You must be referring to our habit of poking fun at Gates and Microsoft. It’s true that we love a good techie joke as much as the next geek, but Bill Gates’ departure is a good time to reflect on all the good things Microsoft has done, aside from making Bill a zillionaire.

Why a cloud? Because, like a cloud, it could be anything. You might see a ducky, or a horsie, or “the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor.”

The June 30, 2008 edition of eWeek has an article by Stan Gibson entitled “End of an Era” about Bill Gates’ retirement from the company he founded in 1975. Gibson makes the point that Bill Gates embodied a rare combination of business savvy and a “passion for technology” that uniquely qualified him to help usher in the computer revolution of the 80’s and 90’s.

While it is true that Gates’ business practices could often be fairly described as ruthless and predatory, they enabled Microsoft to become a dominant force in computing, and this brought some benefits to consumers.

So, how did Bill Gates’ success benefit you? Well, for one thing, it furnished comedians with an endless supply of jokes, and everyone needs a little humor in their lives, don’t they? You can find hundreds of these by Googling “Bill Gates jokes”. Oddly, many of these jokes involve Bill Gates in Hell. Others are shorter, like this supposed entry from Bill Gates’ diary: “Memo to self: Next time, when my wife says we need to buy china, she means dishes.”

But seriously, one of the reasons that computers became a ubiquitous home commodity is because of Microsoft Windows and the PC clone. While Microsoft’s most serious rival, Apple, refused to allow clones of its machines, the IBM PC was being replicated by dozens of smaller companies. The flood of computers inevitably drove down the price, which made them more attractive to consumers. And nearly every PC clone was running a Microsoft operating system of MS DOS and then Windows.

Apple fans grouse that their company produces superior hardware and software, and there is some truth in that. However, Bill Gates grasped a very important fact about computing economics: it’s more important for software to be cheap and “good enough” than to be pricy and perfect. And we all know that Microsoft software is nowhere near perfect. Why, if Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows program crashed… oh, wait, he already does.

Gibson points to software bundling as an example of Bill’s marketing savvy. Microsoft Office quickly became the standard business software suite because of convenience and cost. The bundle included most standard business software, and the software worked well on Windows (no surprise there). In addition, all of the bundled applications shared a standard interface with similar menus. When you learned one, you learned them all.

This is not to imply that all Microsoft products were successful, or even well designed. Remember Windows ME, or (shudder) Bob? But it’s easy to forget the successes, like Windows 2000, and Office 97. For a full list of the top ten best and worst Microsoft products according to eWeek labs, visit tinyurl.com/6yqkd8. For the entire eWeek article about the Gates era at Microsoft, see tinyurl.com/5ebsqm.

But enough of this praise of Bill Gates. We’re making ourselves a little sick. Let’s go back to the jokes. Did you hear the one about Bill Gates going to Hell?