Microsoft today announced that it will be changing its name to "Moft", which will clear up space on users' hard disks. It is estimated that a typical Windows 95 installation contains about 2,842,597 iterations of the word "Microsoft", in copyright notices, end-user license agreements, 'About' screens, as well as several multi-megabyte files containing nothing else (the so-called ego.dll series), etc. So, after the change, a user will have about 14 MBytes more disk space.

Stock prices of hard-disk manufacturers dipped slightly after the announcement. "Well, the programs will take up less space on the user's disk," said Bill Gates, CEO of Moft. "But we have never cared about that. The change will allow us to ship Windows 98 on 13 disks instead of 14, thus saving about $50 million a year in media costs.

We are also looking at shortening the names of some of our software products; for instance 'The Microsoft Exchange' may be changed to 'The Moft Pit'. Gates denied that the move was because of problems with the alleged long filename support in Win95 which still uses 8.3 filenames underneath. He did admit, however, that "MICROSO~1" did look a little ugly.

Gates added that the junior programmer who discovered the potential savings has been rewarded with a free copy of 'Moft Off for Moft Win 98'.