Why Bill Gates should get an iMac - TechRadar UK

So Bill's retired now. Mostly retired, anyway. They are still letting him come into the office to use the subsidised canteen and work on "pet projects" (Nintendogs for Windows, presumably).

But it's the end of the whole, "Can't stop for breakfast, honey. Just gimme that coffee in one of those thermos mugs – I've got to go and run Microsoft". He's got time on his hands now and if he doesn't stretch his morning bowl of Optivita out for a couple of hours, then there's pretty much nothing for him to do apart from troll Slashdot until his golf at 3:30.

Idle hands

What Bill needs is a new hobby. Sure, he has his charity work, but gala dinners are pretty much evenings only and he probably doesn't even sign his own cheques any more so it's not really much of a time sink. I have a much better idea. Bill should get a Mac.

Not secretly; I think he should go into his local PC World, buy a 24" iMac and let himself get papped doing it. Then he should start his own blog, using iWeb and write about this, the ultimate switcher experience. It will probably cost Bill about a billion dollars to do it because Microsoft's share price will drop like a concrete albatross. But only temporarily and it's all made-up money anyway.

Let's take the worst-case scenario. Suppose Bill actually decides he likes OS X more than Windows and tells everyone so. Well, then that's the whole platform bashing debate over right there. If even Bill Gates doesn't want to run Windows anymore, there is clearly no point in Microsoft wasting their developers' time coding it.

Far better to just switch all their resources into porting all the decent Windows apps to Leopard and let Vista stand as the last of a once-noble breed. I'm thinking of the BBC iPlayer, MSN Messenger and Crysis, mainly.

Once they have defibrillated Steve Ballmer, I think the suits at Microsoft might even be pleased. No more anti-trust law suits for them – Apple will be the new monopoly holder and they can take all the heat for bundling iPhoto and iDVD with OS X, while Microsoft picks the low-hanging fruit by selling Notepad to people who don't regard TextEdit as a primitive enough ASCII editor.