Coca-Cola Purchased by Microsoft. by April Fulsearly.

In a move that surprised both the computer and soft-drink industry, it
was announced that Microsoft has purchased a majority stake in the
Coca-Cola corporation.

As one of its first moves as a fledgling player in the soda industry,
Microsoft has decreed that from now on all use of the phrase "soft
drink" should be instead replaced by the phrase "Micro-soft drink".
Bill Gates was quoted as saying that this move "gives us instant name
recognition in a heretofore unaccessed section of the populace", that
being people that drink sodas but do not use computers.  However,
highly-placed insider sources at Microsoft, discussing this under a
requirement of anonyminity, said that the actual impetus for this
purchase occurred through a mis-communication.

According to these sources, Bill Gates had been thirsty after spending
15 minutes on his virtual reality stairmaster, and had requested one of
his aides to get him a Coke.  However, that assistent, hearing "Coke"
and not "a Coke", instead went out and engineered the purchase of the
corporation.

As a result of this purchase, the Federal Trade Commission is forming a
task force to determine if there are potential anti-trust problems in
merging the leaders of the software and soft-drink industries.  This
task force will likely focus heavily on the fact that Diet Coke(tm) is
the primary refreshment of choice for Windows programmers.

A Microsoft spokesperson announced that, contrary to the rumors
circulating since the purchase took effect, Microsoft WILL NOT increase
the caffeine content in Coke and Diet Coke to get more work out of
software developers.  However, the door was left open to make that move
sometime in the future.  Increasing the caffeine content "will only be
done if market analysis indicates that increasing it would be the
proper move," read the Microsoft press release.

Steve Ballmer, VP of Microsoft, announced that a number of product
changes would go into effect to unify the two business arms of the
corporation.  He said that effective immediately, the failed Coca-Cola
product "New Coke" would be brought back, noting that it failed due to
marketing problems and not technical problems.  To address those
issues, the new product would be renamed "Coke 95" upon release, and a
coupon for a free case of the soda will be included with every purchase
of Windows 95.

The second product announcement was a version of Windows 95 that
requires less resources of the computer.  This product, to be titled
"Diet Windows 95", will only use 50 Megabytes of hard disk storage, and
will instead have a lighter version of networking software, called
AspartNet.

Future plans include the development of SMIP, the Soda Machine Internet
Protocol, and inclusion of all Coke machines on the eWorld network and
eventually on the World Wide Web.


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Zeigen's Source: Mary Beth
Author: aparently this person, not me:

    -- Steve

================================================================================
#define NAME    "Steven_Webb"
#define PHONE   "(303) 661-7696"  /* work phone */
#define PROJECT "Iceberg/Freezer embeded software development FCS & FDE cards"
#define L_WORDS "Linux, Letterman, Laughter, Lunch meat, Liverwurst, Legos"