Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, says his friend and fellow billionaire Bill Gates is a brilliant and creative manager, and that Gates’ company, Microsoft, is a great company. But Buffett has declined to buy Microsoft, thus missing out on the hottest stock of the past decade. Why?

Buffett says he will not invest in any company whose earnings he cannot predict with relative certainty 10 years from now.

It is interesting that he does not think it certain that the Microsoft juggernaut that’s how the government characterizes it will continue to rack up huge profits in the years to come. To hear the government’s lawyers argue the matter, you would think that Microsoft’s operating system monopoly makes it a force so powerful that it threatens to dominate every aspect of personal computing, including the brave new world of the Internet.

Buffett’s no technophile indeed he confesses to being something of a technophobe but the view here is that his take on Microsoft is the right one. Not only is it extremely difficult to create and maintain anything permanent in the midst of the explosion of innovation that the personal computer industry represents, but Microsoft has another problem as well.

The problem is that its Windows 95 operating system, now in its second incarnation as Windows 98, simply does not work very well. Yes, Windows 95/98 is an improvement over the earlier versions of Windows. But there are still far too many glitches and hiccups for a system that users count on to be reliable, fast and stable. In too many ways, Windows is none of those things.

For example, on most PCs, the Windows “StartUp” process takes far too long, slowed by inexplicable periods when the software stops loading. No doubt Windows must take some time to take stock of the computer it is in the process of taking control of. But this can drag on for 15 or 20 seconds during a process that is slow enough to begin with.

And consider what too often happens when you try to shut the system down. Sometimes, it goes through some disk activity and proceeds after a while to give you a message that it’s “safe to turn the computer off.” Sometimes, though, it never gets there. It just stalls. If you give up and shut the power off, the computer will notify you when you power up again that because it did not close down properly, there may be errors on your hard disk. It then automatically starts the “Scandisk” utility program and begins searching your hard disk for errors.

It does not matter how often this has happened, even on the same day. It does it again anyway. This has happened to me dozens of times and Scandisk has yet to find an error. Some computers, especially laptops, are equipped with a “standby” feature by which Windows is supposedly capable of powering down, then quickly returning you to where you were when you shut the system down, bypassing the normal startup routine.

Sometimes this works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, Windows will notice it has failed and ask you when you start up again if you would like to prevent the computer from ever using “standby” again. That’s a wonderful solution. Oh, and heaven help you if decide to print a document and, as too often happens, it does not print. You can go to the printers utility and, from a menu, select either the “cancel” option or the “purge print job” option.

That sets in motion, if it can be called that, a process that is so slow that the print job has still not been canceled an hour or more later. You know this because when you try to shut the system down, you will get a warning that there are still print jobs yet to be completed and if you turn off the computer, you will risk losing them. Since that is what you had in mind when you chose to cancel the job, it is unlikely to deter you. So you turn off the computer, only to find that the print job is still hanging around when you turn the computer on again.

Granted, it is not an easy task to develop operating software that will run on any of a thousand varieties of personal computers and in so doing, run virtually every piece of software, new or old, ever developed for that type of computer. Viewed from that perspective, Windows 95/98 can be seen as an extraordinary achievement.

On the other hand, an operating system that has trouble starting up, trouble shutting down, and cannot rid itself of unwanted print jobs, is not likely to prove immune to competition for very long.

T.R. Reid is London bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected] and Brit Hume at [email protected].