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Redmond, Wash., May 17, 2002 12:01 a.m. PDT

MICROSFT ANNOUNCES NEW SOFTWARE INITIATIVE

Today, Microsft Corporation is announcing a New Software Initiative.

At an today's press briefing on the beautiful Microsoft Campus here in Redmond, Washington Chairman & CEO Bill Gates made an unexpected appearance.

"As many of you know," Mr. Gates said, "Everyone here at Microsoft has been working very hard on our new .NET initiative. We have announce our new .NET Servers and the .NET development platform and IDE which have recieved great interest from the development community. We have been very pleased with the initial response and wish to thank all of those who have been willing to step up to the plate and make a committment to our new initiative."

"And, as many of you know, we have publicly stated that we're betting the company on .NET and we've been very excited about
the progress we're making on it."

"However, there have been some in the development community who have raised some concerns about the ability of .NET to actually be able to reach our stated goals, and that's why I'd like to take a few minutes here today and respond to those concerns." Additionally, and in anticipation of our next stockholders meeting, I've made a few decisions regarding some additional technologies that I will be making an announcement on in a few minutes."

"As many of you know, Microsoft has a large and rich heritage in providing developer tool that will meet the need of the broadest cross-section of the development community. By and large we have been successful beyond our original dreams. We have provided operating systems, business application productivity software and, of course, our bread and butter, the lower level development tools, such as Visual Basic, C, C++, Fortran, Access and so forth. Additionally, with some well placed acquisitions we have also added many fine products to our developer's toolkit arsenal. MapInfo, FoxPro, now Visual FoxPro, and many other fine products."

"As always, along with our vision of 'A computer on every desktop' has been the notion of improving the efficiency of those who use our products to create solutions for their clients. .NET is, of course, the latest in a long line of advances towards both developer productivity and a more unified Interactive Development Environment, or IDE."

"We have been very pleased with our progress to date and today I take great pride in announcing VPS, the newest (and we think ultimate) unified developmet environment. With VPS we have managed to exceed even our wildest expectations in simplifying the development environment down to its most essential parts, and at the same time both providing absolute freedom of choice to the developer while at the same time providing both coherence, stability and uniformity to the IDE. PLUS, we have managed to overcome what has been a growing issue with respect to the ever-increasing complexity of the typical IDE. More on this in a moment."

"As many of you know, the lead time for learning a new language was growing while at the same time the time-to-market of new and improved versions of existing products was shrinking, almost all a result of the internal efficiences we've managed to gain here on the Microsoft campus. As many of you know, we had been subsidizing the food preparation here on campus and also providing free beverages as well to our developers, all with the notion of having them spend less time in unproductive work while at the same time increasing their ability to stay here on campus and work."

"After some analysis we discovered that by removing the food subsidies would precipitate a 4 1/2% increase of productive time accrued to the corporation. Well, while many of you may think that this was, well, sort of heartless the fact of the matter is that we also discovered that we had crossed some sort of invisible barrier and suddenly we began to see whole new paradigms!"

"For instance, we realized that with the introduction of .NET that we had crossed the barrier where the time it took developers to learn the 'new way' of doing the same work was now longer than the time it took us as a corporation to develop, test and market the new development products. As I'm sure you can see, we became quite concerned about this and after some lengthy and vigorous internal discussions, among Steve (Steve Ballmer, President, Microaoft Corporation) and others that we had inadvertantly gotten ourselves into a position commonly known in the lending industry as "upside down."

"We realized that we had now reached the point in time where the developer could never keep up with us and would lag further and further behind in their skill set."

"Fortunately one of our senior engineers, who also had been thinking about these very issues came up with what we think is a sublime response. That response is our new product, which we have named VPS or "Visual Panel Switches". VPS is, in so many words a graphical representation of 32 front panel rocker switches which some of you may remember were used by the earliest
computers. The beautiful thing about VPS is that it is entirely neutral and universal with respect to the particular programming language the developer may have in his or her background! We here at Microsoft think that this may well indeed be the penultimate development environment as any developer can program in any language without regard to what their colleagues may be programming in. All computer languages are immediately available through the front panel switches! Even for you Assembly programmers we are happy to inform you that these 32 switches will accomodate your every programming need."

Also, we are beginning work on our next generation system, which we are announcing today, "Visual Tape Loader" or VTL. We will be releasing more information on this exciting new product very soon and we'll make sure to keep all of you informed."

"We envision that this will allow industry and government to be better able to share, not only talent but resources as well and our Board of Directors has enthusiatically endorsed this new paradigm."

"Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen. I'll now turn this press conference over to Steve..."

(editor's note: At this point Mr. Steve Ballmer enteres from off stage doing his famous Monkey Dance.)

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NOTE: If you can read this your eyes are much better than mine. Oh, the above is intended to be a parody and just for fun. I don't want no steenking MSFT lawyers after me. <g>

Best,


DD

A man is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep for that which he cannot lose.
Everything I don't understand must be easy!
The difficulty of any task is measured by the capacity of the agent performing the work.