But now I can relive the magic for the first time, thanks to a new version of DONKEY.BAS for iOS. It’s 99 cents, is compatible with Game Center, and includes both iPhone and iPad versions. It seems to be a faithful rendition of the original, complete with blocky graphics and bloopy sound effects, and the same objective: Drive down road, avoid hitting donkeys. And it’s um, just as fun as it must have been back in 1981.

The new version is by Johnny Ixe; I’d love to think that’s a pseudonym for William H. Gates III. Probably not, though, so let’s hope that Microsoft doesn’t issue a takedown notice….

The notion that Gates might have staged a Microsoft comeback seems to have been wishful thinking more than possible reality. Microsoft faces lots of challenges. Some people think that its current CEO, Steve Ballmer, is doing a lousy job of tackling them. Who better than its co-founder to rise to the challenge? Wouldn’t it be pretty much like Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, which worked out OK?

If Bill Gates had come back to Microsoft and had staged a dramatic turnaround, it would have been a great story. But if he had strolled into the CEO’s office, asked Ballmer to give up his chair, and sat down, I don’t think it would have had a dramatic impact on the company’s fortunes.

Here’s why:

Gates’ tendency to look at everything as a PC wouldn’t help. The man had an amazing capacity to figure out new product categories and jump into them quickly–starting in 1975, when he and Paul Allen thought that this personal computer thing might amount to something. But almost always, he saw new categories as extensions of the PC. As the failure of the Tablet PC and Pocket PC show, that strategy was always problematic. It would be an even more surefire recipe for failure today.

Ballmer is busy mopping up some of Bill Gates’ mistakes. For instance, Microsoft poured immense resources into Windows Vista–and shipped a terrible product that people hated. It hurt Windows, it hurt Microsoft, and it generally represented a major step backwards during a period when Microsoft desperately needed to prepare itself for the future. And it all happened during Gates’ tenure.

Microsoft is still being managed in a largely Gatesian manner. Steve Ballmer isn’t John Sculley, who moved to exorcise Apple of Steve Jobs’ supposedly unhealthy influence. He’s Bill Gates’ longtime friend and partner–the guy who was at Gates’ side in the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s. He’s doing many of the things Gates would do if he were more actively involved with the company.

Ballmer-era Microsoft is doing some really good stuff. Yes, the company is still capable of spectacular missteps. But Windows 7 is good. Xbox is good. Windows Phone is great. Windows 8 is, if nothing else, a gutsy gamble. Overall, in fact, Microsoft may be putting out better products now than it did in the Gates era. If the company flounders in the next few years, I don’t think it will be because Ballmer has been asleep at the wheel.

Bill Gates never left Microsoft. He’s still chairman. And even if he’s no longer involved in day-to-day management, you’ve got to think that if he had any magical secrets for curing what ails the company, he’d have told Ballmer about them by now.

We’ll never know how different Microsoft in 2011 would be if Bill Gates hadn’t handed the reins over to Ballmer in 2008. [Note: As a commenter mentions, Ballmer became CEO in 2000; Gates was Chief Software Architect 2000-2008, then formally retired from full-time activity.] But here’s my guess, based on everything I know from 33 years of Gates-watching and Microsoft-watching: It probably wouldn’t be much different at all. And if it was different, it wouldn’t necessarily be in better shape.

[Photo: PC World's 1987 Bill Gates centerfold]

One of the most prominent successes of his tenure — the Xbox 360 — is credited to somebody else, who was rumored to have left the company over his questionable business decisions.

He’s often derided for his bombastic personality, and has technology pundits calling his tenure “The Reign of Error.” Now its come to a whole other level — investors and analysts asking for his pink slip.

Is the increasing chorus against Ballmer fair, or do others share in Microsoft’s failure? Or is this symptomatic of a larger shift among the company’s key customers, where Microsoft as a whole has fallen out of favor? You could make a case for any any of these scenarios.

Microsoft’s biggest problem right now is stagnancy. In the Ballmer era, the company has become reactive rather than proactive. Rather than seeking new markets to expand into, it follows its competitors — and often misses the mark in doing so, or makes them overly complex.

Zune, Windows Phone 7, Windows Vista, Ultra-Mobile PCs. All great examples of ideas that either came too late or were so unnecessarily overthought that consumers saw right through it or skimmed over them altogether. These mistakes have cost the company both time, and more importantly money.

