Bill Gates may have the wherewithal to scarf up paintings by Winslow Homer and arm an arsenal of heat-seeking attorneys, but there's one thing he cannot buy: a password to Bernadette Taylor: The Website, a wildly popular gallery of saucy images and text run by an enthusiastic exhibitionist from Perth, Australia.
Strictly anti-commercial, Taylor's site is free and accessible to anyone. Anyone, that is, who doesn't work for Microsoft or its subsidiaries.
The ban on Microsoft access to the site's member areas extends to those who use MS-owned services, like Hotmail, and netsurfers who browse the Web via the Microsoft Network. A script screens incoming visitors before they get to the site's front door, and if your Internet service provider is msn.com, you're out of luck, mate. (The site does not exclude IE users.)
Even with that virtual barrier in place, the fans of Taylor's red-and-white lingerie galleries, body-painting tutorials, "teddiette" portraits, and fellatio FAQ still suck up close to a million page views a day.
The product of an unlikely collaboration between a steeped-in-UNIX systems engineer from Sun Microsystems Inc. who speaks with a Dallas drawl, and a spunky, articulate summa cum laude graphic artist who doesn't shy away from displaying her mainframe to a global audience. The site isn't like most sex spots, which are fueled by greed as much as they're fired by lust.
Taylor and her technical adviser Scott Stubbs both make a living from their day jobs, so their extracurricular work is strictly for fun. Being free of financial considerations for the site means they can run it any way they choose, and choosing to exclude MS-related viewers, says Stubbs, is their small way of making a larger point.
"We're just two peons out in the world. We're not trying to convert anyone," says Stubbs. "But I come from the other side of computing: the UNIX side, the academic side, where source code is always open and available, and the purpose is to make the software more capable.... It's a totally different mindset on the Microsoft side. They take what's freely available and twist it into convoluted, proprietary crap."
When Taylor and Stubbs decided to ban MS-related traffic as part of a recent redesign, they expected hit counts to go down and the number of complaints to rise.
Not true, Stubbs claims. "We've gotten a tremendous amount of support for this. Our traffic has gone up, and our problems have gone to zero."
Microsoft, Stubbs says, has created "a whole class of people who are used to the solution being an upgrade." While he sympathizes with the millions who have to use Microsoft products at the office, users of such newbie-nurturing services as Hotmail are "very high maintenance," he explains. By screening out MS-related visitors, they've cut down on the volume of repeat help requests.
Taylor designed all the pages on the site, which launched last October. A sexual omnivore, Taylor doesn't diminish her technical abilities to play cutesy-pie with her male readers.
"I can do virtually anything on a computer," she says proudly, in her autobiography on the site. "I've got HTML and Java sussed, now I've just got to work out UNIX, Perl, and VRML."
"Sending 20-pound Perl books to Perth from Dallas," sighs Stubbs, "is not cheap."
