Bill is a great guy..

Opinion: Bill Gates' new mission: Saving lives

By Wolfgang Gruener

Monday, January 26, 2009 13:54

Opinion – Chicago (IL) - When you already have transformed the way the world works, what do you do with the second half of your life? Ask Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, the insanely rich guy we so often loved to hate, but who is being credited with bringing computing to the mainstream. Today, Gates released the first annual letter describing his new role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. What we read is a passionate introduction to the challenges and goals of his charity. And I remember the old saying: There are those who say they are saving lives, and those who actually do. Bill Gates retiring from Microsoft was one of the big news items last year. Back then, we knew Gates would not be able to leave Microsoft entirely and given the economic times and the challenges that Microsoft is facing, it is probably a good idea that he will drop by occasionally. However, Gates also mentioned that he would like to focus more and more on his charity in the future. And for those who thought this work might just be a hobby and less intensive than leading Microsoft, they have been proven wrong today. Gates released what he describes as the first of an annually published letter detailing some of the focus areas of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates spends some time in the letter addressing doubts (download the 20-page PDF) that his charity may not be as fulfilling as Microsoft was and claims that his tasks are actually quite similar. "Many of my friends were concerned that I wouldn't find the foundation work as engaging or rewarding as my work at Microsoft. I loved my work at Microsoft and it had been my primary focus for over 30 years. I too would have worried if I had paused and thought about it enough." He mentions that his job at Microsoft had "three magical things" - an "opportunity for big breakthroughs", he felt he has "skills would let [him] help create a special company that would be part of a whole new industry" and the work would "let [him] engage with people who were smart and knew things [he] didn't." Gates says his Foundation also has "three magical elements" – "opportunities for big breakthroughs", he believes that his "experience in building teams of smart people with different skill sets focused on tough long-term problems can be a real contribution" and he noted that "the intelligence and dedication of the people involved in these issues [are] just as impressive as what [he has] seen before." Within his letter, which you can read in its entirety online here, Gates outlines the efforts in Global Health, Global Development, and a dedicated U.S. education Program. In health, he provides insight in a program that accounts for 50% of the spending of the Foundation and concentrates on 20 diseases, such as "diarrheal diseases (including rotavirus), pneumonia, and malaria—which mostly kill kids—and AIDS and TB, which mostly kill adults." "With a handful of new vaccines, we should be able to save a year of a person's life for well under $100. If we waste $500,000, we are wasting 5,000 years of life. This is the kind of trade-off I ask our employees to consider when they are deciding which areas to get involved in and which grants to make," Gates writes. There is also the Global Development program, trying to address rural development and starvation. "About 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. More than 900 million suffer from chronic hunger, and most of them live in rural areas of developing countries," according to Gates. "This is why the foundation added our Global Development Program to complement the Global Health group two years ago. We are working in areas like financial services, including savings and insurance. Our biggest investment is in improving agricultural output, another area where innovations have made a huge difference for millions of people but have not reached the poorest, especially in Africa and South Asia." He hopes that "new seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase a farm's output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist. This innovation is just as important as developing and delivering vaccinations." The U.S. Program is aimed at improving education to "help reduce inequity". Gates not only shares what is being done now, what is being funded, but also what has been achieved already, such as this: "Lee High School, Houston, Texas. But a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and high results. These schools are not selective in whom they admit, and they are overwhelmingly serving kids in poor areas, most of whose parents did not go to college. Almost all of these schools are charter schools that have significantly longer school days than other schools." Reading through the activities of the world's best-financed charity is an amazing eye-opener of what can be done with enough resources and dedication. One can only hope that the effort pays off and the results of Gates' new journey will be as significant as the ones he achieved with Microsoft. Even if it is Gates' choice to spend his time with his charity and many would be willing to change roles with him, his work should not be taken for granted. There is no better way that Gates could allocate his time or spend his wealth. It makes me think about other sparkling executives and company founders in the IT industry. Especially those who continue mentioning how they will save the planet by driving a hybrid/electric car, but then spend their fortune on yachts and jets. So with that thought in mind: Thank you, Bill Gates.

