Poor Photoshopped approximation
Jason Fry at The Wall Street Journal reports on the D: All Things Digital conference, including this bit about Bill Gates.
The Microsoft Corp. chairman’s appearances in parody videos have long been a staple of Comdex and other digerati gatherings, showing a more-playful, self-deprecating side of the Redmond, Wash., tech titan and its leader. Mr. Gates’s latest video incarnation, shown at the D: conference Monday, cast him in a send-up of “Napoleon Dynamite,” with Mr. Gates tagging along with the movie’s vertically haired title character (played by Jon Heder) and playing straight man to his rambling questions about Microsoft technology (no teleporting either of mice or men), listening patiently to Napoleon’s Dungeons & Dragons-style ideas for Microsoft Bob, and weathering Napoleon’s scorn that the powers that come along with Mr. Gates’s knighthood are decidedly limited. (No, Mr. Gates does not lead centaur armies, though Napoleon does warn a co-worker that “he’s a flipping knight — he can like joust and everything.”)
Of course I’m working on getting a copy of the video, but it’s a Microsoft produced the film and hasn’t been made available to the public. If you work for Microsoft, or have friends who do, see what you can do to build a groundswell for them to release the video. Reports are it’s quite funny…
There was also a Microsoft spoof of the Matrix with Balmer. It took place in the interrogation room. I didn’t get to see all of it, just a clip, but it was a dig at Linux.
The main agent has a laptop and is talking to Balmer and says something like “As you can see Mr. Balmer we have lots of ….” He then looks at his screen with a penguin background and an error box (linux) and motions to the other agent and says “Damn. Could you log onto a message board download the latest video driver code, and recompile the kernal for me please?”
I’d like to see the whole thing of that one.
The best of the Gates Balmer films I have seen was a parody of a then current TV ad.
Gates and Balmer are driving down a suburban road, see a computer out with the trash in front of a house. They stop load it into the back seat. As they continue driving they notice a smell from the computer. We see them driving away after placing the computer by trash cans. The computer was a Sun.