Business Jokes

Microsoft vs. GM

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 mi/gal."

Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement, "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"

And...

1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
2. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT". But, then you would have to buy more seats.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower.
7. The oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag system would say, "Are you sure?" before going off.

Top Ten ways things would be different if Microsoft built cars:

1. A Particular model year of car wouldn't be available until AFTER that year, instead of before.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
3. Occassionally your car would just die for no reason and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you would just accept this.
4. You could only have one person at a time in your car, unless you bought a car '95 or a car NT, but then you would have to buy more seats.
5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car. Wait a second, it's that way NOW!
6. Sun Microsystems would make a car that was solar powered, twice as reliable, 5 times as fast, but only ran on 5% of the roads.
7. The oil, alternator, gas, and engine warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about thew new features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other brands for years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft Gas (tm).
10. Ford, General Motors, and Chrylser would all be complaining because Microsoft was putting radios in all its models.

Top ten ways the Internet could get worse

10. Rigorous user screening process abolished by America On-Line.
11. "MAKE MONEY FAST" posts protected by 1st amendment, declare internet lawyers Canter & Siegel.
12. Home shopping "network".
13. Netrek corporate sponsorships. Out: Orion, Pollux, Klingus. In: Planet Bud, Toyota Prime, Intelworld.
14. Sun internet servers replaced with pentiums.
15. Dan Quayle appointed head of "bandwidth expansion tiger team".
16. Free netcom account with purchase of big mac.
17. Gameboy web browsers.
18. Tipper Gore cancelbot unleashed onto the net.

AND THE NUMBER ONE WAY THE INTERNET CAN GET WORSE:

1. Two words: "Microsoft Network"

Humorous Computer-Related Acronyms

• IBM: I Blame Microsoft / Idiots Buy Me / Idiots Building Machines / I'll Buy Macintoshes / It Bit Me / It Built Microsoft / It's Better Manually / I've Been Mislead / I've Been Mugged
• WINDOWS: Well, It Never Does Operate With Speed / When I Need Data Output Without Speed / While Idle, Needs DX or WorkStation / Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
• WIN: Whoppingly Immense NOP Worm Infestation Netware
• MS-WINDOWS NT / WINDOWS NT: My Solitaire With Its New De-accelerator, Only With Some Network Technology / Well Intended, Netword De-accelerator, Only Works Sometimes, Never Totally
• WINDOWS (as a) Network Trojan

Different Operating Systems Expectations

• Macintosh: What You See Is What You Get
• MS-DOS: You Asked For It, You Got It
• UNIX: IfUHv2sk, UDntWnt2Kno
• VMS: You Got It, All Of It, Want It Or Not

Random Abbreviations for Many Computer Companies

• APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
• DEC: Dump Everything and Close
• DEC: Do Expect Cuts
• HCL: Hilarious Computer Logic
• HP: Hot Pursuit
• IBM: I Blame Microsoft
• MAC: Most Absurd Computer
• MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
• MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
• NEXT: Now EXchange for Trash
• OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too.
• WARP: What A Rot Program

Acronymns for Other Computer Terms:

• AMIGA: A Merely Insignificant Game Addiction
• BASIC: Bill's Attempt to Seize Industry Control
• CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
• COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
• DOS: Defective Operating System
• ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
• LISP: Lots of Infuriating & Silly Parenthesis
• MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
• PCMCIA: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
• PENTIUM: Produces Erroneous Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Mathematics
• SCSI: System Can't See It
• WWW: World Wide Wait

11th-hour tweaks for Windows '98 by Microsoft

10. Included subliminal "Impeach Janet Reno" messages in start-up screen.
11. New Internet Explorer feature: whenever you visit a Web site ending in ".gov," a message first appears reminding you that Microsoft is not a monopoly.
12. Source code no longer ones and zeros--try 666s and zeros. Windows start-up theme, played backward, says, "Here's to my sweet Satan."
13. Comes with check for $50 that, if cashed, puts your name on an Internet petition telling the DOJ to buzz off and changes your long distance carrier to AT&T.
14. New desktop icon--click once, and $1 will go directly from your checking account into the Microsoft Legal Defense Fund.
15. Added new template to preinstalled version of Word: "Letter to the editor expressing delight with Microsoft products."
16. Freebie computer-controlled Barney doll has been reprogrammed to say, "Big government is sca-a-ary. Janet tried to hurt me."
17. TV function scrambles C-Span during antitrust hearings.
18. Desktop display with countdown tracking number of copies of Windows 98 that must yet be bought to prevent worldwide economic collapse!
19. Last-minute name change: was "Windows 98," now "Windows: Assimilate."

Newsflash

Microsoft today announced that it will be changing its name to "Moft" -- which will clear up space on user's hard disks. It is estimated that a typical Windows 95 installation contains about 2,800,000 copies of the word "Microsoft", in copyright notices, end-user licence agreements, 'About' screens, etc. So, after the change, a user will have about 14 MBytes more disk space. Stock prices of hard-disk manufacturers dipped slightly after the announcement.

