The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and a YSL tie leaned out of the window and asked our shepherd: "If I can tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looks at the yuppie, then at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers "sure!" The yuppie parks the car, whips out his notebook, connects it to a cell-phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system, scans the area, opens up a database and some 60 Excel spreadsheets with complex formulas.

Finally he prints out a 150 page report on his hi-tech miniaturized printer, turns around to the shepherd and says: "you have here exactly 1586 sheep!" "That is correct, take one of the sheep" says the shepherd. He watches the young man select an animal and bundle it in his Cherokee.

Then the shepherd says: "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me my sheep back?" "Okay, why not!" answers the young man. "You are a consultant" says the shepherd.

"That is correct" says the yuppie, "How did you guess that?"
"Easy" answers the shepherd. "You turn up here although nobody called you. You want to be paid for the answer to a question I already knew the solution. And you don't know anything about my business because you took my dog.

And if Microsoft designed your watch...

Don’t try telling me computers are smart. There are smarter –and substantially cheaper—appliances in my home that we don’t call ‘computers’. Take the refrigerator. When they delivered it two years ago, all I had to do was plug it in, and without any knowledge of refrigerants or need to install the pump, it began keeping our meats and ice creams in good shape. Imagine what we would do if the freezer occasionally shut down saying it was ‘overloaded’?

How come the spin cycle in our clothes dryer (which undoubtedly is controlled by a microprocessor) never changes the configuration of our socks and sweaters, just for the heck of it? America would be a different place if people were asked to log on, enter a password, and occasionally upgrade to a higher RAM every time they switched on the TV.

I’m a great fan of Microsoft products (if only because they have become so much Macintosh-like), but I dread to think what life would be had Microsoft designed the first calculator, or the earliest operating system for the garage door opener.