Bill Gates: the exit interview by engadget

by Ryan Block, posted Jan 7th 2008 at 7:34PM

We've been fortunate enough to sit down with Sir Bill a number of times over the years -- and even been lucky enough to call him a fan. While we're certainly hoping this won't be our last run-in, we couldn't help but feel a little sentimental knowing that chances are the next time we see him, he'll no longer be in charge of Microsoft. This time around we talked a little about his historic 2007 sit-down with Steve Jobs, his plans for the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, and even a bit about what he'll be up to in his new part-time gig at Microsoft.

Thanks so much for meeting with us. I appreciate it. So I was at the keynote last night and I saw the video that you did. Being that you're looking for a job, I just wanted to let you know we're always hiring--

Excellent --

... looking for editors anytime. I know you've written some stuff for the Guardian recently--

Well I love your stuff.

You know where to find me.

Ok.

[Laughter]

So I was at D this year and obviously you and Jobs were at it as well. And you guys got up on stage together, I think that was -- besides being a really historic moment -- very emotional for a lot of people in the audience. I want to know what it was like for you personally. I think a lot of people were confused as to whether or it was truly bittersweet, or just bitter. I felt it was really bittersweet.

Oh, I like Steve. And I've always been extremely complimentary of the impact he's had on the industry. Part of it, in terms of that whole crowd though, is that the personal computer industry was started by people who were very young and there was a set of people who believed in it and all kind of grew up together. So Steve and I are virtually the same age -- he's a little bit older, he got into it about three years after we had done the original personal computer stuff -- and he was my sixteenth customer for the BASIC interpreter. I had done the Commodore six months before, if you remember that, I had done the TRS-80 eight months before, and then they needed the floating point basic. I came out and I actually worked more with Woz -- Steve wasn't a hands-on engineer involved in that thing -- because Woz had been trying to do his own BASIC but just couldn't get it done.

So we've always worked together on various things. When Steve did the Mac, that was our closest relationship. That was about thirty people at Microsoft, twenty people at Apple betting on moving the graphical interface into the mainstream. That was a phenomenal experience because we did the only 3rd party software that was on that machine the day that it shipped. And when they went 512 [kilobytes of memory], we did some stuff. They thought [Lotus] Jazz was going to the breakthrough product, but we showed them that Excel was the breakthrough product. So there's always been good back and forth. I am very sincere that Steve has unique skills that I just don't have at all and it's been phenomenal to see how he has been able to make a difference with what he's done.

So when you got up there, what was it like for you emotionally? I mean, Steve quoted the Beatles; it felt like there was just this bizarre camaraderie / rivalry that is almost inexplicable.

Oh absolutely. We had a chance -- I think Steve and I are the two luckiest people in the industry in terms of the center seat we've had, and the involvement we've have been able to have. And we know that it's been a special thing and where we work together it's helped the industry, and even when we've competed it has probably been good for the industry.

So I read this GQ article, the profile that I guess they did of you around the time the new Zunes launched, and it was funny because the one thing they really focused on was that when they spoke to you, you seemed really checked out. In your last few months of tenure at Microsoft -- what is that like? Are you really spending all of your time on the Foundation right now? Or, are you still really focused on the technology?

I am totally full time Microsoft. As hardcore as ever -- you can ask anybody at the company. But come July 1st that will change. Maybe even the month of June will be goofy, not because I'll be focused on other things, but because, it being the last month, they'll be some special things and people that I'll go around and talk to. But in terms of lots of meetings of making our search better, the next version of Office, the next version of Windows -- I'm working harder now than any time in the last decade.

Is there anything on the table that you feel like you never really got to see through or fully accomplish?

Well, the tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream. Getting your TV over the internet -- we talked here about how Mediaroom is up to a million users. But that's just on its way to mainstream, that's not mainstream yet. So when I think about all the different scenarios, there are some that we've have made a lot more progress than on than others. Productivity, for example, although there is still a lot to be done on that. Computing in the cloud is this whole new frontier of how you make software automatically manage the hardware resources, recover, and load balance -- there's some phenomenal things we are doing related to that, both for the consumer and business computing. So this is an amazing time. I believe that all these things will happen but it takes time. Just like the medical technology -- things I'll be working on in the future -- those will take more time than I'd like.

