nan | 楠木

Bill Gates delivered what is reported to be his last CES keynote a few days ago. Since it was his last, he and the guys at Microsoft made a special video: “his last day at Microsoft”. It is a geeky and hilarious spoof, and features a host of celebrities (Matthew McConaughey, Jay-Z, Bono, Hilary Clinton, Obama, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney etc.), but Gates is really the central star. And oh boy, does he shine.

Gates, or Microsoft in general, have always been frowned upon by many people. Microsoft is seen as the big bad monopoly which delivers bad products (Vista is getting all the flak for the last year) which consumers have no choice but to use (since it’s the de facto standard). This video shows a very human side of Gates, the true geeky engineer he always has been. In this sense, you can actually call him “cool”, which quite a few blogs have gone on the record to say that “this video makes Gates cooler than Jobs”.

On a side-note, I thought this could be a great viral marketing opportunity for Microsoft, however the video wasn’t easily available on their website, which again goes to indicate the catching up game that MSFT is playing in the web space. Somewhat ironically but as expected, it was friendly competitor Google’s Youtube that had a easily accessible copy, which is the video embedded above.

The video certainly invokes a sense of nostalgia. I was lucky to grew up in the era where the PC industry boomed into a household necessity – when I was a kid I played 286s, 386s, Apple Mac II; my family bought a 486 in 94, and it was ridiculously expensive at the time. On that inferior computer (by today’s dual-core standards), I learnt MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and played lots of games. And then of course when Windows 95 was launched, MSFT completely took over the OS market and grew to become the giant it is today.

Speaking of nostalgia, I would have to also reference the following video, which is a highlight of the “historic” Gates + Jobs joint interview at the D5 conference last year. I had only seen the whole interview last night, and I’m sure this interview will be lovingly remembered by geeks for a long, long time.

It’s clear from this interview how strikingly different and yet complementary the two men were: Jobs is the artist and the salesman, who has great taste and can blow his audience away with his famous “Reality Distortion Field”, who is extremely demanding of the aesthetic coolness of his products, and whose arrogant confidence is both a virtue and a pitfall; Gates is the geeky engineer and the plain industrialist, whose notion of cool is not cool to the average consumer, whose products were not cool but worked, and whose business strategy is pragmatically effective. I admire Jobs’ commanding presence, but I would like Gates better as a friend – he is the down-to-earth guy that you could easily relate to.

And of course the intro clip they showed, Gates and Jobs way back in 1983:

You can find the whole interview at the D5 website.