Despite Love-Hate Relationship, Users Are Torn

The chit-chat at UC Irvine’s student center revolved around the usual obsessions of youth. Finals. Graduation. Oh, and dissolving Microsoft.

“I think it’s good,” said Wilson Shih, 19, an information and computer science major.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” shot back Rama Aysola, 21, who’s majoring in psychology and economics.

“They’re totalitarian,” said Rachel Wong, a 21-year-old English major, as she checked for e-mail nearby at the student information center.

Amid the grand sweep of the technological revolution, few companies have touched the average person in quite the same way as Microsoft Corp.

It is just a software company--the maker of a program known as the operating system. But the company has managed to incite a kind of passion that is usually reserved for world wars, civil unrest and religious debates.

“It’s a love-hate relationship,” said Richard Costa, a networking specialist in Colorado Springs, Colo.

In many ways, Microsoft is the lens through which the public has come to experience the greatest industrial revolution of our times--a transformation of the world that has touched everything from global corporate purchasing to teenage dating.

“Microsoft is, for most people, technology,” said Dale Egan, the 32-year-old director of technology for Internet start-up Pingpong.com in Fountain Valley. “When the computers crash, they don’t know why it crashed so it’s easy to target the one thing they do know and that is Microsoft.”

Unlike other dominant technology companies, such as Cisco Systems Inc. or Intel Corp., whose products reside deep in the bowels of corporate networks or desktop computers, Microsoft is everywhere. It has become a piece of everyday life.

Its cheery cloud-filled logo, which appears whenever the Windows operating systems starts, has become burned into tens of millions of retinas.

The reviled “blue screen of death,” which appears whenever a serious error occurs in Windows, has become the modern equivalent of the skull and crossbones.

To be sure, there are millions of people around the world who have never heard of Microsoft, do not know what Windows is, and do not care if Microsoft is split into two.

But with the speedy proliferation of computers around the world, it is almost certain that they will eventually learn of the pain and pleasures that have sprung from the empire of founder Bill Gates.

Egan said that seeing Microsoft’s operating system in the early 1980s was the reason he decided to make a career out of technology in the first place. As a high school student, he was daunted by the task of learning all the complexities of computers.

But the story of a rag-tag bunch of Seattle programmers creating a powerful operating system for a new generation of personal computers was an inspiration for the curious teenager.

“I groaned at having to learn an operating system, but the first time I saw [Microsoft’s operating system] I realized it was the last thing I would ever have to learn and that technology was the way I wanted to go,” he said.

Microsoft also has mastered the tricky skill of being able to simultaneously satisfy and infuriate the masses.

One of the more hilarious tales of the Internet involves using the phrase “More evil than Satan himself,” as keywords in an Internet search using the popular Web site, Google.

At one time, the search would turn up the Microsoft home page as the first listing in the search results. The reason? So many people had Web sites where the term “evil” was close to the word “Microsoft” that the company’s home page became the most relevant result.

That quirk tickled the funny bone of the online community, which has since flocked to Google to see the evil deed themselves. For a short time last fall, that search on Google was more popular than searching for the word “sex,” according to the Search Engine Report, an online newsletter.

Costa, the Colorado networking specialist, said that almost all his working life has been spent loathing or admiring Microsoft.

Each new release of Windows was a burst of Hollywood-like excitement that he loved as a computer worker. But at the same time, he hated the way that Microsoft’s products kept spreading through his computer like a disease.

“We loved to make fun of Bill Gates,” he said. “We all knew that Microsoft was evil.”

But the decision to break the company into two rankles Costa who, after all these years, has made his peace with the company. For all its irritating foibles, it has provided him with a living.

“Microsoft is what gives us our jobs,” he said. “If Windows worked perfectly, we’d all be out of work.”

Michael Sekerak, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is enthusiastic about the government’s move to break up the software giant.

The 22-year-old said he has grown increasingly frustrated with all the automatic features of Microsoft’s computer programs, which often seem to wrestle control of his computer away from him.

But for many consumers, the breakup was a disturbing sign of more government intrusion.

At Circuit City’s Burbank store, Jason Autajay bristled at the decision, saying he did not see anything so wrong with one company controlling so much of an industry.

“I wish they would leave them alone,” said the 28-year-old club promoter. “Actually I wish Bill Gates would adopt me for a couple of days until the first week’s allowance came in.”

Pingpong’s Egan said Wednesday’s ruling would be remembered as a moment in history that signaled the end of a free-wheeling era of technology, when software cowboys roamed free and the product battles were swift and brutal.

Among his acquaintances in the software industry, there is a fear--even among those who hate Gates--that their business will suffer from more government meddling.

“This is a horrible day for the United States,” Egan said. “I’m a developer, and I’m crushed that this is happening. I went home late last night because we had an open [complaining] session about the government. They suck. I’m so unhappy about this. This is going to have an impact on the economy. With what the economy is doing these days, we can’t afford to have that happen.”

*

Times staff writers Indraneel Sur and David Kesmodel contributed to this report.