Speaking of productivity, I think that Microsoft has really, if anything, totally nailed productivity over the years and totally nailed business and the enterprise market -- and that's really been the backbone of Microsoft business. But do you ever feel like there has been any regrets about shortcomings in the consumer market? As in, not really focusing on the consumer front the way that Jobs and Apple does? Or do you feel like you have really covered all of those bases?

I think the key thing is the concept of the personal computer and the software industry. That's what we started in 1975 and the core of the company is that platform. There are third party applications that are on Windows to do consumer-like things -- I think as we get speech and touch and mainstream pen into them, you'll see a wave of those that are dramatically better. That's our key role. Yes, Microsoft itself will do photos and music and all that, but the thing that has always differentiated our platform is the breadth of third party solutions. The hardware variety and that software applications variety. And we need new frontiers, of which I think natural interface and service-connections (that I talked about last night) -- those are going to enable these new things. So we are proud of the games work that people are doing on Windows but these breakthroughs can take that to the new level. I think that emphasis on third parties is something we've always done better than anyone else and hopefully it will hold us in a good position.

On the Windows side. One hundred million licenses, obviously that's an enormous amount. But I think in the last few months, especially within from media and the blogosphere and all of these different places, Vista specifically is getting hit really hard with a lot of negative PR -- a pretty big backlash from users who are downgrading to XP. Or at least a lot of people talking about downgrading. Do you feel like right now you are leaving under a cloud? That the company's core product not meeting consumer expectations?

I wouldn't say that. Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough. With Vista, a lot of it's the transition from XP to Vista. Did we get the device drivers ready in the right way and time? Did we make it easy to do the upgrades as well as we should? When people get up and running on Vista they are basically quite happy. Not perfect -- but quite happy. It is that transition where we definitely need to get a better job up on that piece.

Now, in time, more of those drivers are becoming available. It is definitely a product where we look back and say, okay, a lot of good things but we are going to change the things where it just didn't become trivial to step up to the new version. That's always been a hard with Windows and we're looking at some of those challenges and why we didn't think they'd be as hard as they were -- and making sure that we do better at it. The feedback is important to us, but it is a product that has lots of good features. I encourage people to use it! We are proud of the features in there!

Well, of course! But are you personally fully satisfied with it?

I'm never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

Like the saying, "Software is never complete, only abandoned"?

There are always the features that I wanted to get in, or the things that I wish were a little more polished. The people who are good in these companies are really sort of ridiculously demanding people. They have to sort of know when to back off so that thing can eventually ship. But I look at any product -- and I'm better at Microsoft products -- and say what I wished what was better about the product.

In terms of the Foundation [which focuses partly using technology to enhance health care in developing nations], is it your intention to run that as you would a software company, or as you would a technology company?

Of course not. The nature of the problem is very different. I do not think technology companies are not all of one ilk either. Here at the foundation you have researchers in academia, great scientists in drug companies, you've got rich-world governments, poor-world governments, non-profit organizations, you've got to activate the public. The biggest part of the Foundation is solving twenty diseases. Malaria, AIDS, TB -- some diseases, because they are only in the poorest countries, rich people have never even heard of, like visceral leishmaniasis. In the top ten, -- but not broad awareness.

So the way we are going to orchestrate more energy and more resources, where we'll get a lot more progress where there is some market failure -- there is no market incentive driving these things -- that is going to require invention. And I wouldn't enjoy it if it wasn't at very early stage. And I am going to have to learn lots of things going back. I've got a great library of science, biology type things. The second half of the year I will spend lots of the year boning up on them.

So, foundation is in place and you've got this amazing, gargantuan grant from Buffet. What's the first plan? What is your first year going to look like there, and what do you hope to get accomplished in this first twelve months?

Well I've been part time on the Foundation and there is great full-time people there including Patty Stonesifer (the CEO), and my wife spends time. So I wouldn't say it's a huge discontinuity. We are going from $1.5 billion in grants a year in 2006 to $3 billion in 2009. So we are on a ramp, which means we are more ambitious. As we make breakthroughs, like new vaccines, then you actually need more money to get the manufacturer to fund the delivery systems. But fortunately the public's awareness of these things have gone up somewhat. The Global Fund and the work that Bono has done together with us has started to get a little bit of consensus about what needs to be done.

