Redmond, WA - In an effort to boost sagging revenue growth, Microsoft today announced it will begin selling advertising space on the company's world famous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)©. The screen, displayed whenever Windows cannot recover from an error in the operating system's core, until now has historically served as a display of unintelligible diagnostic data that has not made any sense to anyone, ever, according to a survey conducted by the Gartner Group. In addition, the BSOD has scared most users because it was composed mainly of hexadecimal digits that, which in extreme cases, can lead to hallucinations, epileptic seizures and homosexuality in primates and rats.

The Bud Screen of Death

"Past efforts to make the blue screen more helpful by adding animated characters and changing the hue to a more user-friendly beige or aqua have failed," said head of BSOD Development Kate Verban. "When we failed to make the BSOD user-friendly, we decided that at least it could generate revenue. Displayed more than a billion times a day globally, the blue screen has a captive audience, with over 90 percent of the computer desktops in the world. This makes it an excellent platform for advertisers, comparable only to the Super Bowl and makes watching the blue screen just about as exciting."

Tom Gordon, Director of Marketing for Anheuser-Busch, confirmed today that the beverage giant will be among the first advertisers, "We think it's a tremendous opportunity," said Gordon. "Picture this, you're working late at night on a crucial project. Your computer crashes. You've lost all your important work. It's definitely time for a beer, and we'll be there to remind you that the beer should be a beechwood-aged Budweiser."

For earlier versions of Windows, the BSOD ads will be installed using the Windows Update feature. However, Windows XP systems connected to the Internet will automatically install the new software in the middle of the night when no one is looking.