Poor Stewart Alsop; the man will probably one day be studied as one of history's great tragic figures. He seems to be pretty technically-minded-- at least, we doubt he has any real difficulty setting the time on his VCR-- and yet, due to a single tragic flaw, his computing life appears to be one of misery and despair. Sure, Hamlet's flaw led to a dozen deaths or so (and a corpse-ridden stage is always a bummer), but consider poor Alsop, who is doomed to spend his life using Windows and hating every minute of it. As faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil points out, he's written yet another Fortune article about how much he despises the diabolical operating system from Redmond which has once again "made [his] life hellish"-- and yet he just keeps on using it.

See, Alsop's tragic flaw ("hamartia" for you lit geeks out there) appears to be his stubborn refusal to notice that Windows is not the only game in town. Read the article. Alsop waxes eloquent about how the personal computer wrested power and control from the clutches of the Evil Mainframe Experts and delivered it into the hands of the Individual. Power to the people, as Alsop says. But Windows has forced him to see through that illusion; following a nasty crash, even a reasonably technically competent person like himself was unable to recover, and he found himself "at the mercy of the experts," for which he blames Windows' complexity. He also goes on about how tough it was to switch to a new Windows machine and bring across all of his old settings, and how he screwed up during a Palm software upgrade which led to all sorts of nasty junk happening. And yet, throughout all of this, never once does he seem to realize that he doesn't have to use Windows if he doesn't want to.

Unsurprisingly, almost all of the "Talk About It" comments posted by readers after the article describe how easy to use and trouble-free Macs can be by comparison. Sure, problems pop up-- but I've yet to hear of a Mac being rendered unusable by accidentally running a Palm installer without the cradle attached to the serial port. The thing is, though, Alsop will never stop using Windows. Despite his claim that he "really wish[es] there were a computer out there that could give [him] basic PC applications that work fluidly with the World Wide Web and networking," his tragic flaw is that he'll never acknowledge that he's just described a Macintosh. People like Alsop wearing Windows blinders are the reason that Bill Gates keeps getting richer off of mediocrity. Alas, poor Stewart; he's locked into a technological death spiral, and the corpses on his stage will one day be whatever patience, good nature, and joy of computing he might still have left. Hey, it ain't Lear, but it's tragic nonetheless.