Microsoft Introduces "Low Powerpoint"

In its latest energy-saving move, the Seattle-based Microsoft Corporation for World Domination has announced the creation of "Low Powerpoint" for inclusion in its 2008.5 Office Suite.

"Ever since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Microsoft has been the clear leader in 'persuasion technology'," Bill Gates explained in a press conference, ostensibly referring to the company's ubiquitous slide-based presentation software.

"Microsoft has long been committed to winning the power struggle... I mean, the struggle to win power and save the world, for ourselves. Our goal is to save energy by disempowering the user as much as possible. Power is energy divided by time. If an application takes a long time to do something (because, for example, it continually crashes your operating system), then it is a low power application. We can't reduce how much power or memory our operating system uses; but we can reduce how much power is wasted by giving less to users."

Power saving features of Low Powerpoint will include the replacement of "clip art" with "fixed art", saving 100 billion virtual paperclips a year. All slides will simply come with a picture of a silhouette scratching his/her head with a question mark halo floating on top, as this is the only "clip art" most users use. Additional art will be guaranteed tacky to improve placement options. Low Powerpoint will use only environmentally-friendly lead-free bullet points.

Also announced was that the popular term "Death by Powerpoint" will now be flagged as an tetragrammatical error by the "Spelling and Windows Genuine Advantage®" checker. It will be flagged as a violation of the "thou shalt not disparage Microsoft with Microsoft Software" rule, which first appeared in the beta version of the Ten Commandments. However, people are free to use any of the other numerous operating systems that run on PCs to disparage Microsoft.

Microsoft forwarded all questions on the new software to "balloon help" in their current Office Suite.

"It looks like you are trying to create a news article! Would you like to open our news article wizard?" the Microsoft Office anthropomorphic talking spokespaperclip responded when asked to comment. The Wizard suggested we change the title of this article to "Microsoft™ Powerpoint® 2008.5 to be loaded with New Features!" and replace the text with a bulleted list of suggested new features. He issued many other mystical utterances and software recommendations, but failed to answer further questions.

Microsoft's main competitor, Apple computers, has countered the "more time, less power" argument by pointing out that if the additional user energy required exceeded the additional user time needed, the power usage would go up.

"There is a principle we like to call conservation of mental energy," an Apple spokesfarmer explained, "One person's laziness leads to another person's frustration. Frustration causes the wasted dissipation of mental energy as heat, which is absorbed either by the operating system, the computer itself (if it is light enough to throw), or by whatever colleagues happen to be unfortunate enough to be in the radiation zone. This, in turn, leads to more wasted energy and ultimately global overheating."