You have an important email to send or you have to finish up that blog post of yours. You fire up your computer and 2 seconds into the booting process, you get a message.

A flashy little rectangular box showing the latest shiny looking iPhone. It doesn’t let you go past it. You have to click on the box to go ahead with the boot process. Helpless as you are, you click and you proceed.

That is how the future looks like. Not pretty, is it? Steve Jobs and Apple have applied for a patent to do just this. Put advertisements into the operating system itself. In turn the OS will be free or cheaper.

How evil is that?

Speaking of evil, Microsoft has bundled its Internet Explorer as a part of operating system. There was a lot of fuss about that. Anti-trust radars put that on high alert and overnight Microsoft was synonymous with evil. Now this ‘advertising in the operating system’ might absolve Microsoft.

If implemented, the invention would make it possible for advertisements to be displayed on a variety of devices, including desktop computers, cell phones, PDAs, and more. In one alarming aspect, the device could be disabled while the advertisements run, thereby forcing users to let the advertisement run its course before the system would unlock and allow further use. In an even more invasive scenario, explained in the patent application, the user could be required to do something, such as click to continue, in order to verify that they are actively watching the advertisement and haven’t simply walked away while the ad runs. (Slashdot) Read more here.

You might soon see an update window which says :

“Your advertisements are at least 3 hours old. Need to download new ones.  I Know you don’t have a choice you poor soul. I know what you would do. So I am just going to download it for you. Ta da…”

I hope this is not the future of either computing nor that of advertising.

PS : Apple and Google are running a Usain Bolt race for the evil tag leaving Microsoft behind.