Accordingly, Bill's about to spend $200 million on a massive advertising campaign that's going to show you a lot of other people getting terribly excited about the absolutely key role that Windows XP plays in, let's see now ... things like cooking, education, sports, music, travel, theatre, photography, gaming and education. The theme of the campaign is "Start Something" and the idea is that you'll be so infected with these people's passions that you too, will want to umm, Start something for yourselves. There's even a new Web site, www.windows.com, devoted to the idea.

The clever thing about the campaign is that these people are fictional. Not being burdened with the reality of Windows, the ads won't be showing them cursing and banging their head against the wall when Windows won't Start something, or when, having started something, it suddenly Stops. That sort of thing has apparently discouraged a lot of you to the point that you no longer care about Windows.

And what with the next version coming along some time next year, it's absolutely essential that you start caring, or you might not go out and buy it. Like a lot of people who are still using Windows 98 etc, still haven't bought XP.

According to Ted Schadler, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, "The forces of phishing and spam and viruses and spyware and malware and all the rest of it have been nibbling away at Windows' perceived value. In fact, people are pretty negative on the product right now. Microsoft very badly needs consumers to care about Windows ... and to want to continue their relationship with the brand."

Otherwise they might perhaps prefer to Start Something entirely new with Apple, which in about a week or so launches the fourth update to its Mac OS X operating system, codenamed Tiger.