Most companies make it very simply for me and my staff. If I want to license Norton Antivirus, all I need to do is count number of machines on which product is to be installed, write up a purchase order and call salesperson to order product. It works same with Conversion Plus, Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, WinZIP and any of other hundreds of products that we require to keep our company in business.

You would think that Microsoft would want to make it easy for people like me to give them money. I know that if I were in their shoes that's what I would do.

I should stop for a minute and explain that I love many Microsoft products. Windows 2000 (server and professional) are very solid, well-thought-out operating systems, and Office 2000 suite is easily best in industry. Internet Explorer is far superior to Netscape and has been for several years now, and Visio 2000 is one of most versatile flowcharting tools available anywhere.

Unfortunately, purchasing and licensing Microsoft products is nowhere near as pleasurable as using their office suite. My god, they make it so difficult to purchase licenses that I've often considered (especially recently) switching entire company to Unix and WordPerfect just to simplify my life.

Okay, let's take Office suite of products. In a sane world, you would do this one of three ways:

- You could just buy everything (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and so on)

- You could purchase "base" kit, then purchase additional licenses for pieces that you needed. For example, spend $75 on base, then add $40 for Word, and perhaps $10 for PowerPoint, and then don't purchase Access. This could all be done with a licensing key.

- Just purchase each piece separately.

Naturally, Microsoft didn't choose any of these methods. What you have instead is a number of "suites", each a different mix of products. For example, if you just need Word and Excel, you could purchase Office Standard. If, on other hand, you also need Access, then you need to purchase Office Premium. To make matters even worse, depending upon how many of each product you want to purchase you can use different discount scales.

It's enough to make one pull his hair out in frustration. But wait, it gets even worse with operating systems. You want Windows 2000 server, then you need to purchase a license for server, a license for each workstation (Windows 2000 Professional) and a Client Access License (CAL) for each workstation that needs to access a server. And, of course, depending upon how many of each you buy you get a different discount scale.

You've worked hard on your web pages. If you are anything like me, you've spent countless hours writing content, finding or creating graphics, cursing at tables, juggling lists and learning HTML and possibly even CSS, Java, DHTML and countless other things.

My web site is uniquely mine. It is a product of my imagination, my sweat, my brain and my frustration. I have spent many sleepless nights and countless long days adding just perfect content to communicate exactly what I wanted to say.

Now Microsoft has come along with a "brilliant" idea. They want to piggyback their own selected content on top of that work. The idea is to have their products (such as Internet Explorer and Office suite) scan web pages and documents for keywords and phrases known to Microsoft. Any of these that are found would be underlined with a special purple "squiggle" to show that they are "smart tags".

Anyone viewing page could then click on smart tag and be transported to a Microsoft web site for more information. For example, you could write a web page about Grand Canyon, and phrase "Grand Canyon" could be underlined, allowing your visitors to check out Expedia.Com page about how to book travel to area.

Why does Microsoft want to do this? It's really very simple - to make an incredible amount of money. Look at it this way, Microsoft suddenly would have at their disposal every single document viewed with a new Microsoft product as a potential advertisement. Wow. That's power. No, this is an understatement of incredible magnitude. This is more than power - this is harnessing of everyone's creative energy into a huge global advertising tool. It totally staggers imagination.

You could be looking at a newspaper site, reading an article about train travel, and click on numerous links to Microsoft sites (and presumably third party sites which paid Microsoft for privilege) selling train related products and services. If you read a classified ad on that same newspaper site selling an automobile, word "Cadillac" could be underlined with a smart tag linking to a Cadillac dealer.