a competitor’s software and pasted them onto their own website. And Bill Gates expressed what sounded like genuine bewilderment at how many bloggers seem to own Macs.

Their response to all this pre-Vista embarrassment, produced in partnership with HP, was a marketing mascot called Mr. IT: a puppet-handed corporate man who drifts through open-plan offices, hits on the receptionist, and develops an unsettling rapport with the photocopier. It’s somehow worse than MS Bob, Microsoft’s legendary early-nineties interface catastrophe, and it carries the same spiritual energy as Clippy—the animated paperclip assistant who spent the late nineties asking if you needed help writing a letter when you very clearly did not. There’s a specific Microsoft frequency where the wrongness loops back around into something almost loveable, and Mr. IT broadcasts on it at full power.

I can’t explain why this company is so endearing precisely when it’s being terrible. I resent the software I use every day, and yet every new Microsoft embarrassment lands like a small gift. You’re a disaster. Never change.