In the trade rags, where I lurked for so many years, Thanksgiving week is a time when nobody reads the paper. Advertisers don't buy ads and the magazines get very thin simply because of the expectation that Comdex has come and gone and nobody will be distracted from their turkey and football enough to read about computers. The same thing happens at Christmas, when the publishers typically don't even bother to print an issue. But this is the World Wide Web and it's so new that nobody really knows for sure where or when the readers read and whether the fact that this is a holiday week makes any difference at all. That's why I am going to run a little experiment.

Frankly, I am tired of all the Microsoft stories that I've been reading and writing for the last few weeks. It's time to move on to more interesting subjects and I intend to do just that. But first I need to cover one final aspect of the Microsoft-controls-the-world story that hasn't been featured elsewhere. And the experiment is to see whether anyone even reads this week's column or cares. Rather than hold my best stuff until after Thanksgiving, I'm going to let it all hang out, right here.

But what story should I write? I could look at last week's wide press coverage of the fact that Microsoft now claims 40 percent market share for Internet Explorer. I could point out the dim fine print of Microsoft's press release where Microsoft's methodology for claiming 40 percent is explained. They aren't claiming that 40 percent of the browsers in the world are theirs but that 40 percent of the browsers IN USE are theirs. This is proved not through sales or download figures, which generally aren't available, but through an analysis of one week's worth of search inquiries -- 60 million hits -- on Digital's Alta Vista search engine. Someone at Digital apparently sifted the queries to see which browsers were used and 40 percent of those were from Microsoft.

I think the numbers are too high, and here's why I think so. If you are using Netscape Navigator or Communicator to read this column, take a moment to punch the "search" button at the top of your screen. None of the four search engines behind that button is Alta Vista, because Digital didn't feel like paying Netscape the several million dollars per year it costs to share that button. Do the same test on Internet Explorer and you'll find Alta Vista as one of the seven listed engines. Maybe Microsoft charges less than Netscape and makes it up in volume.

This difference presents a bias -- enough that back in the days when I was a scientist and knew about this stuff I'd say the results are compromised. This isn?t science, but marketing. So what else is new?

What IS a science, though, and is also a much better story, is the technical precision with which Microsoft has taken control of the PC hardware standard. Yes, hardware. IBM used to control it, then Intel, but now it's all Microsoft. Here's how they do it, and why.

Microsoft has a testing program for hardware called the Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL). The lab tests hardware and passing the test allows vendors to put on their boxes a sticker that says "Designed for Windows 95," or Windows NT, or Windows 95 and NT.

Why would a hardware peripheral company care about having a Windows logo on their sound card or CD-ROM drive? Because system OEMs get a discount and other sweetners from Microsoft if their PCs pass the logo certification. And the best way to certify a whole system is to build it from parts that are already certified. So any peripheral manufacturer who wants to sell parts for Windows PCs has to design their hardware according to Microsoft's latest Hardware Design Guide, the latest version of which is PC98. You can find it for sale at the better specialty computer booksellers.

According to hardware developers who want to keep their jobs and businesses and who therefore choose to keep their names the heck out of this column, Microsoft uses hardware certification as a part of their marketing strategy. Redmond deliberately sets unreasonable standards for new hardware that has the result of requiring customers to purchase new Windows operating system versions where they might otherwise not have had to.

Recently Microsoft expanded the scope of their program to require that all software bundled in the box be certified, too. So system OEMs, in addition to being threatened if they don't ship Internet Explorer, have to build their systems completely from Microsoft-certified parts and containing Microsoft-certified software.

This is tough for companies trying to sell parts to system manufacturers, but there is always the retail channel, right? I can sell my sound cards and CD-ROM drives as upgrades or replacements. No, I can't, because Microsoft also has a preferred reseller program offering discounts on Microsoft products if retailers carry a certain number of Microsoft-certified components and arrange their store to feature those products. So Microsoft's strategy of changing the operating system to require new applications and changing the applications to require a new operating system has now expanded to hardware. They are specifying new hardware to go with their new operating system and driving the market in any direction they like.

The ultimate irony in this situation is that when Microsoft is late with a new operating system release, there is the risk that hardware will be in the channel that's certified for the new version that isn't shipping and won't work with the old. For hardware vendors, this means writing both old and new versions of the software just in case. And there is nothing anyone can do about this.

Resistance is futile.

Yes, but will anyone read this and care?