Microsoft's Gates Faces Off With Napoleon Dynamite

LOS ANGELES - Bill Gates is not known for his comic timing, but the world's richest man brought down the house at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference this week with a spoof video that paired him with an unlikely co-star: Napoleon Dynamite.

The taped sketch, shown during Gates' keynote to a hall of software developers in Los Angeles, cast Jon Heder — reprising the deadpan Idaho teen of last year's indie film hit — as a new Microsoft intern reporting for duty at the company's Redmond campus.

In the bit, Napoleon wanders the Microsoft grounds in his moon boots, pledges his vote to the chairman, and helps Gates plot corporate strategy with the same solemn cluelessness that made the film a $44 million sleeper.

The crowd of 5,000 programmers — a friendly audience for a joke about awkwardness — roared. Clips of the video were already circulating online by the next day, in the same word-of-mouth channels that made the film itself a phenomenon.

The skit continues a Microsoft tradition of keynote self-parody. Gates has previously appeared in spoofs riffing on "Austin Powers" and "The Matrix", and once donned a Matrix-style trench coat for a conference gag.

"We take the technology seriously, not ourselves," a Microsoft spokesman said.

The conference itself, the company's biggest developer event, is where Microsoft is showing off the next version of Windows, code-named Vista, and the new Office suite — the actual business of the week for the engineers in attendance.

Analysts say the humor has a purpose: Microsoft's developer outreach is a real competitive weapon, and a keynote that gets clipped and emailed around the world is marketing money cannot easily buy.

Heder, who shot to fame when the $400,000 "Napoleon Dynamite" became last year's surprise hit, has kept busy with studio comedies; the Microsoft gig, he has joked in interviews, is the most corporate work he has ever done.