The People Moan

Here is an article I received in my mail...

Allez AS/400!
Debbie Strand,Facsimile Support/400,IBM Rochester

******************************************************************

 Here is a translation of an article from the NRC Handelsblad, a
 respected Dutch newspaper, about a noteworthy occasion in Paris.

 The title of the article is "The people moan"
 <begin transcript>
 Recently, Paris witnessed the most bizar business conference in years.
 More than 1200 SW developers were invited by SW moloch Microsoft to view
 the latest Internet Explorer 4.0. A mere 50 made it to the end of the
 conference day. The rest were already gone, in anger and disgust.

 Until lunch nothing special was happening. It was just another of those
 informercial type of gathering of which 13 will fit in a dozen.
 But when everyone sat down again, Microsoft's marketing director France
 took the stand to say 'something about JAVA'. And he began a long and
 fierce 'filippica' against this even newer -and therefor a little less
 stable- but much promising programming language.
 It didn't work, was no good, everybody could look into the sourcecode,
 etc.. But the audience understood very well what Microsofts real
 objection against JAVA was: it's not made by Microsoft.

 And the audience didn't buy it. All those well-dressed 'IT-specialists',
 , like schoolboys, began to make sissing and booo-noises. So much that
 everybody was shocked by himself and the others; an embarrassed silence
 set in. The Microsoft staff on the stage was looking baffled into
 the audience, the audience looked back in despair, until somebody
 shouted couragiously "Allez JAVA*" (french for "Come on, JAVA").
 A big applause and chear was raised.

 After this happened the majority of the audience left the building.

 <end of transcript, not of the article, which goes on about the monopo-
 listic style of Bill Gates and Microsoft, comparing him with Richard III
 (Shakespeare).
 The artice end with the observation that the people moan, like in Paris
 and starts to hope for some sort of Richmond (also Shakespeare) to
 steam up to Redmond and make an end to this immature nonsense>.

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