A 'Bill Gates Moment'

Do you know what it means to have a 'Bill Gates Moment'?
(If I have to explain it, Dear Reader, you have never experienced one; but, if you work on a PC and/or use Microsoft products, you probably will!)

Because most of us over the last 30 years have been using computers based on the Microsoft model, we have had to put up with plenty of software/hardware mismatches and glitches to try to get our work done. Lots of timely, messages, such as (Not Responding). Sometimes, you are left to face a brick wall, and no matter what you do, you will not be able to carry out your task. On a few occasions, however, your task will get completed, after you employ an astonishing array of work-arounds.
(On a Mac computer, you may meet these problems -- perhaps in Microsoft Office for Mac -- at the rate of once in a blue moon!)
For me, these glitches have been arriving more often lately.
Our home office contains a variety of computers: 8-year-old Dell desktop, a six-year-old Dell laptop (both using 'Windows XP'), and a new iMac (on OS X). The tricky part is that, while we can do a lot of work on the iMac, only the Dell desktop is attached to both an old workhorse inkjet printer and a cranky laser printer!
(You know what's coming, don't you!)
Friday afternoon, at 2 p.m., my task was rather elementary: download two Excel document, print them, and update the information on the rows and columns, then submit the two finished products via e-mail by 4 p.m., firm.
('Sounds simple,' you say.)
Because I was going to print it, I had to download it in Windows on the Dell.
I knew it was going to be a long afternoon when Windows XP could not find a spreadsheet program to open it.
(The problem here is that I had been the WordPerfect product “QuattroPro” spreadsheet, which can emulate the Excel program, but cannot download an Excel file. You can work in only one direction; you cannot save a file in "QuatroPro" while in Excel.)
I decided the best workaround would be to save the documents on the iMac in PDF, e-mail them to the cloud, download them in Windows, and print them. This part of the work-around took a while, but it worked, and the printed spreadsheets were available for updating.
Now, I was in a quandary: How could I reverse the process? Both files I had transferred and printed were “photos”, and I needed the finished products in Excel. Both documents were quite short and slight variations of each other.
The best workaround I could come up with was to carry out a complete re-construction of both Excel documents. (Remember now, they were in WordPerfect “Quattro Pro” emulating Excel.) I did that, entered the 'new ' information (performed addition on the columns), and saved both documents. I then dispatched both Excel documents by e-mail, with about 15 min. to spare!
Question to Bill Gates, if you're still reading: Why couldn't you have made the Microsoft software more compatible with that of other manufacturers?
Guess I didn't just have a Bill Gates Moment; I had a Bill Gates Afternoon!