We've been really busy for the past few months here. We were sitting around one day, trying to figure out how to "maximize returns on our investment." Put simply, we want to make boatloads of cash while sitting around doing nothing. So we've decided to spin off our own Internet stock!       What's that, you say? We have no product to sell? We're just a bunch of people sitting around, eating barbecue chips and waiting for someone to show up with the beer? That's one way to look at it. But as the market has proven, you don't need a moneymaking venture to become a hot Internet stock. You don't even need any prospects of future growth. Since we have some income after returning yesterday's empties, we're already looking better than most of the Internet stocks out there. So let's rock! Our new corporation, Cynicor, will do nothing but scan the Internet, look for the ridiculous, and offer up our findings. We project $3 billion in profit for fiscal year 2003 based on, uh, income from banner ad swaps.       Our first product offering is a recent story passed off by our friends at ZD/MSNBC. It reported that in the 105 days after March 31, 250 million copies of the source code for Netscape Navigator had been downloaded. We sent these claims to the Cynicor data labs for analysis and found some interesting stuff. If we were to take these numbers at face value, it would work out to about 27.55 downloads per second—at 16.1MB or more per download. Assuming an equal load across the approximately 110 mirror sites serving up Mozilla, that would mean a steady download rate of 4MB per second per site—68 times as much as microsoft.com serves up in its entirety. (Not to mention the question of where all those copies went. Did a million C/C++ developers each get 250 copies?) We pointed out that they probably meant 250 thousand copies, which is still an impressive number. To date there's been no correction.       Second, we took a look at the now-famous "our first time.com." Let's see. They found two nineteen-year-olds who were virgins. Despite this humility, they were willing to "do it" for the first time in front of thousands of strangers. Gotcha. And anyone believed this?       Next, we took on the passage of the Computer Decency Act II. Thankfully, it's now illegal to distribute material that's "harmful" to minors. That will certainly pass court muster better than the hazy word "indecent" ever could. Why not just change the wording to "distasteful" if you want to get really specific? (Full disclosure note: thanks to the mayor of NYC, the board meeting of Cynicor has been moved from Cheeks Topless Club to Cheeks Lingerie Club. Thanks, Rudy.)       And what's this in our mailbox? "We are asking for you to vote on whether the Federal Government should regulate bulk e-mail (SPAM)? Call our 900 number and vote yes or no! Only 95¢ per call!" Wow. If only there were some way for us to let our views be known to our member of Congress without enriching a spammer.       So what drives us at Cynicor? Simple. We believe that with our help, the world can become a much more bitter, distrustful place. And if it does, maybe we'll stop hearing about people being taken in by stupid, half-baked schemes. "Our first time," indeed. Maybe if they had topless pictures of Marv Albert we'd actually be interested.       We expect to be trading on Nasdaq under the symbol CYNI before the week is out. Look for us to open around 25, shoot up to 150 on the first day as each share changes hands an average of six times, and settle in at around 70. We'll go up and down by about eight points a day as people need to buy us to satisfy shorts. If we can issue enough shares, we might even be able to reach that $3 billion target by the end of the month. We'll be an attractive stock, with one of the lowest P/E ratios in history. (When earnings are consistently negative, that P/E gets into the negative hundreds without breaking a sweat.)       Cynicor! —J.T.       This editor's note is not an offering or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any service, security, or commodity herein described in any state, country, or jurisdiction in which the offering is unauthorized. No sales representative, dealer, or other person is authorized to give any information or make any representations other than those contained in this editor's note. Past performance does not necessarily indicate future success. All investors are encouraged to fully investigate any stock before making an investment. Investors should always check with their licensed financial advisor, psychic friends network, and/or mother to determine the suitability of any investment.

From the September 1998 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer