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The End of the World as We Know It

By Allen Holub

April 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 3)
REDMOND, April 1, 2006—Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) announced today that it will retire its Windows operating system in early 2007.

“I just bought one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, “and it’s a great machine. I was impressed by the quality of the UI and the stability of the platform—much better than anything we’ve ever done.

“I just had a Windows device driver fail the other day and lock up my Windows XP Professional laptop,” Gates continued. “Nothing like that seems to happen on my new Apple machine under Mac OS X 10.4. I even have a Unix command line when I need to do real work.”

“Now that the Mac is Intel-based,” added Gates, “it’s a trivial matter to run legacy Windows applications on the Mac using a virtual-machine-style product. So, of course we’ll buy VMware and shut it down,” he said. “But in the long term, why even bother making an inferior product like Windows? We’ll just port everything to the Mac.”

Gates went on to say, “When I looked at what was involved in the porting process, I was shocked to learn that our developers were using proprietary dialects like C# and Visual Basic. These programs can’t run on any operating system except Windows! What were my developers thinking? We tell our customers to use this junk, of course, otherwise they might be tempted to go with that open-source stuff, or with another platform, but I never thought for a minute that we’d use it ourselves! We don’t want to be locked in to a single operating environment. Consequently, I’ve ordered a complete rewrite of all our server and desktop products in Java. That way they’ll run on my new machine without difficulty.”

Gates pointed out that the rewrite should not be difficult since Microsoft’s code was strictly object-oriented. “We’ve been pushing bad programming practice on our customers for years,” he said, “so that they won’t be able to compete with us. Our published libraries, such as MFC and .NET, aren’t the least bit object-oriented, and Visual Basic is such a kluge that I’m amazed that anyone fell for it! Since our programmers take OO design seriously, their work will be much easier to modify than if they had been using that junk we promote publicly.”

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