Microsoft jubilant after first ever patch-free period

The champagne corks have been popping at Microsoft HQ after the company attained a new zenith in product excellence. For the first time in the history of the software monolith, a period of time has passed during which no new vulnerabilites or bugs were detected in Windows products, and therefore no urgent software patches were breathlessly released while panic-stricken sysadmins ran around like headless chickens and threw themselves from tall cases of rack-mounted servers.

Using the world-renowned Rockall atomic clock our experts were able to discern that between GMT 23:45:12 and GMT 23:45:48 on the 30 March 2004, the Microsoft Critical Update website remained eerily silent. True, the patch-free period began and ended with "Code Orange" alerts provoked by serious security holes in Internet Explorer 6, but this still leaves an amazing 36-second span during which no life-threatening cock-ups were discovered.

Microsoft front man Bill “too dull for a nickname” Gates was quick to herald the news as vindication of Microsoft’s innovative testing methodology. Since its inception the company has foregone traditional testing methods in favour of its unique “customer interface” policy.

“Of course we could test our products before we release them,” explained Mr Gates, “but at the end of the day there’s only a few thousand Microsoft employees compared to millions of Microsoft users. It makes more sense to let our customers do the testing and concentrate our limited resources on fire-fighting and nobbling rival Web browsers.”

“And they do a great job too,” Gates enthused. “We’ve already had thousands of bugs reported in our new Longhorn operating system and that’s not even been released yet. These people are really on the ball, let me tell you."

“As the patch-free period shows, our policy really works. Some of our earlier products such as Windows 3.1 are already relatively bug-free and we’ve finally got rid of that annoying fuc*king paperclip.”

The news is expected to create utter pandemonium among the Linux and Mac OS communities as hundreds of thousands of users rush to the shops in search of Windows products, safe in the knowledge that they are — finally — the intelligent choice for 21st-century computing.

In related news, millions of people who had gathered on mountains tops to await the end of the world after Microsoft predicted the imminent destruction of civilisation, decided to go home after the promised apocalypse failed to materialise. Bill Gates had issued the warning after his company had been forced by the European Commission to unbundle Media Player from preloaded OSes.

"Make no mistake, we're talking nuclear Winter, mass extinction events and plague and famine upon the land," a Microsoft spokesman thundered after the ruling which carried with it a $800bn fine — estimated to represent around 0.001 per cent of the company's daily profit.

"I've been up here a week, waiting for the end," one visibly-disappointed Japanese punter told us via VoIP from the summit of Mount Fuji. He did, however, pledge to keep vigil for another couple of days — or until his laptop batteries ran out, whichever came soonest — in the hope that the MS supremo's dire prediction would yet come true. "If Chairman Bill says the world will end, then the world will end," he told us, eyeing a nasty-looking samurai sword.