So I'm going to be reaching out to business leaders who I think can get their companies more involved and using their expertise, and hopefully my voice will help with that. I'll be talking with other philanthrophists telling them about how much fun I'm having doing it and suggesting that I'd love to see if we can get them involved. So there are some things that I think I'd bring to it that my [full-time position at the Foundation] will let me do that haven't been done. But the goal of the Foundation in terms of making the health of the poorest two billion as good as the richest two billion -- that has been there from the beginning and I'm just really doing things to accelerate it.

One last question: what kinds of pet technology products do you think you'll be keeping at Microsoft? You've got to have your fingers in the pie a little bit!

I love natural user interface and particularly the research groups to do that. I want to stay involved with that and make sure that when it's time to really put these things in the mainstream that Microsoft is jumping on it and taking that big risk. Search is obviously a huge thing for us that we put about a brilliant people on. Right now -- people don't know -- can do something really differentiated that could be fun to help drive that piece forward? Steve [Ballmer] will pick; my non-Microsoft time I'll be thinking about software for health systems and education. So I will probably be over at Microsoft seeing where their breakthroughs can help in those areas. But the day of the week that I'll be at Microsoft will be probably three projects, I'd guess.

Thank you so much for meeting with us.

You bet! Good talking to you.

Good luck!

Bill Gates bids a teary farewell to Microsoft

By Daisuke Wakabayashi

REDMOND, Washington (Reuters) - Bill Gates said a teary goodbye on Friday to Microsoft Corp, the software maker he built into the world's most valuable technology company based on the ambitious goal of placing a computer on every desk and in every home.

He leaves Microsoft, which he co-founded with childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975, to focus on his philanthropic organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest charity, funded in part by his vast fortune.

At an employee event at Microsoft's scenic headquarters campus here, Gates joined Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on stage to deliver a short speech and field questions from employees.

"There won't be a day in my life when I won't be thinking about Microsoft, the great things that we're doing and wanting to help," said Gates, who wiped away tears as the group of employees rose to give him a standing ovation.

Ballmer, a Harvard University classmate who joined Microsoft at Gates' behest, got choked up as he tried to describe Gates' impact on the company and society at large.

"There's no way to say thanks to Bill. Bill's the founder. Bill's the leader," said Ballmer. "This is Bill's baby."

Gates will leave behind a life's work developing software to devote energy to finding new vaccines or to microfinance projects in the developing world. He will remain chairman of Microsoft and work on special technology projects.

Ballmer spoke about how he contemplated quitting Microsoft a month after joining the company and return to Stanford University business school. Bill passionately implored him to stay and laid out the vision of the company.

"This is what Bill said to me. 'You don't get it. You don't get it. We are going to put a computer on every desk and in every home,'" said Ballmer.

There are currently more than one billion PCs worldwide, according to research firm IDC.

Once the world's richest man, Gates' personal fortune has been estimated at about $58 billion, according to Forbes Magazine. He has slipped to third place, behind investor and good friend Warren Buffett and Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim.

Bill Gates: top ten greatest hits (and misses) - the Microsoft years

by Engadget staff, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 3:33PM

Damn, Bill, you have come a LONG way. Look at you there back in '82, you handsome devil. As part of our tribute, let's take a quick look back at the top ten greatest (and not so great) products created on Bill-time, shall we? Don't worry, it'll only sting a little.

Hits

Internet Explorer (IE)
Introduced 1995

It's really easy to simply remember "Internet Exploder" as the standards-breaking, web-forking, buggy, monopoly-causing app that helped shape Bill's old image as the evilest baron of all technology companies. But it's also the app that led to the creation Ajax-based web apps through the XMLHttpRequest spec, and the kludgey early popularization of CSS. Love it or hate it, IE's gotten more people on the web over the years than any browser, and that's definitely got to count for something.

Media Center
Introduced 2002

Despite TiVo's DVR dominance and competitors that came and went over the years, Media Center has always been an underrated standout product. Even Bill admits that the company's long struggled with usability, but Media Center is a beacon of hope not only for 10-foot UIs everywhere, but also for the company's ability to create powerful, advanced, user-friendy products. Between its online integration, extensible plugin architecture, ability to stream shows to nodes around the house, and now CableCARD support, the only real downside to Media Center is the fact that you still need a full-blown PC to run it.

