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But the museum also relentlessly pushes Microsoft's vision and Microsoft's products. If you make your way to the very end -- past the final exhibit of Microsoft's newest platform, the talking Barney doll -- and fill out the on-screen survey, you'll be asked if you came away with a good understanding of (surprise) Microsoft's vision and Microsoft's products. (Never mind about the history of computing, the significance of key digital events or the role of technology in our daily lives.)

The store sells Microsoft geekware, Dorling-Kindersley books and software at cost to employees (Encarta for $20, Cinemania and "Age of Empires" for $10). You can buy a portable version of the corporate vision -- in the form of a hacky sack painted like a globe and plastered over with the Microsoft logo. There's a "Where do you want to go today" Swatch, and for the brave, an Internet Explorer 4.0 shirt. The inventory is endless: baby overalls with the little Start logo on the front; Microsoft clocks; steel Microsoft-logo picture frames; coffee mugs, of course. And an Internet Explorer Golf Ball Pack with two IE logo Top Flight golf balls and nine light-blue tees with "The Web the way you want it" printed in tiny lettering down their length.

At a dollar each, the official Microsoft postcards (credited to the Microsoft Corporate Photographer) aren't exactly a steal. Their montage of aerial shots of endless gray, blocky buildings looks, appropriately enough, like the Pentagon -- or, as an Irish friend pointed out, eerily like overhead shots of the Maze prison outside Belfast.

More frighteningly, for $15 you can pick up an "Employee Volunteer Kit" with "the tools you need to get your local school excited about technology." In other words, Microsoft charges its own employees to go out and sell the company in the education sector. Contents include "a brochure and video that describe the Microsoft vision for K-12 education" and "information on Microsoft products for education." Oh, there's Microsoft pencils and note pads for the kids as well.

Surrounded by this numbing array of Microsoft junk, immersed among the promotional gewgaws, I finally got a glimmer of insight into why the company has been behaving so perversely in its high-profile legal battles. Products and vision are everything to Microsoft -- and when Microsoft senses that its products and vision are threatened, it reacts with what the British and Irish call whinging.

Whinge, which rolls off the tongue so much more satisfyingly than its pale cousin "whine," is not a portmanteau word but a relic of the English language's meatier past. It incorporates whine, but with added duration, volume and pitch -- and usefully encompasses pigheadedness as well. Behind every whinge lies a stubborn insistence on only seeing the world your way. When others don't share that view, when the rest of the world lacks their true vision, then children -- and even companies of a certain mind-set -- will whinge.

The Microsoft Store and Museum are built on the assumption that the rest of the world will embrace Microsoft's vision and products as fully as the most faithful Microsoft employee. When the company encounters others who simply don't share that fervor (visitors, say, or Justice Department lawyers), the result can be a spectacle of arrogance, stubbornness and whinging -- something like what we've seen in court lately.
SALON | Feb. 9, 1998

Karlin Lillington is a technology writer in Dublin whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, The Irish Times and other publications.