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

wait a minute here...

[je ne sais quoi]

Wait a minute here.... I read this story and I thought, well hey, a company tried to force on everyone a product that wasn't desirable for the consumer, waited a long time to deliver that product, and has a history of making some products that don't do so well, so is in deep trouble financially and might go under. Seemed pretty reasonable to me, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? If you don't make products that people want to buy, aren't you supposed to do poorly?

But then I remembered this is an April Fools joke. Since it's not true, and Microsoft is doing just fine, I thought about why it isn't true: either A) Microsoft really is making products that people want or B) Capitalism isn't working here. Regarding A, I suppose MS does make more decent products than bad ones, but I can't help but think of Microsoft as the GM of the auto-world 20 years ago in that they have a much larger market share than the quality of their products warrants (suggesting B). So I wonder when the Toyota of the operating system world is going to come along and eat MS' lunch? It must be nice to be a monopoly.

P.S. Please MS fanboys, try to remember that the troll or flamebait mods are not a substitute for an "I disagree that Vista was a failure" mod.

Re:wait a minute here...

[je ne sais quoi]

Well, continuing with my auto analogy, if Microsoft is the GM of the operating systems, that makes FOSS the VW microbus. Yeah sure it kinda works, but you spend half your time repairing it and the other half the time using it with parts broken. (Oh, and it's most commonly used by bearded hippies.)

I joke, I joke! :) I actually think that a great way to stimulate the economy would be to make micro-grants (by gov. standards) to pay programmers to write FOS software. That way, the tax-payer gets a return on their investment by having better quality software that is freely available. Oh wait, that would be communism... (Incidentally, isn't that what the Google Summer of Code is?)