MS-DOS
Introduced 1981, discontinued 2000

It was arcane and nigh-unusable to mere mortals -- but the early cash-cow was one of Bill's most strategic moves, and helped Microsoft define the concept of software licensing. It also helped launched Mossberg's career as crusader of user-friendly technology. But most importantly, MS-DOS was still the OS an entire generation grew up learning, so del crticsm.* for a second because our autoexec.bat and config.sys were so very well crafted, and extensively tweaking Memmaker for a few extra KB of usable RAM definitely ranks amongst our top most formative geek moments.

Office
Introduced 1989 (on Mac), 1990 (on PC)

Word, Excel and PowerPoint certainly did well enough on their own, but when Microsoft combined 'em into the tidy (and pricey) package that is Office -- first on the Mac in 1989, interestingly -- it had a selling point that would prove irresistible to many a productivity-obsessed middle manager even today. The addition of Outlook and its support for the (for some) nigh-indispensable Exchange only further solidified its foothold in the corporate computing world, and that's where Bill knew the real money was. That's certainly not to say that it hasn't been without its share of problems and annoyances, though -- we're looking at you, Clippy.

Peripherals
Introduced 1982

Microsoft has always been a software company first, but it's been cranking out high-quality peripherals for over 25 years -- long before the Xbox and Zune were even a twinkle in Bill's eye. Not only that, but it's been a reliable innovator in the field, with a string of devices that were first, early, or just simply popularized technologies like the wheel mouse, force-feedback joysticks and controllers, the modern optical mouse, and the ergo-keyboard. The division has gone through some bumpy times -- the SideWinder line was killed off for a while there, and there've been some questionable designs along the way -- but it's been riding high as of late, and it doesn't show any signs of slowing down soon.

Windows 3.1 / NT 3.5
Introduced 1992 and 1994

It took a few versions to come into its own, but by the time Windows hit 3.1, Microsoft finally had a product that was able to pull PC users away from the command line (for some of the time, at least) and give them a real taste of things to come. Windows NT may not have had quite the same appeal with the average consumer, but it did bring the operating system into the 32-bit world and pave the way for enterprise desktop computing as we know it today. (Plus, it had the NT file system (NTFS), which to this day continues to carry on the legacy in its own little way.) We really wish they'd made a sequel to the Pirates of Silicon Valley, because we'd love to have seen the dramatization of Bill overseeing the first popularized verions of Windows -- especially '95, which came out just a couple of years later.

Windows 2000 and XP
Introduced 2000

When thinking of Microsoft and the new millennium, few people are able to keep the crinkles out of their nose. Thankfully, Windows ME wasn't the only thing that arrived in late Y2K, as Windows 2000 rushed in to rock the socks off of suits everywhere. The whole Win2K thing went over so well that Gates and company decided to base its next consumer OS, XP, off of it. Some may argue that the resulting product still stands as the last great OS to ship out of Redmond.

Windows CE / Mobile
Introduced 1996

As two of the most ubiquitous projects to come out from under Bill's command, both Windows CE and Windows Mobile are almost impossible to avoid when it comes to handhelds or phones. What began as a mishmash of small components has grown into the adaptable -- though sometimes maddening -- mobile OS that resides on just about every kind of device you can think of. Really, we mean every kind of device, from PMPs to enterprise-level stock-keeping systems. The slimmed down and restructured micro-Windows is at the very least one of the more flexible offerings the company has ever produced. Say what you will about its usability, there's no denying the massive impact it's had on portability and convergence.

Xbox and Xbox 360
Introduced 2001 and 2005

Back in 1999, Bill was all about multimedia convergence, and he said that a new gaming / multimedia device would be Microsoft's trojan horse into the world's living rooms with something coined the "DirectX-box." In 2001, the original Xbox entered gaming territory dominated by Sony's PlayStation with Nintendo's N64. But the clunky machine brought with it the first easy to use multiplayer console service, Xbox Live, as well as a developer-centric model that helped turn the tables. Of course, things look quite a bit different today: the Xbox 360 leads the former market leader's PlayStation 3 in spend and attach rate, and with the relative success of media and content sales on Xbox Live, it seems Bill's dream of dominating the living room wasn't just a pipe-dream after all.

