Did You Get Microsoft's TechEd Joke?

Microsoft opened this week's event with a "Back to the Future" spoof. The company's Server and Tools Business Senior Vice President Bob Muglia joined actor Christopher Lloyd in a time machine. You know, time machine? Next week's Apple developer conference will put Mac OS X 10.5 front and center; Apple calls one new, prominent feature Time Machine.

Now do you get it? Microsoft got to its time machine riff before Apple. I was a little slow, as in three days, getting the joke. Either I'm no candidate for Mensa or it was just too subtle a joke.

Maybe Microsoft intended no joke, but c'mon, what a coincidence?

Video: Microsoft Back to the Future Parody

The video above is incomplete, only capturing the first five minutes of the "Back to the Future" spoof. There's a Microsoft archived stream of the event, which opens with the roughly 9-minute segment.

The spoof, which looks like a costly production, is Microsoft at its self-deprecating best. For all the company's faults, one of its distinguishing strengths is self-recrimination through humor. In the parody, Muglia is booed off the stage for another "vision thing" speech.

"These guys have heard visions up the wazoo," Lloyd scolds. The actor, reprising his professor role, takes Muglia into the past to see other Microsoft future visions that were never realized so the executive can learn "why your audience is so tired of Microsoft visions."

Microsoft pokes fun at itself for failing to deliver some highly propagandized technologies, and there have been some beauties. In defending one vision fiasco, Muglia pleads, "We were just thinking big."

"Big waste of time," replies Lloyd.

There's more parody here than Microsoft simply poking fun at its past mistakes. The time machine concept is a great upstage of Apple—again, for anyone cerebral enough to get the joke.

Speaking of time, Microsoft's MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit) has a new general manager. He's been doing some time travel, too, into the future. His hours-ago post is time-stamped 5:08 pm. In any event, whether it is the past, present or future, Craig Eisler has replaced Roz Ho.

Eisler really needs to get his team moving, lest the time span between Mac Office releases rival that of Windows or Windows Server. Apple moved over to Intel-based processors 18 months ago and Microsoft still hasn't delivered a supporting version of Mac Office. The current version of Office 2004 is kind of stinky on the shelf. Meanwhile, after years of delays, OpenOffice.org has finally released an alpha version of its open-source productivity suite that supports the Mac user interface; no more X11 workarounds.

Maybe those Mac Office delays are intentional; it's possible, if Lloyd took Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to an alternate future where Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the problem and not Napoleon Dynamite.

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