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Microsoft ‘dresses up’ Office 2000

There's no bugs whatever -- official

Microsoft forced its Office 2000 developers to wear dresses to ensure that bugs have been found and fixed, according to Kurt DelBene, general manager for Outlook.

Whether or not this was indeed sufficient punishment for the developers is still open to question. Three of the team were women, although sources claim they regularly wore chinos and Microsoft standard uniform shirts anyway. Microsoft would not confirm or deny whether or not any of the team were known cross-dressers.

According to a chart shown during DelBene’s keynote speech at today’s Microsoft Office 2000 Deployment Conference in Nice, the bugs were at a minimum level, low enough for the product to be deemed safe to release.

"We worked really hard on finding and solving bug problems," said DelBene, "we had big bug busting sessions where everyone stayed really late and we brought in pizza and we tried to bring in the release date. When we were trying to ensure that certain bugs had been solved, we confronted the developers with the question, 'will you where a dress to work tomorrow if you are sure there are no bugs?' We’ve had a few developers wearing dresses."

Office 2000 will be available in the UK retail channel on June 8, although Select customers will start receiving product towards the end of this month.

DelBene’s final moment was to show a video of the development team giving Office 2000 the all-clear for manufacture. While the camera panned around the various faces giving geeky remarks such as "ship it", "go for it" and "go baby", there were no signs of dresses, which means, one would assume that Office 2000 may still have some bugs up its jumper. ®

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