A blonde takes her child to school to sign up for a sport.
She goes over to the football table and says, “I would like to sign my child up for football.”

“Ok,” the coach says, “Is there any special position he would like to play?”

“Oh yes,” the blonde replies, “He would love to be a pitcher.”

These are several musings, in no particular order, of things that would be different if Microsoft made cars.

A particular model year of car wouldn’t be available until AFTER that year,instead of before.
Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you’d have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would just die for no reason, you’d have to restart it. For some strange reason, you would just accept this.
You could only have one person at a time in your car, unless you bought a car ‘95 or a car NT, but then you’d have to buy more seats.
You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car. Wait a sec, it’s that way NOW!
Sun Motorsystems would make a car that was solar powered, twice as reliable, 5 times as fast, but only ran on 5% of the roads.
The oil, alternator, gas, engine warning lights would be replaced with a single “General Car Fault” warning light.
People would get excited about the “new” features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other brands for years.
We would still be waiting on the “6000 sux 58′” model to come out.
We’d all have to switch to Microsoft Gas ™.
The US government would be GETTING subsidies from an automaker, instead of giving them.
New seats will force everyone to have the same size butt.

“Think of the Internet as a highway.”
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the “Information Superhighway.” They don’t know didley about the net. It’s nothing like a superhighway. That’s a rotten metaphor.
Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net…

A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection.

No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant- vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.

AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120.

No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.

No offramps. None.

usual disclaimer
I didn’t write that. They’re a bit harsh on AOL. I added the hypertext links corresponding to the particular operating systems, and I stand by my choices.