According to published reports, Internet Explorer 5.0 will occupy about 50 megabytes of your hard drive.

Now I’m a broad-minded soul, and a firm believer in letting every single adult American make his or her own trip to perdition in his or her own fashion. If Microsoft wants to ship a 50 megabyte browser, bless its heart. If you want to invest a dollar’s worth of hard drive to install it, bless your heart.

And if Microsoft wants to keep on calling a product it packages and ships as a discrete entity for several OS platforms an integral part of the operation system … well, that’s what we have the Department of Justice for, I guess.

Calling it an integral part of the operating system is an interesting enough claim. I enjoy the folks who call it a “thin client” even more, since it isn’t thin and isn’t really a client, either, merely a platform on which the client software can execute.

Blessed with complete ignorance of all facts, I’m confident Microsoft could have provided identical functionality in 25 megabytes had it established compactness and performance as design goals. The code is almost certainly bloated.

But, as Arlo Guthrie once said in a different context, that isn’t what I’m here to talk to you about today.

I’m here to talk about the consumers who will complain about the bloated feature set of the product, proclaiming with great pride that they only use 10% of the features anyway. The inference they’ll want the rest of us to draw is that Microsoft should remove the other 90% of the product.

Bragging that you fail to take advantage of 90% of what a product has to offer ranks right up there with bragging about not knowing how to balance your checkbook — it’s one of the reasons I’ve suggested organizing National Boycott Stupidity Day in previous columns.

So here’s a simple suggestion to all of you who are happy in your 10% mastery of the basic tools with which you perform much of your daily work: LEARN MORE FEATURES!!!

General office software contains lots of features that can make all of us more effective at what we do. When you’re using the computer, any time you find yourself doing the identical thing more than once or getting things out of whack when you make a revision, you’re probably ignoring a useful feature that would do it for you. You may manually number a list, manually retype the name of a section heading when you refer to it elsewhere in the text, manually format bulleted lists, use the space bar to line up right-aligned columns of numbers … do you see a trend emerging?

Extend this insight to the training programs you offer. We go about end-user training all wrong. Most IS trainers teach features. To drive the cliché off a cliff, we give our end-users fish instead of a rod, reel, and bait. Think about it. How much time do your trainers spend on exercises designed to make end-users self-sufficient, able to find solutions for themselves? Probably very little — that’s usually an afterthought at the end of the two-day Basics class. Teach them to poke around in the menus and help system, though, and they’ll learn how to do all sorts of great stuff on their own, including how to not call the Help Desk.

Now here’s where it’s going to hurt. The hardest part of learning these great new techniques is knowing they exist, right? Wouldn’t it be great if the computer watched what you do and, recognizing when you could benefit from one of its features, automatically suggested it to you?

I’ve spent more than a year wanting to punch Mr. Paperclip in the kisser. I still think he’s an obnoxious little cuss. Looking at it objectively, though, (ouch!) I’m forced to conclude (groan!) that he and his compatriots are a valuable addition (eeeeyooow!) to Microsoft’s office suite.

So if you only use 10% of a product’s features, don’t brag about it. Ignorance may be bliss, but it isn’t a virtue.