Apologies in advance … from a non PC source.
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Attention please -
Could all those that have turned up for yodelling lessons today, please stand to my right and form an orderly orderly orderly queue…
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!!! I was just reading that and it disappeared before my eyes…What was the punchline?
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Apologies if this has been posted before !
For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on …………
At a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill’s comments, Ford issued a press release stating:
"If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:"
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For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash…twice a day.
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Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
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Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
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Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
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Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
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The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
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The airbag system would ask, “Are you sure?” before deploying.
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Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
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Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
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You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
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When your car breaks, you have to call “customer service” in some foreign country and be instructed in a foreign language how to fix your car yourself.
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That’s a surprising comment.
Surely Ford must have heard that other manufacturers are using the same button to switch the engine on and off. 
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My favourite was no. 7.
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It’s a long time since I owned a Ford Cortina. The ignition switch accepted a key which was clicked clockwise to start and anti-clockwise to stop the engine. It’s much the same on my Merc and BMW today.
I do appreciate that newer cars seem to have a simple Start/Stop button that doesn’t require a key to be inserted or turned. Perhaps Ford have adopted this modern technology ?
OTOH, at home, my ancient Thinkpad does require me to Mouse over the “Start” icon in order to access the “Stop” option. Took me a while to grasp that concept !!
I can’t remember the last time my Windows PC crashed.
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Mine doesn’t crash very often. Sometimes Word seems to get stuck. If I try to scroll down, on releasing the mouse, the cursor springs back to the top of the page.
Switch off, wait, restart seams to clear it.
But I think the essence of most jokes is that they exaggerate real life !
My occasional SoH failures lead me to respond… Bear with me 
That list of Cars v PCs is from donkeys years ago, the early days of W95 iirc when home PCs were going through a massive development phase and things changed so quickly keeping pace was sometimes difficult. It wasn’t that funny then tbh and hasn’t gained anything over time, and the never-ending ‘joke’ about using Start to close it down completely misses that Start in Windows opens up access to the means of starting applications and processes, including the process to gracefully end a Windows session. The days of hitting the Off switch or even pulling the plug are long gone. It’s a process that needs to be started.
Cortina keys were standard surely, every car from my dad’s Wolsely and beyond was started and stopped with a key. I don’t recall my Mk1 Cortina or 1600E being any different. As for buttons, Volvo have had these for years, where a plastic fob is slotted into the dash and the Stop Start button below it does what it does once it’s in. Ford have owned Volvo and Aston Martin at various points over the not so recent past, and that tech was shared. Where a Volvo fob is a bit of plastic, the AM equivalent is the same but leather bound, but it’s still a slot for the fob and a Stop Start button.
Anyway…
Funny thing is, it never actually happened:
It’s a good joke though and why let the truth get in the way of a good joke
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But much much easier than before Windows (or Mac) was developed. For one thing, with window-based systems, most applications used common ways of doing things - similar buttons/menus and placements of these so that if you knew how to use Word Perfect (back in the day) you had a good chance of figuring out how to use Word, WordStar and several others. Similarly with spreadsheets - before Windows/Mac they all worked somewhat differently, but once we had GUIs they began to be much more interchangeable.
And upgrading the operating system didn’t really require much re-learning - and certainly not for each application.
I don’t think anyone ever took it as genuine tbh.
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