Teary-Eyed Bill Gates Leaves Microsoft

Bill Gates shed tears as he left the top post at Microsoft, the company he founded 33 years ago, at a hastily assembled Bellevue, Washington gathering of employees who watched Gates and fellow Microsoft leader Steve Ballmer reminisce.

"Remember the time we took WordPerfect, that really brilliant competitor of ours, with a much better word processing program than ours, and crushed them like a bug," Gates asked Ballmer, "just because we could?"

Tears flowed freely as Ballmer recalled that moment, and then shared one of his own. "Remember the time we made all those antitrust lawyers stay up for four straight nights? When we were pretending we couldn't make up our minds about how to fight a government injunction? Just because we could?"

Gates dabbed at his eyes. "That was a beautiful memory," he shared. "Remember the time we ordered 400,000 pizzas and had them delivered to Apple? And we were hiding in the bushes across from their offices and watching all the pizza guys get in fistfights? Just because we could?"

The entire audience of employees was also weeping with fondness for the memories the two longtime Microsoft leaders were sharing.

"And remember the time," Ballmer added, "that we sold the American public--actually, the whole world--software that we hadn't fully debugged? And we made the whole world into our beta testers? So that everybody had to buy our software and then tell us about how to fix it, and then we could charge more money for updated versions? Just because we could?"

Gates nodded, openly sobbing by now. "Think about all the money we've sucked out of the world economy, and all the competitors we've destroyed through our untramelled use of our monopoly power, by becoming the sole superpower in software!"

And then the two men, their faces wet with tears, put their arms around each other and cried, "Just because we could!"