Crazy Apple News Site

Since there has been so much clamor for a fable, here’s a post I was already working on cleverly re-worked as “a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral”¹

Once there was a dorky man named Mister Gates.  He wrote software on punch cards.  Everyone thought he was a geek, but they were kind to him because he made lots and lots of money.

One day Mr. Gates found a bald monkey living a sad and dejected life. The monkey had no name, so Mr. Gates called it Ballmer, because it was, well, a bald monkey. For years Mr. Gates tried to teach Ballmer to behave properly around people. He spent his time teaching Ballmer how to speak, how to walk, and how to motivate people, until one day he decided to let Ballmer out in public.  It didn’t go well. Ballmer got scared of all the people looking at him, started sweating profusely, and suddenly started clapping his hands together and shouting “Developers! Developers! Developers!” while dancing around in a circle.

Mr. Gates was sad, but he took Ballmer back to his home in Seattle and worked with him for several more years.  It got to the point where Mr. Gates couldn’t even clean his Windows because he was spending so much time trying to get Ballmer to act like a human.

Finally, after years and years, Mr. Gates believed that Ballmer was ready to be let out into the real world.  In fact, he was so confident that as he left his company he gave Ballmer the keys, and told everyone to listen to the monkey.  Everyone was surprised; the monkey had learned how to form full sentences, and even some basic math:

“Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux.  How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don’t like it. … We have some work to do².”

Although some of his sentences are a little convoluted:

“We want software more powerful than software that runs in a browser³.”

In the end, Ballmer hauled Mr. Gates back from his retirement feeding starving children in Africa and working on a cure for AIDS so that Mr. Gates could star in a pointless series of commercials with a comedian from New York. And while nobody laughed at the commercials, once again everybody laughed at Ballmer.

The moral⁴ of the story:  Don’t dress a monkey in a suit and call it a CEO, lest it start flinging things in the board room((Like this. Caution: linked story contains naughty words that Steve Ballmer allegedly said to an employee.)).

Okay kids, settle down now, it’s time for bed.

1. courtesy of the Apple built-in dictionary [↩]
2. from Macworld [↩]
3. also from Macworld, but a different article [↩]
4. Does anyone remember the Wheel of Morality from Animaniacs? [↩]

Microsoft has launched the first wave of their $300 million+ advertising campaign set to counter the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads in an unlikely form.

“How’s that game playing going, Mac freaks?” asks Steve Ballmer in a form letter sent to every “@apple.com” email address. “Oh, and Squeak? Your Open Source software sucks! I mean, check out Paint.Net! That’s some Open Source software worth using, lemme tell ya!”

Needless to say, this quixotic, Tokyo Rose style spam attack was devastating to the morale of Apple employees. “Ooooh, Stevie, them’s fightin’ words,” said Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple. “I mean, picking on our open source development? Wow, that’s hitting us where it hurts, pal. What’s next, a criticism of our favorite brand of floor wax? Please, not that!”

Peter Oppenheimer asked, “How much of your $300 million did you spend on writing this email?” Reports that Steve Jobs had to physically restrain John Gruber and Steve Wozniack¹ from “hopping on their Segways and giving Ballmer a piece of their mind” are as yet unverified.

Steve Jobs’ response was typically refined. In an email response he writes: “Wow, Ballmer. That’s quite some attack, and it hurts. It hurts almost as much as our 30% profit increase this quarter. I guess the “wow” really does “start now”, only a year after you launched Vista. Wow, indeed.”

For once, it was Microsoft who had no comment, except to remind us that they could “(expletive deleted) crush” the Crazy Apple News Site, which is entirely true.

In an unrelated side note, we here at CANS have just uninstalled Vista from Boot Camp on our iMac and installed XP instead.  It is surprisingly more stable.

1. neither of whom work at Apple but both of whom have @apple.com email addresses due to tremendous whining [↩]