Speaking of wasting money — how about Skype? Just about everyone seems to agree that $8.5 billion was a price too high for the company. I doubt the company will see a benefit equal to the price they paid for that company. Ever.

There are some out there that are calling for Bill Gates to return to the company’s helm, but that isn’t the answer either. Gates’ time is long past — his own vision is dated. Microsoft needs somebody who understands modern computing. Even he admits that people like Jobs have far more of a knack for “thoughtful product design” then he does.

Thus, Microsoft might find itself looking to the outside for the man (or woman) to guide it out of the wilderness. While it may be great to put on a public face of support for your embattled leader, at the same time the company has a responsibility to think about what life will be like beyond Ballmer.

Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, has written a memoir, Idea Man, which is excerpted on Vanity Fair‘s site. His fellow founder Bill Gates doesn’t come off well in the excerpt–Allen says he pushed and pushed to reduce Allen’s ownership in the company–and the Wall Street Journal says that the book has caused a “rift” between Allen and Gates and may include some inaccuracies.

I’m looking forward to reading the book, which goes on sale on April 19th–not because of any juicy stuff it may contain, or because I relish the thought of Microsoft’s creators being at odds with each other in public. (That’s kind of sad whether Allen has a point or not.) Whatever you think of Microsoft, the founding of the company is one of the most visionary things that’s ever happened in the history of personal technology, and it’ll be interesting to hear the tale told by one of the two guys who know it all.

(Fuzzy-but-evocative 1983 photo of Paul Allen and Bill Gates borrowed from a 1983 issue of InfoWorld.)

It was at Out of Town that a young computer nerd named Paul Allen bought the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics–the one with a cover story on a built-it-yourself personal computer called the Altair 8800. Allen got really, really excited–and showed the issue to his buddy, Harvard student Bill Gates. Gates got equally excited. The two decided to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair–and that programming language was the first product of the company called, originally, Micro-Soft.

Allen and Gates were deeply into computers, and had already formed one software company together, Traf-O-Data. You gotta assume they would have heard about the Altair one way or another, and it’s therefore silly to posit that if Allen hadn’t stopped to to browse at Out of Town, there would have been no Microsoft, no DOS, no Windows, no Microsoft Mouse, no Microsoft Office, no Microsoft Bob, no MSN, no Clippy, no MSNBC, no Xbox, no Zune, no Gates Foundation, and not a single Blue Screen of Death. But it is Twilight Zone-ish fun to toy with that notion.

Within about five years of Allen’s purchase, incidentally, Out of Town played a major role in my own obsession with PCs–for many years, it had the best selection of computer magazines in the Boston area, and I bought countless copies of magazines such as Creative Computing, BYTE, and Popular Computing there. Given its proximity to Harvard, MIT, and other universities, Over the years, I’m sure many thousands of other people who were fixated on computers got most of their information on the subject from Out of Town. It may be a quaint relic of the pre-Web age, but the memories will live forever.

Cambridge city officials are trying to find another company to operate a newsstand in Out of Town’s hut-like building. (Which, incidentally, isn’t the one that Allen bought his magazine at–the newsstand moved a few yards into a new structure years later when the Harvard Square subway stop received a major makeover.) I wish them luck–for one thing, it’s going to be a tad disorienting if I ever visit a Harvard Square without Out of Town.

If it does close, I hope that Cambridge erects some sort of plaque in its honor, and that that plaque mentions Paul Allen’s purchase…

(Photo by Flickr user afagen)

But with Gates’ retirement from active duty at Microsoft, next month’s CES will be headlined by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He’ll give keynote on Wednesday, January 7th–the day after Phil Schiller gives his first and final presentation as Steve Jobs’ substitute at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. In two days, we’ll see two changings of the keynote guard at the only two keynotes that ever mattered.

Jobs and Gates: The two most iconic entrepreneurs that tech has produced to date. Schiller and Ballmer? Not iconic. It’s like seeing Marlin Perkins sidekick Jim Fowler take over Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom the same week that Ed McMahon assumes the duties of hosting The Tonight Show.

In the era of Jobs and Gates, you didn’t have to give a nanosecond’s thought to who would give the more impressive presentation. With Schiller vs. Ballmer, it’s a tougher call. We’ve seen both of them do demos before, but the spotlight has never shined on them quite as brightly as it will in three weeks.

Who will be the new king of the conference keynote? (Yes, I know that Schiller plans to abdicate after one morning.) You’ve got me, but as we prepare to answer that question, we can at least prep ourselves by analyzing existing footage of the two execs ‘ communication styles.

