Devil's Advocate: Should Microsoft be paying you to use Windows?

Martin Brampton imagines a world where companies must pay customers when their products cause them grief. Yes, that includes banks and Microsoft.

In a recent interview, Bill Gates suggested that Google would have to start paying people to use its search engine. Gates pointed out that Google makes around $50 per year out of each committed searcher. He complained that Google was not giving any of that money back to users of the search facility.

I think he might be onto something here. There is obviously a lot of money floating around that could perfectly well be given back to people. How much money does Rupert Murdoch's News International make from a Sun reader in a year? It would certainly make sense to me if people had to be paid a small fee for reading the Sun newspaper.

Or what about Tesco? The company has grabbed a huge slice of the retail market, and has recently been making gigantic profits. Most people feel that shopping, especially for groceries, is a bit of a chore. Maybe it would be a little more acceptable if Tesco were to pay us something for our trouble?

There have been plenty of suggestions for involving the banks in a scheme of this kind. They have tried hard to introduce charges for letting us withdraw our money from cash machines. But, if banks are profitable, then perhaps they should pay us a fee every time a deposit is made into an account? Or maybe each time anyone is dissatisfied with a bank's performance, an automatic payment of thirty pounds could be added to the account?

Naturally, Gates will want his own company to be at the forefront of this revolution. With around 10 times the level of profit achieved by Google, Microsoft is ideally placed to lead the way. Why not pay people for using Microsoft Office or even the basic operating system Windows? There are interesting possibilities in devising schemes for distributing these innovative payments.

One approach would be simply to pay for the amount of use, so people who are addicted to their computers and spend many hours in front of the screen would receive the most. But perhaps a fairer approach would be to pay users in relation to specific issues that caused them grief. After all, there is plenty of scope for that in contemporary computing.

One has to concede that blue screens do seem to be getting less common, so they should certainly command a sizeable bonus. Likewise, suffering from the intrusions of an internet worm can involve many hours of tedious salvage work, so that would justify a significant payment. On the application side, when the Word grammar checker insists on one construction, only to be rejected by the Word spell checker, the bemused user clearly deserves recompense.

Oddly enough, many of these considerations seem to fall into a pattern. If companies were to pay their customers for the frustrations caused by their products and services, perhaps we might see standards rising. If charges of doubtful legality, such as the credit card companies' penalties for late payment, were not collected, many people would be treated more fairly.

A more revolutionary effect could come from the fact that all these $50 amounts that are troubling Gates add up to a great deal of money for huge companies. Yet those huge companies notoriously pay far less in tax than small companies or average citizens. So Gates' suggestion that money be removed from that sector could have a dramatic effect on most people's tax bills.

It does seem that if Gates is serious in his proposals for giving company profits back to consumers, he may leave a much more substantial legacy to the world than he ever imagined when he started a software company.