"Well, the programs will take up less space on the user's disk," said Bill Gates, CEO of Moft. "But we have never cared about that. The change will allow us to ship Windows 95 on 13 disks instead of 14, thus saving about $50 million a year in media costs. We are also looking at shortening the names of some of our software products; for instance 'The Microsoft Exchange' may be changed to 'The Moft Pit'."

Gates added that the junior programmer who discovered the potential savings has been rewarded with a free copy of 'Moft Off for Moft Win 95'.

If Microsoft Ran The IRS

"Government should be run like a business." We've all heard that chestnut. Here is how the Internal Revenue Service (nobody's favorite government agency) would be like, if only it were run like Microsoft Corp. (a successful private enterprise).

• The IRS, as always, announces new tax forms will be mailed the week before the new year. However it will follow Microsoft's example and actually ship them the following May.
• Responding to pressure from some large corporations and a users' group, some early copies of the tax forms will actually be released in March. The recipients must sign non-disclosure agreements.
• In June, the forms will be recalled because the IRS loses a suit for appropriating some other country's intellectual property.
• When you move, the IRS will continue to send mail to your previous address forevermore, just like Microsoft sends its product upgrade notices.
• When you upgrade from form 1040 EZ to 1040 A, and then to 1040, you will pay an upgrade fee each time. Also you need to send in a new registration card and get a new Social Security Number. In order to upgrade, you have to submit the original first page of your previous year's form.
• Like Microsoft, when you file a late or amended tax return the IRS will reject it on the grounds that the prior year is no longer supported.
• The IRS telephone help will remain similar to Microsoft's, staffed by ill-trained, high-turnover personnel who sometimes give a correct answer, but the IRS will have to discontinue using a toll-free phone number.
• After struggling with reams of dense documentation of complex options and rules, you discover that you will need publication 3297, with a ten-word-long title, in order to answer (you hope) a single obscure question. The IRS, like Microsoft, will charge a minimum of $40 for that publication.
• The IRS, like Microsoft, will continue to issue immense volumes of bug fixes, interpretations, and clarifications. However the tax-rule updates should be neither easily searchable nor well-indexed.
• Instead of three-ring binders containing complete sets of tax code bugs and interpretations, IRS rulings will be promulgated in a haphazard fashion by individual taxpayers via BBS, Usenet, and Compuserve. A for-profit publishing subsidiary would also be nice.
• The new all-powerful (and eccentric) Commissioner of Internal Revenue will jet around the country giving speeches and granting numerous interviews, but only to sycophantic reporters. Changes to the tax code will be at the whim of the Commissioner and largely kept secret until they are published.

CORPORATE DIRECTIVE NUMBER 88-570471

In order to increase the security of all company computing facilities, and to avoid the possibility of unauthorized use of these facilities, new rules are being put into effect concerning the selection of passwords. All users of computing facilities are instructed to change their passwords to conform to these rules immediately.

RULES FOR THE SELECTION OF PASSWORDS:

1. A password must be at least six characters long, and must not contain two occurrences of a character in a row, or a sequence of two or more characters from the alphabet in forward or reverse order. Example: HGQQXP is an invalid password. GFEDCB is an invalid password.
2. A password may not contain two or more letters in the same position as any previous password. Example: If a previous password was GKPWTZ, then NRPWHS would be invalid because PW occurs in the same position in both passwords.
3. A password may not contain the name of a month or an abbreviation for a month. Example: MARCHBC is an invalid password. VWMARBC is an invalid password.
4. A password may not contain the numeric representation of a month. Therefore, a password containing any number except zero is invalid. Example: WKBH3LG is invalid because it contains the numeric representation for the month of March.
5. A password may not contain any words from any language. Thus, a password may not contain the letters A, or I, or sequences such as AT, ME, or TO because these are all words.
6. A password may not contain sequences of two or more characters which are adjacent to each other on a keyboard in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal direction. Example: QWERTY is an invalid password. GHNLWT is an invalid password because G and H are horizontally adjacent to each other. HUKWVM is an invalid password because H and U are diagonally adjacent to each other.
7. A password may not contain the name of a person, place, or thing. Example: JOHNBOY is an invalid password.

Because of the complexity of the password selection rules, there is actually only one password which passes all the tests. To make the selection of this password simpler for the user, it will be distributed to all supervisors. All users are instructed to obtain this password from his or her supervisor and begin using it immediately.

The Committee for the Reduction of Redundancy and the Antiproliferation of Repetition has decided not to meet until they have their first meeting and thus will not be meeting until the first time.

Their Pre-meeting Statement wanted to make this clear before they had their first meeting, so that it would not be unor confusing.

So their first meeting will actually be their first meeting and they will not have a meeting before the first meeting.

This should avoid having people show up for their first meeting before it is held, since to do so would be confusing to those who did so and this is what they want to avoid by reducing the confusion and lessening the repetition.

What does Santa call his wife at tax time?
→ A dependent Claus.