Revealed: Ballmer’s original keynote [Opinion]

“Thanks everyone for attending, and I welcome all our MVPs, which we’ve just announced will now stand for Microsoft Vista Promoters. We know that’s what you’d really like to be known as after all – no reseller wants to push that silly old Windows XP anymore. Can’t make a buck out of that – the thing uses sod-all hardware, why it even runs on what the customer already has installed, and where are the support calls? Gone. Everyone knows how to use it and the damn thing hardly ever crashes. Best we move on.

“Now of course we made a few mistakes with Vista, but hey, we’ve got the world’s highest over-paid software developers and with their salary packages they’re bound to get a bit recreational now and then and forget a few minor things. Like that USB stuff. Who knew anybody cared about USB? Isn’t that just for Macintosh people? I mean, you only need it so you can download music and photos and for that you get a Mac. Why on earth are Windows people trying to plug USB thingies into their PCs?

“Yeah, well anyway we fixed it and now it works, and we did it in SP1, so you can’t say we don’t learn from our mistakes — we didn’t get it fixed until SP2 in WinXP. So stop bleating, and besides those customer calls are chargeable! You can easily spend more than four hours futzing about trying to make USB sticks work under Vista and that’s serious income at my hourly rate let me tell you! I sent Bill a personal IOU for $8K just for helping him download pics of his kids at the ball game!

“What’s that? Oh, yeah right, well sure, you do have to re-boot your PC after you plug in the USB thing but what did you expect? Plug-and-pray wasn’t our idea you know. We had to do that to keep the European Catholics happy. What? European Commission? You say they have nothing to do with religion? Well anyway, like I said earlier, you want photos and music and stuff go get a Mac. Vista is for real people who work for a living.

“And enough of this whining about it being slow. It’s not slow on my PC and it’s a run-of-the-mill Quad Xeon with 4GB RAM and 16GB VRAM. You’ll find the same thing at any computer store in the clearance bin, or that’s what my team tells me. So yeah, we’re pulling the plug on WinXP this June. Enough already. Get over it.”