Martha Does Bill; Real Good

Franco Vitaliano

Move over, MS! No, the other one, silly: Martha Stewart, whose saccharine sagacious advice on everything from artfully arranging azaleas to positively purging plumbing appears in thousands of newspapers across the county.

But Bill G. can't allow a new media darling rival, can he? To reclaim his "You-only-look-at-me!" status, MS Bill has recently hosted a series of special PR bashes at which he offered his own heartfelt advice on how to make all your systems nice-nice.

Not to be outdone by our new MS-MS (Microsoft-Martha Stewart), here are Francis 's own techno-ideas on making things simply lovely and wonderful.

Still can't get those 3-D graphics in full bloom on your Jurassic 486 PC, and your neighbor's cubby looks so-o-o much more colorful and decorative? Don't despair. Just turn that out-of-pixel-breath PC into a lovely window box, and buy a new Pentium II/NT bursting with barely ripe MS Active server fruit. (Mind those frail MMX branches!) Meanwhile, try filling that now defunct PC with some Microsoft graphics perennials. When these broken 3-D promises finally bloom in about three or four years, your colorful new Windows treatment will be the talk of the office.

Uh-oh, those pesky MIS people annoying your perfect cubby bliss again? Try this simple fix. At the next staff meeting, insist that they simultaneously support Netscape, Explorer, Notes, and Java. Then start a lively, informative, and fun e mail campaign by all your fellow co-workers to senior management. Make sure you carefully explain how not supporting all these new technologies is costing your company millions of dollars in revenues. Things are getting grimly fierce out there in that nasty market! I guarantee you wont hear from those pesky MIS people for a long time to come, and your cubby will be blissfully peaceful once more.

Speaking of your cubby, is it starting to look drab and tired, with just those smiling pictures of your spouse and kids vainly trying to liven things up? Here's the perfect cubby-perk up idea: Try putting up 3' x 4' full color posters of Chairman Gates all around the walls. Get different great historical scenes, like Gates at the moment of his single-handedly inventing the PC, the CD-ROM, and the graphical windowing environment. Not only will your work space be more much more cheerful, it will also be highly informative for casual passers by. A sure-fire conversation starter!

Want to make that perfect turkey for the holidays? Here's a sure-fire recipe. First, go out and buy the biggest, plumpest, RAM-engorged Pentium II you can. Next, stuff it full with the fattest RAID array you can find. Lastly -- and here is our culinary piece de resistance -- put NT on it. Scale it up to 1,000,000,00 transactions a day, and let it thoroughly stew in its own MS marketing juices. At the end of four days, the overhyped aroma from this now thoroughly roasted bird will have staff and customers streaming in from miles around, incredibly anxious to know what you were thinking of when you bought this turkey. And for the perfect enterprise garnish, add some crunchy Wolf Pack clusters. These MS delicacies are sure to provide no automatic software fallover, no load balancing, no easy incremental CPU power, and no simplified, lower MS licensing costs. A deliciously useless package from any standpoint. Yum, altogether an amazing MS marketing dish!

Now what's this? Microsoft's rapacious new enterprise licensing policies have your purchasing people and MIS staff looking blue? Well, get ready for some smiles! Next time the Redmond Raptors come around, have them sit next to the office with all those cheery new network computers and handsome Sun servers. The unusual look on the Microsoft negotiators' faces will lift everyone out of those new contract doldrums. What an inexpensive way to have some fun!

Need to spice up those stale office conversation with some peppy little bon mots? Try talking all your co-workers into exchanging files between Office 95 and Office 97. Their spicy outpourings should go a long way towards perking up your brown bag chit-chat!

Is Valentine's Day coming, and there is someone special on your office politics wish list? Well, here's just the thing to make that certain person sit up and take notice. Take an old floppy disc and decorate it with some festive wrapping; for example, an eye-grabbing, "Pre-Beta, Press Review Copy Only" sticker. Then coyly drop it on the object of your affection's desk -- Now sit back and enjoy one of the most memorable and heartwarming Valentine's Day's ever. You will watch with lovingly rapt attention as pre-beta incompatibility issues cause nothing released to install until your office sweetheart takes it all off!

Finally, dear readers, always remember that just because your Windows PC is usually down when you need it most, it doesn't mean you have to be!

Bottom Line

Home Users:Decorate that tired looking WebTV with some wallpaper off the Net. Watch how it all changes colors as the nasty virus you just downloaded makes the picture go fashionably haywire.

Business Users: Does that corner office beckon you? But someone else is in it? Give that out of touch executive sitting in there a copy of Microsoft's new OSR2 for Win95. You'll be in that office quick as a bunny as this poor person will be spending so much time fighting with his now thoroughly corrupted system, he'll never turn in a report on time again.

Power Users: Martha says now is the time to throw away those stacked piles of Twinkie wrappers, recycle those hundreds of Coke cans, and go home and attend to your personal hygiene.