Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sense of unfairness is compounded by a feeling that the government has taken the side of Microsoft's enemies in Silicon Valley, when it ought to be neutral. Silicon Valley is full of hypocrites who talk about the free market but come running to the government to hobble a competitor. Silicon Valley also is full of characters--such as Larry Ellison of Oracle and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems--who do fit the stereotype of obnoxious megalomaniac so often and unfairly applied to Bill Gates. Or, again, so it seems to many in Redmond...
...symbol more than a person. He is the personification of arrogance and unreason, and of a powerful institution that is misusing its power. Klein and Attorney General Janet Reno and the DOJ, in other words, are regarded in Redmond as cartoon figures, rather like the image of Gates and Microsoft projected by rivals and echoed in the antitrust suit. Each side holds this cartoon view of the other but cannot fathom why anyone would hold such a cartoon view...
...tune with the dot-commerce age, because it's more ad than drama. Aimed at young Web surfers, the smart, saucy sitcom's natural audience, it's really a child of the ingenious Internet marketing for The Blair Witch Project. It was promoted entirely online--in part through Microsoft's MSN website--and the 10-minute episode, with hard-hitting information about the characters' period hairstyles, is strictly fan-club stuff. There's the all-empowering Web for you: why rely on Entertainment Tonight when you can do your own puff pieces...
...tapping away at another dreary spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. By accident, you hit a secret combination of keys. Phfft!--the spreadsheet is gone, and you're flying over a landscape of rolling green hills, guided only by your mouse. Find another hidden combo, and--this gets curiouser and curiouser--you're crossing a zigzagging platform with fiery death on either side. Admit it. That's a whole lot more interesting than accounts payable...
...could explain why some eggs take satirical aim at management. Some versions of AOL, for example, have been implanted with Scott's Winkie, a winking face that offers mock insider gossip, such as a forthcoming "big announcement involving Steve Case, the CIA and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia." Microsoft's Wine Guide--now discontinued, alas--contains pictures of a shirtless Bill Gates (real snaps taken at a company picnic) that slide by to the strains of Pretty Woman...