id Software company

100% agree with you, boss... iD "ROCKS"

To your mind, maybe. I dislike Microsoft myself, but there's a pretty big difference between designing an operating system and making a game. It's like comparing someone who proved the Riemann Hypothesis and someone who discovered the Higgs boson. More likely than not, it's just him feeling superior because he wrote something more essential and practical than a game.

That being said, I find some irony in that idea, since I only really find use for Windows as a gaming platform -- Linux is far better for actually getting any work done.

You'd have a super good point if Bill Gates ever wrote an operating system. Instead, he bought something that might or might not have even fit the definition and "improved" it (i.e., got a sweet deal with IBM to include it on their breakout computer). What came of it was possibly the most primitive computer operating system of its time that did very little but often broke anyway. After that, he "designed operating systems" about as much as Bob Dudley "works on oil drills".

On the other hand, John Carmack wrote a game from scratch so awesome that it affected everything since for better or for worse. And he did it with all the crappy limitations built in to that operating system Bill Gates "designed".