Visual Basic
Introduced 1991, discontinued 1998

It's hard to underestimate the impact of Visual Basic. While the average user might have never heard of the original VB that Microsoft released way back when, the simplicity of the language and its graphical toolset made just about any power user a potential app developer, powering the flood of third party application development Microsoft operating systems enjoyed throughout the 90's. Sadly, Visual Basic met its demise at the hands of more modern languages and toolsets, but with a legacy of making programming accessible to the masses, its place in the history books and in Bill's pocketbook is undoubtedly secure.

Runners-up: DirectX, Flight Sim, Portable Media Center, Solitaire and Minesweeper

Misses

Auto PC
Introduced 1998, discontinued 2001*

Riding high on its previously-introduced sister products -- the Handheld PC and Palm PC platforms, now dead and transformed into Windows Mobile, respectively -- Microsoft's Auto PC initiative was promised to herald a revolution for in-car entertainment and productivity. There's no question it was well ahead of its time; in fact, many of the features debuted in Auto PC have gone on to become standard fare in today's cars. Problem was, when it launched your ride was already pimped with a mere CD player. In-car navigation, voice recognition, and MP3 support were still the stuff of science fiction in those dark days (particularly at the four-digit asking price), and the whole thing was doomed to a geeky, spendy niche. Though products were initially expected from several manufacturers, Clarion ended up being the only one to actually produce a head unit.

*The Auto PC lived on in spirit as Clarion's Joyride, but Microsoft's heart was no longer in the project and Clarion had switched to a generic Windows CE-based core to build the product.

Microsoft Bob
Introduced 1995, discontinued 1996

Poor Bob. No one ever gave him a chance. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was really annoying. And as it turns out, Bill was dating Melinda French, Bob's program manager. Which isn't to say there was any nepotism involved -- Bob suffered an early death in 1996 due to general hatred for the little bastard. Bill offered this to a column in January, 1997, "Unfortunately, [Bob] demanded more performance than typical computer hardware could deliver at the time and there wasn't an adequately large market. Bob died." Thankfully, Billinda's blossoming relationship lived on. Oh, did you hear? They're like the world's greatest philanthropists now.

Cairo
Introduced 1991 (but never released)

Ask folks to pick one word to describe Microsoft's technology roadmap in the 1990s and you'll commonly get "Cairo" in response. Announced before Windows NT 3.1 was even released, Cairo was occasionally an operating system, occasionally a collection of new technologies -- it depended entirely upon who and when you asked -- but at its core, it was intended to guide Microsoft on the path beyond the architecture introduced by NT. After throwing countless dollars and man-hours at the ambitious project, Cairo was ultimately canned (though mentions of the storied buzzword continued even into this decade). Although Windows 2000 eventually became NT's heir apparent, the fruits of Microsoft's labor weren't entirely for naught, as various Cairo features found themselves implanted into various versions of Windows throughout the years. Even the WinFS file system can trace its roots back to the project -- fitting, because it too has become such an albatross.

MSN Music and URGE
Introduced 2004 and 2006, both fully discontinued 2008

When MSN Music -- Microsoft's effort to build its own PlaysForSure-based subscription music based store -- imploded, headstrong Bill did what he usually does: rebrand, and launch again. When he got up at CES 2006 and announced MSN Music would become URGE with MTV, we were all a little skeptical -- after all, the problem wasn't really the service, it was the overbearing DRM and the fact that consumers simply weren't ready for subscription music. Of course, eventually URGE died as well, and MTV shunted customers to Rhapsody America; naturally, Microsoft had a third PlaysForSure-based store waiting in the wings with Zune, which doesn't appear to be going anywhere any time soon.

Origami / UMPC
Introduced 2006
Note: Intel, please join Microsoft on stage to accept this award

UMPCs... what can we say? Sure, Scoble liked them, but even from day one we never saw the market potential. Fueled by an early and too-successful hype-generating viral campaign of Microsoft's own making, there was no way that these first generation Origami devices would achieve their promise. Overpriced, underpowered, desk OS-laden (with Microsoft's Touch Pack add-on), and poor battery life would ensure that UMPCs would need quite some time to live up to the wave of "ultramobile lifestyle PC"-hysteria they rode to market. And as UMPCs begin to fade, the shrinking niche between smartphones and laptops now looks toward to the sweet release of MIDs -- though that's already been two years... and counting.

