| |||
| |||
| | | |
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
OK, Gates, I've flown in from Washington at short notice again. I hope this isn't one of your spurious denial speeches. I'm sorry you feel like that Judge Penfield Jackson, but I feel we have a few modest proposals to make. Ah, good. Coming round to my way of thinking? If that's what it takes. I do, however, have one small complaint to lodge. Sheesh. Yes. Will you stop breaking into my house and interfering with my domestic board-gaming? (See Rules of the game). Oh, gee, Bill. It's a parable. Well, anyway, I was winning at Scrabble. Only because you changed the rules to allow you to move the triple word square. Anyway, I couldn't use my PC last week because it got completely blocked up with Love Bug mails. And that's my fault? Well, it did only affect Windows machines using Microsoft Outlook. Why d'you do it, Bill? I hope you're not saying I wrote it. No, I mean why did you enable scripting in an email client. I can't believe none of your developers saw the potential abuses. Well, yeah we did. But you know, at Microsoft we like to invent the future. You're gibbering, man. No, I'm not. You remember in the early days of the Net when you'd get that 'Beware of the Good Times virus' mail once a week, quickly followed by some prissy system administrator sending out a mail that said 'Oh no it isn't it's a hoax and an email can't hurt you'? Yes? Well, I hate system administrators. Are you saying this plague of email viruses was borne out of a desire just to make a bunch of technical prigs eat their words. Well, yeah, but not just that. We invented the NT security model to drive them mad, but that didn't work, so we had to do something else. Oh, Bill. You know I'm getting fond of your megalomania. It's going to be a shame to split your company into so many factions that you won't be able to release a DOS text-editing tool without incurring some penalty, and I'll miss these chats. Ah, well that's what I wanted to talk about. I've had my lawyers draw up an alternative structure for Microsoft that might satisfy the Justice Department's desire to split up Microsoft. Here's the chart. Hmm. So one part of the company will make Windows, IE, Office, and Visual Studio and so on, and the other bit will...be...where's the page. Ah. Oh. Flight Simulator? Yeah, I think that should do it. It'll stop us bundling secret Windows trapdoors that make ours the best Flight Sim. That's gotta be good, no? No. Okay, how about I throw in Encarta as well? Bill! Sheesh. You can't do it, Judge Jackson. I can't put anything else in or I'll be just too poor. Too poor? Even with just Word you'd still be in the top 20 richest people in the world. Yeah, but I'd be poorer than Larry Ellison. You don't know how it is, Penfield. Ever since our stock dropped after your findings he's hired a telemarketing agency to ring me every five minutes with his net worth. I mean, I know I'm a pretty unacceptable face of capitalism. But think. America's poster boy for entrepreneurship could be a man who makes me look like the closing chapters of A Christmas Carol. You know, Gates. You're right. There's absolutely no way we can let this happen. OK, you can keep Microsoft. Just don't cheat at Scrabble again. | ||||||
16/02 16/03 16/04 16/05 16/06 16/07 16/08 16/09 16/10 16/11 16/12 16/13 16/14 16/15 16/16 16/17 16/18 16/20 16/21 16/22 16/23 16/24 16/25 | ||||||
| | | | | | |