▶ YouTube Summaries

• YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS3XxRz03co
• Original title :: WTF Microsoft

A comedic tour of Microsoft's strangest old promotional videos, from Steve Ballmer's Windows sales pitch to a scrapped Windows XP campaign, with the backstory behind each. Prime concludes that the Ballmer era's goofy internal culture made him the most fun Microsoft CEO, whatever the stock price says.

"Except in Nebraska"

Ballmer's famous Windows sales pitch was an internal video, never aired, spoofing late-night ads by electronics retailer Crazy Eddie. The closing "except in Nebraska" joke parodies the state exclusions in ads of that era and refers to a real telecom quirk: Cold War-era Nebraska had huge phone trunk capacity and big call centers in Omaha, and toll-free numbers couldn't route in-state and out-of-state calls together, so national 800-number campaigns often left Nebraska out.

Windows 386 retailer tape

A training video sent to retailers starts as a Mission Impossible-style office drama (Linda must beat corporate raider T-Bone Perkins's takeover bid by 5pm) and at minute 7 turns into a rap about multitasking spreadsheets, databases and PageMaker under Windows 386.

Windows 95 video guide

A ~50-minute tutorial with Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston at the height of Friends, full of bad jokes, including fat jokes about "Boris the window washer".

Gates and Ballmer internal skits

All-hands videos parodied pop culture: a Night at the Roxbury bit, "What's up?" impressions, scooters and swings, a "future" grocery store with talking fruit, and Ballmer in The Matrix with a Linux jab: "write a new device driver and recompile a kernel".

The scrapped Windows XP ad

An August 2001 campaign set to Madonna's "Ray of Light" showed people flying over New York. After 9/11 it was dropped as tasteless and replaced in under two months; leftover online ads without flying scenes still used the song.