Office AssistantThere are two names that are typically associated with the word “evil”:  Dr. Evil, and Microsoft.

After reading an article on Information Week about Microsoft’s latest patent applications, I’m left scratching my head as to why someone might think that the world’s most successful software company would be foolish enough to embed contextualized ads to the Windows operating system.  If anything, this patent was likely filed to prevent other companies from doing this very thing.

The jist of the pantent comes down to this:  This software works like Ad-Sense in that it determines what ads to display on your screen based on the contents of your hard drive.  This software could be a standalone application, or built right into the operating system, and would use the information extracted from your personal documents, finance files, music, error messages, emails and a slew of other digital media types to determine what products or services you might be interested in.

This would be a great application for those companies that try to get people to install all kinds of useless crap when they download those “free emoticons”, and it would open someone’s drive up to anyone and everyone that wanted to know something about us.  Heck, to be honest, I’m surprised that something like this doesn’t already secretly exist in Windows.  Just think about how easy it would be for law enforcement agencies to catch child predators if our computers could let the police know about our activities and digital format fetishes.  I’m sure RIAA would love to get their hands on this data as well, just to see how many millions of non-DRM audio files might exist within their legal jurisdiction.

On an aside, it would be interesting to see Windows tell me that my physical memory is consistently running low and recommend some RAM from a local vendor or two….

Despite what many people believe about this move by Microsoft, I don’t think it’s their attempt to beat Google out of their Ad-nonsense schemes.  As it is, there are enough people complaining about those stupid banner ads at the bottom of MSN Messenger (enough with the Lavalife ads!  My profile says married!) to give Microsoft pause about introducing something even more invasive.  That’s why I believe this is their attempt to block other companies from releasing the mother of all adware applications.

Please Microsoft, don’t prove me wrong.