Hiel to the Chief

" getting there is half the fun "

The Government, ruling on the recent 97% drop in profits by Applied Materials (the company that makes all the equipment that makes computer chips ~ these were their results in 2003), has decided to review the case against MicroSoft. The case had previously closed with a decision against breaking the software mammoth into two little behemoths. Now the Goverment is considering racketeering charges against Microsoft and Dell for conspiring to sell advanced computer systems that weren't that at all, but just systems using parallel processing. The court is now in session, Judge B. Techno Savvy presiding.
Mr. Pearly Gates, it occurs to the Bench that when somebody buys your software almost 35 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your bank account, or that of the other Directors at MicroSoft.
Isn't that wonderful? Nothing like a little cash viagra to keep the firm's profits up!
How can you expect to keep making new products when all your disposable income is scraped like cream off the top of the consumers you've milked?
Who said anything about new products? We just crush the competition and incorporate them into the organization. Resistance is futile.
Yes, you do have a smorgasborg of features. I've always wondered, though, why none of your products do automatic defragmentation of the hard drive.
Planned obsolescence, that great American tradition. The sooner the hardware collapses, the sooner the consumer will be back purchasing a new machine and the software to go with it.
The old buy the patent for silk stockings that don't wear out trick, eh? Then keep anybody from manufacturing them?
You may call it a vice, but in the Bible of modern business, it's a virtue.
How come Windows 98 is twice as big as Windows 95 but doesn't do any think different or new? And I get more error messages on my machine every time I fire it up than spam letters in my email. If you were in any other business, putting that kind of product out, you'd have been stoned out of business in a second.
You must have one of those old 686 Cyrix sextium PC's your nobleness. Windows 98 is designed to operate on a machine with two processors. It takes parallel processing machines to run it, otherwise you cram up your random access memory real bad.
You mean all the programs in Windows 98 split the tasks into two groups, and does two things at once - like the old 16-bit bus advancing to the now 32-bit bus?
That's correct.
Hmmm. So you have the same old Intel microprocessors inside and the PC's are faster by virtue of having two processing systems?
That's the general idea.
So the doubling principle is really over?
Depends on how you think of it. .
Dammit, I mean the notion that the processing speed of computer chips doubles every few years!
We got modern math now. Don't cotton to those kind of old fashioned ideas.
So Beavus and Butthead are in cahoots on this one?
Sure, duh - hehe! we got it all worked out, me and Michael He . Ugg . He . Dell.
How so?
You let us charge more for our software if we don't tell anybody that you're not really increasing computer speed with faster chips. It wasn't hard really. All we had to do was monitor the media, and excise any rumors before they became rampant.
I guess Steve Jobs at Apple isn't in your cozy little cache?
No, he's rotten to the corps, that Job is. High minded so-and-so thinks he can do business like he's in some kind of Garden of Even. Had to go and call their Power Macs dual processor machines. He'll curse the day he was born, that Job will.
Sounds like an Ironclad case against MicroSoft, I'm afraid.
Yea, if it wasn't for the Merry Macs our Monitor system might have worked.