Remember when every telephone worked all the time?

Forget it. As people abandon rock-solid Plain-Old-Telephones, PBXs and key systems for skittish cell phones and Wintel PCs, the era of dependable communications is all but dead.

As always, Microsoft is a bellweather for user tolerance. In that light, Bill Gate’s Trump-like boast at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle is either saddening or maddening:

With our mail, we’ve got 240 million users, about the same number with Messenger, over 100 million with Spaces, which is about blogging, and that’s a very new thing, and already big, big numbers.

If you just take one month, we had 800 million minutes of voice, and in the same month a billion minutes of video, and just overwhelming use of those capabilities.

So this is changing communications and how people think about that.

Right. So far, 580 million souls have become accustomed to Hotmail-style Quality of Service and Windows-style security.

And that’s not even counting the cell phone users who accept flimsy equipment with tentative connections.

Gates has a lot in common with Donald Trump, who quips:

When I build something for somebody, I always add $50 million or $60 million onto the price. My guys come in, they say it’s going to cost $75 million.

I say it’s going to cost $125 million, and I build it for $100 million.

Basically, I did a lousy job.

But they think I did a great job.

We’re all doomed.