Monday, October 6 12:00 AM ET

Microsoft Getting Serious About Upgrading Users to Vista

Redmond, WA – Slow adoption by businesses and consumers has Microsoft getting serious about moving customers to Windows Vista.

Steve Ballmer announced the two-pronged strategy at a press conference on Monday. "The first part of the rollout has been our marketing campaign which started off with the successful Mojave experiment, the Seinfeld ads, and now the 'I'm a PC' ads."

For the second part of the strategy, Ballmer revealed the Microsoft would be going back to using its position as the dominant operating system maker to their advantage.  "We're going to get aggressive with users who won't upgrade, and I'm going to play a part."

Ballmer then turned it over to Vance Fredericks, the executive in charge of this second line of attack.  "This project is targeted at XP users who don't see the benefits of upgrading to Vista.  The first change will be to install a desktop wallpaper of a naked Steve Ballmer during the next update.  Customers will be unable to change the background, unless they upgrade to Vista."

Fredericks said that even that might not convince customers to upgrade.  "The second line of attack will be to downgrade Internet Explorer users to version 6.0 beta.  Other browser installations will be blocked.  The home page will be changed to a Windows Vista upgrade screen."

Fredericks was confident that these two tactics would be enough to get many customers to voluntarily upgrade to Vista.  "We considered releasing the source code of XP to a team of virus writers so they could better target XP, but we don't let anybody see the source code."

Ballmer did not mention if Microsoft would be using their army of evil monkeys they had successfully used in the past.