They're up in heaven, and God's sitting on the great white throne. God addresses Al first.

“Al, what do you believe in?”

Al replies, “Well, I believe that the combustion engine is evil and that we need to save the world from CFCs and that if any more freon is used,the whole earth will become a greenhouse and we'll all die.” God thinks for a second and says “Okay, I can live with that.

Come and sit at my left.”

God then addresses Bill Clinton. “Bill, what do you believe in?”

Bill Clinton replies, “Well, I believe in power to the people. I think people should be able to make their own choices about things and that no one should ever be able to tell someone else what to do. I also believe in feeling people's pain.” God thinks for a second and says “Okay, that sounds good. Come and sit at my right.”

God then address Bill Gates. “Bill Gates, what do you believe?”

Bill Gates replies, “I believe you're in my chair.”

Bill Gates dies in a car crash and ends up in front in front of This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
St. Peter says I don't know what to do with you. You've created many jobs and helped a lot of people in the new electronic age, but you've also been a royal pain to some of our big contributers. I'll tell you what, I'll let you have a look at heaven and hell and choose for yourself.
So St. Peter shows Bill heaven, with the clouds and Angels and harps, and Bill thinks to himself: “OK, as far as it goes.”
Then St. Peter shows Bill hell, with scantily clad bathing beauties on a tropical beach with palm trees and Bill thinks to himself: “This is a no-brainer!”
So Bill says to St. Peter: “I'll take hell!”
Two weeks later St. Peter thinks to himself: “I wonder how Bill is doing?”
So he drops by hell and finds Bill chained to a wall, consumed by flames and screaming in agony.
“Where are the bathing beauties, where's the beach?” Cried Bill. “This isn't what you showed me!”
“That”, said St. Pete, “was a demo.”

BILL GATES IN HEAVEN

Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven.

When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area. Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd.

Booze and drugs were being passed around. Fights were commonplace. Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in all, the scene looked like Woodstock gone metastatic.

Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow lettering.

“Hello,” said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. “My name is Gabriel and I'll be your induction coordinator.” Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. “No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel who died in a car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese in which case it's first name first.”

“Gates, Bill.” Gabriel started searching though the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. “What's going on here?” asked Bill. “Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?”

Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then Gabriel looked up in surprise. “It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are over five billion people on earth. Jesus, when God said to ‘go forth and multiply,' he didn't say ‘like rabbits!' With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?”

“I guess not.”

“You guess right. So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions.” Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more, and then continued. “Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment.”

“Job assignment?”

“Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your rear and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!” Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. “Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham.” Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. “No, he's not that Abraham.”

Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait.

“Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing infrastructure,” explained Abraham. “As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries.”

“I had to wait three weeks,” said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. “Well,” Bill offered, “maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up.”

Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. “Your job ill be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works.”

Bill could barely contain his excitement. “Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!”

“We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?”

“You bet!”

Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. But the center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, half a million ....

.... Macintoshes ....

.... all running Claris software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!

The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. “What about PCs???” he exclaimed. “What about Windows??? What about Excel??? What about Word???”

“You're forgetting something,” said Abraham.

“What's that?” asked Bill plaintively.

“This is Heaven,” explained Abraham. “We need a computer system that's heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, then ....

.... GO TO H….!”

If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...

.... Oh, wait a minute, he already does.

For the first time in, oh, a decade, I think, something from Microsoft shipped on time: Jennifer Katharine Gates, weighed 8 pounds 6 ounces when she was downloaded, er, born on Friday, April 26 at 6:11 p.m.

And what do Baby Gates and Daddy's products have in common?

1. Neither can stand on its own two feet without a LOT of third party support.

2. Both barf all over themselves regularly.

3. Regardless of the problem, calling Microsoft Tech Support won't help.

4. As they mature, we pray that they will be better than that which preceeded them.

5. At first release they're relatively compact, but they seem to grow and grow and grow with each passing year.

6. Although announced with great fanfare, pretty much anyone could have produced one.

7. They arrive in shaky condition with inadequate documentation.

8. No matter what, it takes several months between the announcement and the actual release.

9. Bill gets the credit, but someone else did most of the work.

“Wiiiiilliam Gaaaates...”

“Oh, hi, Satan. What's up downstairs?”

“It's tiiiiime...”

“Yeah, but we're still debugging Memphis, and Ballmer swears he'll wipe out Adobe before lunch, and Melinda wants to change the tile in the third-floor kitchen again, and...”

“Sorry, Bill. I've given you too many extensions already, not to mention the Oracle8 launch event disaster, not to mention Steve Jobs' head on a platter.”

“Yeah, that was a good one. I think you enjoy this as much as I...”

“Regardless, a deal's a deal. Your soul is mine, Bill Gates. And today is the day you pay your eternal debt to me.”

“Now, let's be reasonable here, Satan...”

“Reasonable?!? You want reasonable?!? You're the richest man in the world! You've got a beautiful wife and daughter! Microsoft is the most powerful company on the planet! We're even using NT to run hell's WAN server! And frankly, it sucks. That's one of the reasons I've come to collect. If you can't get my network to run right, you'll spend the afterlife writing Windows applications that run on doorbells...”

“What's your alternative, Satan? Netware? AppleTalk? OS/2? You're a funny guy for someone who breathes fire.”

“Well, God is porting all his heaven-critical applications to Java...”

