GENEVA, SWITZERLAND (Nov. 28, 1997) -- After an intense week-long meeting with dozens of officials, Bill Gates announced yesterday that Microsoft purchased the Metric System for an undisclosed sum. The Metric System will be renamed MSMetric 97®. Bill Gates said at a press conference, "The Metric System, while technically superior to the British System, has floundered because of a lack of promotion and advertising. However, Microsoft intends to change that. With Microsoft's hype machine and operating system monopoly, MSMetric 97® will become the number one scientific standard." Reactions are mixed. One computer industry analyst said, "Wow! This kind of innovative decision making is precisely why Microsoft is so successful. The fact that IBM hasn't purchased a major scientific standard is exactly why OS/2 is failing in the market. Excuse me, I have to be at a meeting in three MS Minutes®." However, scientists are not so thrilled about this development. One said, "WHAT?!?!?! Microsoft 'owning' a scientific standard?!?!?!?! This is preposterous! I know for sure that I'm going to switch to Metrix, the free measurement system developed by Linus Torvalds."
Ironically, last month Microsoft announced plans to develop it's own measurement system, code-named ActiveMetric. However, the Microsoft engineers ran into trouble. An anonymous Microsoft engineer said, "We just couldn't do it. We were trained to code programs like Windows 95 and Bob. Scientific standards were way out of our league." However, the engineers did make some progress, some of which will be incorporated into MS Metric 97®. Some of these changes include:
MS Bill-Meter® - length of Bill's [censored]. Approximately equal to 2.43 mm. MS WinSecond® - time it takes Windows 95 to boot on the average Pentium 200. Equal to 13.7 minutes. MS WinByte® - amount of space taken up by a typical Windows 95 installation with IE 4.0. One WinByte® equals 4.2 gigabytes. The next few months will be a testing period for MS Metric 97. If any bugs are discovered, they will be fixed in the MS Metric 98 upgrade, to be released sometime in 1999. Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0 will feature a module that will upgrade the system from the British System to MS Metric 97® (or MS Metric 2005®, depending on when NT 5.0 is released).
In conjunction with this purchase, Microsoft has changed its slogan to "What do you want to measure today?"TM Microsoft's stock, MSFT, closed up 5 points today in heavy trading. For more information, consult Microsoft's new website, www.ms-metric-97(R).com.
[All jokes and graphics are believed to be in the public domain. If you feel one of these belongs to you, please let us know the details and we will either remove the material or provide a link at your request.]
Connect with me
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.