Microsoft Asks Fed For Bailout

snydeq writes "Microsoft requested on Tuesday some $20 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, claiming that as the company controls an overwhelming share of the OS market, it is too big to fail. Low adoption rates for Vista, the ensuing ad campaign trying to convince people that they really do like Vista, and the increased need for development resources to rush Windows 7 to market to make people forget about Vista have necessitated the bailout, the company said. 'We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement,' said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. 'This is simply a crisis of dollars — a crisis of not having enough dollars coming our way.'"

Comments

I Hate April Fool's Day Stories

[gadlaw]

I really hate April Fools Day crap online. It's not funny. If I wanted funny I'd go read the Onion.

Re:It's April 2 now

[Mark_in_Brazil]

Uhh, you realize that all April Fool's Jokes are meant to be done by 12PM on April 1?

By noon? Why? Where is that written? I could see everyone agreeing that April Fool's jokes should end by 23:59:59 on April 1 (or let's say before 00:00 or 12:00 AM on April 2) without it being written somewhere, but I think it would be very hard to make people do their April foolin' before lunch on April Fool's Day.

The other thing is that I'm in Brazil, an hour ahead of any US time zone, and as I'm typing this, I've still got 5 minutes on the 1st of April, so people in the US are still quite safely on the right day. And as the Slashdot FAQ says, Slashdot is "U.S.-centric."

Re:They are, ghowever

[kumanopuusan]

I think Microsoft is being kinda generous by offering to pay for a huge chunk of it.

I think the city of Redmond is being kinda generous by not raising Microsoft's taxes in order to pay for the entire cost of the bridge necessitated by Microsoft.