(blatantly stolen from Slashdot, thanks to Harmonious Botch #921977)
Bill: “I’m worried, Steve. We’re losing more ground to Linux. It’s on the verge of becoming a non-nerd OS.”
Steve: “I’ve got an idea. Let’s buy another version of Linux.”
Bill: “Are you crazy? The SCO gambit didn’t fool anybody.”
Steve: “No, not like that. Instead of trying to fool a judge, we’ll try to fool our customers.”
Bill: “So? That’s already company policy.”
Steve: “Yes, but we’ll release our own version. We tell the public that we’re joining the Linux bandwagon, and with our marketing clout, it will soon become the dominant version on the market. Then when the public is convinced that MS-Linux IS Linux, we make gradual changes to turn it into an unusable bloated wreck. Linux will be finished!”
Bill: “No way! Remember, Steve, I used to write software. No self-respecting programmer would deliberately wreck an OS. Where are we going to get a bunch of programmers to do that?”
Steve: “We have all the guys who wrote Vista. I think they could do it.”
(Steve exits)
(10 minutes later, Steve returns, slamming the door quickly behind him. He looks like he has seen a ghost)
Bill: "So, how did it go?
Steve: (shaking his head) “Bad, bad, bad, bad, b-”
Bill: “Get a grip! What happened?”
Steve: “They won’t do it…I mean they’ll do it, but they want to do it well! They won’t wreck it.”
Bill: “You explained the plan to them?”
Steve: “Yes, very clearly. Twice. But they just started chanting. One word, over and over and over and over and over and ov-”
(Bill picks up a chair, bashes Steve over the head with it.)
Steve: “Wh..? Uh..thanks…I needed that.”
(Bill puts down the chair, walks to the door)
Steve: “Nooo! Please don’t op-”
(Bill opens the door. From down the hall a chorus of voices can be heard.)
Voices: “-ux! Linux! Linux! Linux! Linux! Linux! Lin-”
(Bill slams the door)
Bill: “That’s bad.”
Steve: “It’s worse. They now refuse to work on Vista any more!”
Bill: “That’s ok. We aren’t going to support it for very long anyway.”
Steve: “So what are we going to do?”
Bill: “I think I can still make the plan work. Listen: we’ll let them produce a good version of Linux. We’ll make it very good for servers.”
Steve: “SuSE? You mean we’ll take over Novell?”
Bill: “Yes. That gives us a big step up to dominate the Linux market like you suggested. But instead of trying to convice the world that Linux is junk, we’ll tell them that Linux is only for servers.”
Steve: “But it will migrate to the desktop! We have to kill it!”
Bill: “No, we’ll let the guys downstairs make it the way they want it. Keep it for nerds. Each update will be more and more technical. Let them gradually turn it into something that only a Linux pro can use.”
Steve: “We’re gonna pay them to write Gentoo?”