The most-mentioned complaint against Microsoft is the charge that "bundling" its internet browser with its operating system is an unfair competitive practice. Most consumers who use Windows are unfamiliar enough with how to operate the system and how to download and use free software - and, more to the point, are frightened away from changing the operating system or downloading software by pop-up warnings generated by Windows and the Microsoft Internet Explorer - that they simply use what's given to them.

There is a deeper question raised by the way the system operates, one that I don't recall seeing addressed anywhere: advertising.

When you buy Windows or a computer pre-loaded with Windows, you also buy a set of ads that the software (that is, the Microsoft corporation) puts in front of your face. Every so often (I think every fifteenth time I start up my machine) a box appears in the middle of my screen asking me if I want to sign up for America On-Line. There is another ad that appears, asking me to agree to use Microsoft Messaging Service. If you click on "yes," the computer dials a toll-free number and connects you to the servers. This, dear readers, is an advertisement that your purchase of Microsoft Windows has subsidized.

Less obvious are the icons that you click to start programs or call up documents. Most of these are logos of software companies, including the wavy window on the "Start" icon in the corner of your screen. If you have Real Player, you see the Real Player logo in another corner. Right now I'm using Corel WordPerfect; I can tell because there are at least three Corel trademarks visible simultaneously while I use the program.

The defense that these are only identifying marks nicely evades the issue. Any kind of distiguishable mark could signify "word processing program," or "operating system." But the use of just such marks, marks that identify not a generic type of software but a "product," reinforce a nearly subliminal association of using the computer with using these products. In other words, the constant use of these symbols and pop-up ads channels my perception: using the computer means using Microsoft Windows and Corel WordPerfect and Netscape Communicator.

More amazingly, this is exactly the defense of his company's competitive practices that Bill Gates offered in his recent testimony. Sending my perception down a narrow path, such that I always associate writing papers and letters with using Corel WordPerfect, or that I always associate browsing the web or writing email with using Netscape, standardizes experiences. Since something like 90% of the wired world uses Microsoft Windows, something like 90% of computer users have more or less identical experiences of computers. That standardization, Gates claimed, is necessary to the growth of the industry and the creation of better and better software. Just like the standardization of the auto industry.

There are more. Using the Help files (included, as a service to the user, by Microsoft), one encounters such tips as how to use Microsoft Word to compose a fax document to send through Microsoft Fax. Are there other methods? Perhaps, but the Help files do not refer to them by name, and this maintains the single-line train of one's use of the machine. To send a fax with the computer, one is led to a particular brand or product, rather than a general mode of use. That is precisely the function of an ad, and the fact that these are embedded not only in the operating software and the interface of the user to the computer, but give a certain pre-formulated structure to the way that interface can be perceived, makes these supremely effective ads. They are unavoidable when we use our computers, and their advertising function is virtually effaced.

The apotheosis of advertising is when a brand name is so fully associated with the generic product that the two become synonymous: Kleenex or Brillo pads, Coke and Pepsi, for example. All Bill Gates wants is to lead the public to think of Microsoft as the Kleenex of computer software.

Marshall McLuhan claimed that advertising would reach its pinnacle when advertisement and the public's perceptions of its own needs perfectly coincided. Where does the altering of public perception by advertisement begin and end? When has the public reached a consensus as to its needs? Does it matter that the means by which we approach the world - the way we work and communicate, using computers in more and more daily activities - constantly reinforces the idea that this standardized way is the normal way? Does it matter that we can only engage in these forms of communcation and work while accepting its self-advertisement?