It is difficult to believe that anyone need take this very seriously, but a Committee to Fight Microsoft has been formed in Washington DC, and on Wednesday mailed fraud complaints to the attorney generals of all 50 US states seeking to have them slap a ban on the sale of Windows95, on grounds that it will not work as advertised. The Executive Director of the Committee is Anthony Martin, an Adjunct Professor of Law, who says We believe that Windows95 could become the greatest consumer fraud in history if it is not stopped by regulatory authorities. Behind the complaint is the fact that Microsoft Corp has said Windows95 is being designed to run on machines with 4Mb of memory when all the evidence is that it has the greatest difficulty in doing much that is useful in less than 8Mb, and that tens of millions of consumers will be inveigled into paying billions of dollars for this functionally defective product. Noting that relatively few computers currently installed have more than 4Mb memory, Martin states that the financial reality is that Microsoft has convinced Wall Street that it is going to sell tens of millions of copies of this product to existing consumers. They obviously can’t sell tens of millions of copies right away only to buyers of new machines. Thus, Microsoft’s duplicity reflects financial fraud as well as technological fraud. He asserts that Microsoft will be targeting helpless home users, and trying to sell them an ‘upgrade’ that simply won’t work on their existing machines. The group is asking every state attorney general to seek a ban on the sale of Windows95 unless and until the product shipped is labelled accurately and truthfully as to its system requirements and actual operating potential. We demand that manuals be rewritten to tel l the public the truth: you need upwards of 8Mb to run Windows95 properly. The group is affiliated with the Computer Consumers of America, which is lobbying Congress to enact a Computer Competitiveness & Consumer Protection Act of 1995 to ensure uniformity in sale of software and hardware in the US.
