David Miscaviage, formerly CEO of RTC, will become the new executive chairman of the Microsoft Board, as well as taking the title of Senior Vice President for Religious Technology. Eugine Ingram was named to be the new VP of Human Resources.

Gates announced that future releases of Windows and Windows NT would be delayed, and merged into a new product, to be called Windows OT. "We were meeting stiff resistance to our product in the Macintosh user community", said Gates, "It was something of a religion to them. Now that we have Scientology[tm] religious technology, we have removed the biggest barrier to the universal use of Microsoft products." Windows OT will feature tightly integrated networking, web, and security features. Customers will be required to sign a billion year extended service agreement, which will permit Microsoft's own servers to regularly screen the content of their disk drives to detect and delete viruses and what Gates referred to as "Body Thetans".

It will also detect and delete pirated software. "The protection of intellectual property is perhaps the least understood crisis facing Americal today. Our customers understand this", Gates said. "We want every disk in the world to be Clear of degraded data." To hasten adoption of Windows OT, Microsoft will cease all support for previous versions of Windows 30 days after OT is released. Gates was vague on the release date, committing only to have cut over to Windows OT "by the year 2000".

The deal, which greatly exceeds Microsoft's cash on hand as well as the gross domestic product of most of the world's economies, will be financed partly as a stock swap, and partly by selling junk bonds. Microsoft shares plummeted 47 points in the minutes following the announcement, prompting the suspension of trading.

When asked about the merger, Gates explained, "I was walking down University Way in Seattle a few months ago, when this really cute girl approached me with a free personality test. I may have been the richest man in America, but you know, I was always a bit socially awkward. I hated being thought of as a 'nerd'. Scientology has helped me to overcome all that, and to realize my true potential as a sentient being. Now we're ready to take the whole Microsoft user community up the Bridge to Total Personal Computing."

(Donor: Robert Goodwin)