Totally Off The Hook

Scene: the Microsoft campus, Zune division. The Microsoft peons have had a productive morning and a hearty lunch.

Boss: That Zune sure is a remarkable piece of machinery.

Peon 1: Sure is, Boss!

Boss: An iPod killer, is what it is.

Peon 2: An iPod and then some! Our market share is going through the roof!

Peon 1: We've made a better iPod than Apple! It's all blue skies from here!

Boss: Hey Peon 3, what's that you're looking at?

Peon 3: Oh, it's Steve Jobs doing his talk.

Boss: Jobs, eh? Hm. Anything interesting?

Peon 3: He just said they had three exciting new announcements. One is a wide screen iPod!

Boss: Widescreen?

Peon 1: And a phone. And an internet thingie.

Peon 2: Holy shit! The new iPod is an iPod and a phone and an internet terminal?

Boss: What?

Peon 3: Look at that screen! And ... with the fingers! Gah!

(Peons and Boss watch in stunned silence.)

Peon 1: I think Steve Jobs just killed the iPod.

Peon 2: But we're the iPod killer ... aren't we?

Peon 3: So we just went through all this work to copy something that just got obsoleted?

Peon 1: It's not that bad.

Peon 3: We may as well be shipping flint axeheads.

Peon 2: It's really not that bad.

Peon 3: Did you see that thing with the zooming pictures with two fingers? Or the GPS and the Starbucks? Or, fuck, did you see him email a picture to someone while still on the phone with them?

Peon 1: Well ...

Peon 3: What do we do, play music? That's it? That's all we got? They have a phone and an iPod and a PDA and a fucking laptop, in a package that looks like it came from the Minority Report, and we got ... we got what iPods did five years ago? Looking like iPods looked five years ago? Do I have that right?

Boss: ...

Peon 1: ... and they have Google.

Peon 3: Fuck.