Schiller:

Ballmer:

Schiller:

Ballmer:

Schiller:

Ballmer:

So who would you rather watch at work next month? So help me, I may witness both in person…

So without any further ado, lemme throw out ten initial questions, impressions, and reflections about the campaign and Windows marketing in general–all of which are subject to revision and retraction once the ads hit the airwaves in a couple of weeks.

1. Bill Gates is doing Microsoft ads? The noted philanthropist? Didn’t he used to work there or something? It’s fascinating to see Microsoft come back to him as the public face of the company –it’s only been two months since all the tearful, nostalgic fuss about him passing on the torch.

2. Okay, it’s completely understandable why they’d decide to put Gates in Vista ads-he remains the human personification of Microsoft. Unless you can envision a Windows ad campaign built around, say, Steve Ballmer.
Er, actually, we already know what that would look like:

(Full disclosure: I like that video so much I just watched it three times…by choice! Wouldn’t rerunning it cost less than $300 million?)

3. But it’s still surprising to see Gates back so quickly. You gotta think that it’s absolutely mandatory that Microsoft being to to position Windows as part of the future of computing, not a legacy of the old way of doing things. The company would bristle at what I’m about to say, I’m sure, but Bill Gates is a representative of the past–more than even since his retirement. Long term, you gotta think it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to position itself as a company that’s vibrant, relevant, and forward-looking sans Gates.

4. Seinfeld? The Bee Movie guy? The husband of that cookbook author? The fellow whose sitcom (1989-1998, RIP) dates from the heyday of Windows 95? (Correction: When the show premiered, the current version of Windows was 2.0!) Again, it’s odd to see Vista associated with someone who’s most famous as the leading comedian of a previous era. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

5. How big a problem is it that Jerry–at least the fictional Jerry on his show–was famously a Mac user? Does that affect the credibility of his pitch? Did he switch allegiances for an easy $10 million? Did he actually move to a PC in, say, 2001 or thereabouts, but nobody noticed? Is the whole question moot, since no rational person would choose an operating system because a famous comedian told them to?

6. Maybe tying Vista to the past is intentional, or at least shows Microsoft’s subconscious at work. I get the sense sometimes that Microsoft gets exceptionally wistful when it looks back at the Windows 95 launch. It’s certainly the best example of the company engaging in massive, massively successful hoopla. Perhaps that’s why the company is apparently associating Windows circa 2008 with a couple of guys whose fame arguably maxed out in the mid-1990s

7. Ultimately, I kinda think that Microsoft and celebrity spokespeople don’t mix very well. At least not in any way that involves any celeb hipness rubbing off on its products. Oftentimes the company goes with the safest, least imaginative possible option–Jay Leno, Regis Philbin, and Conan O’Brien have all been involved with Windows launches. Other times, no particular rhyme or reason seems to be at work: I went to a 2004 Windows Media Center event with Queen Latifah, and she was fun and engaging…but  it didn’t seem to be clear to anyone involved what she was doing sharing a couch with Bill Gates.

8. Hey, time out for a couple more videos! They both involve Bill Gates, celebrity guests, and misbehaving Windows demos! Fiest, let’s watch Regis attempt to contact Bill via a glitchy Webcam at the 2001 Windows XP launch in New York (I shot this video myself)…

It’ll be interesting to see if Seinfeld’s Windows testimonial can top Reege’s: “It really knocks you out–I guess the people who are more familiar with it are really impressed, and I am too, but I must tell you–there’s a lot to learn. But it’s easier this time to learn.”

Now here are Bill, Conan, and a balky Windows Media Center at the 2005 Consumer Electronics show.

9. “Windows, Not Walls?” It’s hard to gauge what that slogan means until you see the ads. (That may not be a good sign: Maxwell House doesn’t need to explain “Good to the Last Drop” to anybody.) At first blush, it sounds a little geeky. What are the walls? Who erected them? Apple? The Web? Do normal people worry about technological walls, or know what they are?

10. Obvious knee-jerk response to the slogan: Microsoft spent years building walls all around its products. It attempted to lock people into using Internet Explorer. It released Office upgrades with new file formats that made it hard to work with users of previous versions of Office, let alone other suites. For years, it seemed to work. These days it doesn’t. But when I think of Windows, I don’t think of it as an alternative to walls. I think of it imprisoning users within them.