We don't know about you, but for us, occasionally the holiday season throws us a curve in the form of a mild moral dilemma. As you may possibly have realized, we are not fond of Microsoft. The company's products are getting more bug-ridden, bloated, and complex over the years, and its business practices would make a robber baron weep with shame. But we love buying gifts for our friends and relatives, and this year, a good friend has his eye set on Microsoft's new IntelliMouse Explorer-- so the question becomes, will we give Microsoft our hard-earned money, or not?

Have you seen this new mouse? It looks pretty cool-- it uses optical sensors instead of a rolling ball to track motion, which means it should never skip or need cleaning. We at AtAT have an old-style optical mouse kicking around here somewhere, but Microsoft's jobbie doesn't need a special mouse pad to work. As far as we can tell, the IntelliMouse Explorer is an honest-to-goodness example of actual Microsoft innovation. Really! You could have knocked us over with a feather. Now, the Explorer probably isn't for us: we personally aren't fond of "handed" mice (we prefer symmetry), we've heard a few hardcore gamers say the Explorer is a bit sketchy (though other gamers rave about it), and we just have to wonder about the placement of the two thumb buttons (do you really want even one button under the only opposable digit gripping the mouse itself?). But we haven't tried it, so we won't knock it. Most people seem to love the thing. And we think it glows bright red.

The question then becomes, what are the moral ramifications for giving yet more money to the world's richest man, whose lack of ethics we condemn? The last really good piece of Microsoft software we ever bought was Word 5.1. Remember that? A full install was maybe 8 MB. These days Word 98 requires a minimum of 33 MB, with an "Easy Install" taking up 56 MB. (We had to find that out from Outpost.com, since Microsoft's Word 98 Pricing and System Requirements page was blank when we checked.) You want the true definition of bloatware? The IntelliMouse Explorer requires 30 MB of hard disk space on Windows systems. A mouse. 30 MB. (Mac users only need 15 MB.) What gives? We've officially gotten to the point where you can't put on a Microsoft t-shirt without having 20 MB of free space on your boot disk.

But our friend wants that mouse, and so we'll probably get it for him, obscene system requirements notwithstanding. As for feeling bad about giving money to Bill Gates, we did a little math and we feel a bit better about it now. If His Billness is worth $100 billion, even if he personally gets the entire $69.95 we'd be paying for the mouse, that's 6.995 E-8 % of his total worth. Relatively speaking, that's equivalent to him giving us two hundredths of a penny-- and that's being very optimistic when estimating our net worth. So we clicked on the "Buy Now" button on the IntelliMouse Explorer page... only to get an error message: "We are sorry, but no data exists for that product ID. You may continue to browse the site." Figures...