OS/2
Dates: introduced 1987, discontinued 2006

What began as a collaboration between Microsoft and then-partner IBM blossomed into what looked like -- for a time at least -- the logical successor to the DOS / Windows empire. The advanced OS showed early signs of greatness with it's incorporation of the HPFS file system, improved networking capabilities, and a sophisticated UI. But cracks in the relationship between the two powerhouse corporations would ultimately lead to its downfall. With Windows 3 a sudden success, IBM's reluctance to go hardware neutral, and Microsoft's increasing displeasure with code which it called "bloated" (ahem!), the project was eventually swept aside by Gates and the gang to make way for what would become the omnipresent operating system you know and love and/or hate today.

SPOT watches and MSN Direct
Introduced 2004, discontinued 2008

When the concept of an information-enabled watch that automagically received content over unused FM radio subcarriers was first conjured up by Microsoft in the early part of the decade, it seemed like a fabulous idea. So much so, in fact, Bill personally took the project under his wing. But by the time it had launched, it was already doomed by a perfect storm of problems: the devices were uglier than sin and comically oversized, the bizarre ad campaign featured frighteningly hairy cartoon arms, and -- as the mobile web was just starting to pick up steam at that time -- virtually anyone who would've been interested in that kind of product had already discovered ways to get the same information from their phone. The underlying data network Microsoft built out to support the watches, MSN Direct, lives on to this day and sees plenty of use in Garmin's nüvi line, but will it ever be used to beam weather, news, and MSFT stock reports to wrists other than Bill's? Not bloody likely.

Windows Activation
Introduced 2001

Depending on who you talk to, Windows Product Activation is a serious privacy violation, a headache, minimal protection against piracy, or all of the above. Lucky for us, Microsoft is finally seeing (some of) the folly of its overbearing ways, and has gone with a more permissive nagware method with Vista SP1. This as opposed to the regular method of routinely locking users out of their systems, which, wouldn't you know it, tended to hurt legitimate users more than pirates. Perhaps the best example of Windows Activation's legacy was the great WGA outage of 2007, which left 12,000 systems out in the cold due to a few downed servers at Microsoft. It didn't take long for the servers to bounce back, but any shred of reputation the service had at that point went out the window with the uptime.

Windows ME
Introduced September 2000

It's not exactly clear what the point of Windows Millennium Edition was -- our guess is that Microsoft needed to keep up with that year-based product naming scheme it had going at the time, and cranked out this half-baked update to '98 in order to capitalize on the turn-of-the-millenium frenzy. Unlike the NT-based Windows 2000 released at the same time, Windows ME retained its MS-DOS-based core, while managing to somehow get even more slow and unstable than its predecessors 95 and 98. And to add insult to injury, it restricted access to shell mode, rendering many MS-DOS apps incompatible. Thankfully, Windows ME was only inflicted upon consumers for little over a year; it was replaced by indomitable Windows XP in 2001.

Windows Vista
Introduced 2007

Vista doesn't suck. Let's just get that off our chests. In fact, it's a quite capable, secure and sexy OS when you get right down to it. Unfortunately, its problems just loomed too large for many folks to overlook. A multitude of delays and a rapidly diminishing feature list soured people right out of the gate, and once the dust settled people just weren't happy with the minor improvements they were getting in exchange for their hard-earned monies and fairly mandatory RAM upgrades. Mix that in with the standard driver incompatibilities of any Microsoft OS upgrade, and you've got a whole bunch of disgruntled downgraders on your hands -- and plenty of bad press to fill in any remaining gaps. Sadly, improvements to Media Center, aesthetics and even that quirky little sidebar got overlooked in the process. Microsoft's already scrambling to get Windows 7 together to capture the multitude of users that've decided to skip Vista altogether, let's just hope it's not too late.

Runners-up: Actimates, Pocket IE, Games for Windows - Live, Xenix (yeah, Microsoft actually did a Unix at one time!)