ATLANTA – In addition to the usual security problems, the Microsoft corporation’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, has some patching to do with special interest groups. The groups’ complaints arose after the latest Vista pep rally, this one during a sales-staff meeting held in Atlanta on Monday.
The meeting resembled an embarrassing high school assembly put on by a social studies teacher trying desperately to demonstrate his street cred, and the video didn’t come off any better.
Featuring a generic-sounding, smells-like-teen-advertising, techno-pop music background, the Vista video was introduced by a roly-poly doofus in a black western hat and stupid goatee who shared the stage with a cardboard-looking stiff in pleated chinos and a black polo shirt. As the brief video played, obligatory smoke clouds arose from the left and right sides of the stage. Every KISS cover band in America would have killed for that intro.
Despite its geek-encrusted attempt at hipness and its alliterative slogan—Clear, Confident, Connected: Bringing Clarity to your World—the Vista introduction managed to offend several special interest groups. The assembled sales pimps—who looked as if they would have been comfortable hoisting Kool-Aid at Jonestown—clapped on cue at the conclusion of the Vista video, but no sooner had they stopped clapping than special interest groups went on the attack, accusing Microsoft of promoting everything from homophobia to male chauvinism to tofuburgers.
National Organization for Women (NOW) president, Kim Gandy, denounced the Vista video for “catering to an all-male fraternity of laptop-toting, lapdance-craving pigs.
“There isn’t a woman to be found in that frat-boys video,” Gandy added. “If this doesn’t prove there’s a silicon ceiling at Microsoft, I don’t know what does. Apparently the only place for a woman in the top ranks at Microsoft is under an executive vice president’s desk.”
Not to be outdone, the Reverend Jesse Jackson weighed in on behalf of the NAACPC (National Association for the Advancement of Computer Programmers of Color). In a press release issued from Michael Jackson’s compound in Bahrain, the Reverend Jackson argued that the couple gazing into a foggy distance-scape in the Vista image on Microsoft’s website is obviously Caucasian. Speaking in his usual doggerel, Jackson declared:
“Jack and Jill went up the hill/And therein lies our plight/We black folk knows this image blows/For Jack and Jill are white.”
Although the self-proclaimed “queer rights” group, Act Up, was not concerned about the racial profile of the persons in the Vista image, the militant organization was dismayed that the two persons in the image appear to be a heterosexual couple.
“There are too many queers using Microsoft products—and working at Microsoft, if the truth be known—for the company to insult us with that kind of Leave It to Beaver imagery,” said Act Up in a prepared statement.
For its part, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NBCA) complained that in choosing to dump the code name “Longhorn,” by which Vista had formerly been known, Microsoft was sending a meat-is-murder message to American consumers.
“We expect this sort of thing from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals),” said NBCA president Jim McAdams, “but what kind of message does it send when Microsoft abandons the Longhorn brand at a time when soccer moms across America are buying increasing numbers of tofuburgers in an hysterical reaction to the Mad Cow Disease terrorist-funded scare?”
In related news, Angelina Jolie announced that she was going to boycott Microsoft products until such time as the company “started featured more adopted orphans” in its advertising.
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