The Trouble with Being Numero Uno

A Yahoo named Amr Awadallah whacked up a subtitle parody of 300 as a commentary on Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo.

As Microsoft, we are the Persian forces, coming to the free land of Yahoo to ask for submission or some such nonsense. Sunnyvale gets to be the bastion of liberal thought, while Redmond is portrayed as a uninspired collective wanting nothing more than to grow in size.

I can really only appreciate the design of the joke, because as a part of Microsoft, I have a more humane view of the company than the rest of the world. The part of this that upsets me is how handcuffed we are. There’s no effective way we at Microsoft can comment on this sort of thing with the same tone; it’d only be funny to my co-workers, while for anyone else it’d be in extremely poor taste.

As a postscript, you’ve got to enjoy the irony of an ad for this parody appearing on Facebook.