“Java?!? Stop it, Satan. You're going to make me wet my pants again like that time you told me to buy Novell for $50 a share.”

“Yes, Java, running on Sun servers, IBM plumbing and Oracle databases with thin clients accessing the apps via the web through Netscape Navigator.”

“That's not a solution, that's one of those Grimm's fairy tales that scare children to death. I have yet to see an NC actually being used to do anything except crash during demonstrations. Look, Java is a nice little language for animating web sites, but Shockwave after too many espressos isn't going to displace Windows as an applications platform on hundreds of millions of PCs.”

“Nevertheless, Java is the future of computing, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give God a strategic technology advantage!”

“Satan, what if I told you I could kill off Java with a single word?”

“Interesting. Tell me more.”

“Wait a minute. What's in it for me?”

“I promise I won't turn you into Larry Ellison's bidet right this second.”

“Okay, that works for me. Here's the word...disable.”

“Disable what?”

“Disable Java support in Internet Explorer.”

“You mean Microsoft's web browser won't run Java anymore?”

“That's right, brimstone breath. You want to run Java, give Netscape 50 bucks per seat and pray that IBM doesn't buy the company to merge Communicator with Lotus Notes.”

“The Department of Justice will...”

“Will what? Punish me because I won't support a product my enemies want to use to destroy my company? Chevrolet dealers don't have to sell Fords. Pepsi's restaurants don't have to offer Coke. Why does Microsoft have to support Java?”

“It's an industry standard...”

“It's an industry hallucination.”

“There will be a public outcry...”

“From who? Network managers? MIS? The CIO? They're up to their nosehairs in Cobol getting ready for January 1, 2000. To them, Java is still a cute word for coffee.”

“What about all those spiffy applets on thousands of web sites?”

“Microsoft owns 100 percent of the Apple and Windows preload market for browsers, and our overall share has gone from zero to half in two years. It's a safe bet most people will soon use IE for web access. If they come to a site that doesn't work because of Java, they'll simply jump to the next one. Trust me,
developers will switch to ActiveX faster than you can say ‘Playstation.'”

“What about other platforms...”

“Like Intel has competition?”

“Interactive TV...”

“We call it WebTV in Redmond.”

“Venture capitalists have invested billions...”

“To get a date with Kim Polese.”

“Sun will write a plug-in...”

“Not without the hidden APIs.”

“Of all my minions, you are my very favorite, Bill. You may stay.”

“Thanks, Satan. Now, about that Exchange license agreement...”

Eventually, Bill croaks and Satan is there to greet him. "Welcome Mr. Gates, we've been waiting for you. This will be your home for all eternity. You've been selfish, greedy and a big liar all your life. Now, since you've got me in a good mood, I'll be generous and give you a choice of three places in which you'll be locked up forever."

Satan takes Bill to a huge lake of fire in which millions of poor souls are tormented and tortured.

He then takes him to a massive coliseum where thousands of people are chased about and devoured by starving lions.

Finally, he takes Bill to a tiny room in which there is a beautiful young blonde with an alluring look on her face, sitting at a table on which there is a bottle of the finest wine. To Bill's delight, he sees a PC in the corner.

Without hesitation, Bill says "I'll take this option."

"Fine," says Satan, allowing Bill to enter the room. Satan locks the room after Bill. As he turns around, he bumps into Lucifer.

"That was Bill Gates!" cried Lucifer. "Why did you give him the best place of all!"

"That's what everyone thinks" snickered Satan. "The bottle has a hole in it and the girl hasn't!"

"What about the PC?"

"It's got Windows XP!" laughed Satan. "And it's missing three keys,"

"Which three?"

"Control, Alt and Delete."

Bill Gates dies in a car accident. He finds himself being sized up by God.... "Well, Bill, I'm really confused on this call. I'm not sure whether to send you to Heaven or Hell. After all, you helped society enormously by putting a computer in almost every home in America, yet you also stole Windows '95 from Apple. I'm going to do something I've never done before. In your case, I'm going to let you decide where you want to go." "Well, what's the difference between the two?"Bill asks. God says, "I'm willing to let you visit both places briefly, if it will help your decision." "Fine, but where should I go first?" "I'll leave that up to you." "Okay, then," says Bill. "Let me try Hell first." So Bill goes to Hell. It's a beautiful, clean, sandy beach with clear waters and lots of beautiful women running around, playing in the water, laughing and frolicking about. The sun is shining, the temperature is perfect. He is very pleased. "This is great!" he tells God. "If this is Hell, I REALLY want to see Heaven!" "Fine," says God, and off they go. Heaven is a place high in the clouds, with angels drifting about, playing harps and singing. It's nice, but not as enticing as Hell. Bill thinks for a quick minute and decides. "Hmm. I think I'd prefer Hell," he tells God. "Fine," replies God. "As you desire." So Bill Gates goes to Hell. Two weeks later, God decides to check on the late billionaire to see how he is doing in Hell. When he gets there, he finds Bill shackled to a wall, screaming amidst hot flames in a dark cave, being burned and tortured by demons. "How's everything going?" he asks Bill. Bill responds, his voice filled with anguish and disappointment, "This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago! I can't believe this is happening! What happened to that other place, with the beaches and the beautiful women playing in the water?" "Oh ... that was the SCREENSAVER."