BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH
Redmond, WA - In an effort to boost sagging revenue growth, Microsoft today
announced it will begin selling advertising space on the company's world famous
Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)©. The screen, displayed whenever Windows cannot
recover from an error in the operating system's core, until now has historically
served as a display of unintelligible diagnostic data that has not made any
sense to anyone, ever, according to a survey conducted by the Gartner Group. In
addition, the BSOD has scared most users because it was composed mainly of
hexadecimal digits which, in extreme cases, can lead to hallucinations,
epileptic seizures and homosexuality in primates and rats.
"Past efforts to make the blue screen more helpful by adding animated characters
and changing the hue to a more user-friendly beige or aqua have failed," said
head of BSOD Development Kate Verban. "When we failed to make the BSOD
user-friendly, we decided that at least it could generate revenue. Displayed
more than a billion times a day globally, the blue screen has a captive
audience, with over 90 percent of the computer desktops in the world. This makes
it an excellent platform for advertisers, comparable only to the Super Bowl and
makes watching the blue screen just as exciting."
Tom Gordon, Director of Marketing for Anheuser-Busch, confirmed today that the
beverage giant will be among the first advertisers, "We think it's a tremendous
opportunity," said Gordon. "Picture this, you're working late at night on a
crucial project. Your computer crashes. You've lost all your important work.
It's definitely time for a beer, and we'll be there to remind you that the beer
should be a beechwood-aged Budweiser."
For earlier versions of Windows, the BSOD ads will be installed using the
Windows Update feature. However, Windows XP systems connected to the Internet
will automatically install the new software in the middle of the night when no
one is looking.
