Bill Gates email rant

[zridling]

Hey, at least the guy understood the common user experience with Microsoft.com was broken back in 2003 when he wanted to download MovieMaker.


   [gratuitous graphic]

Now if only he hadn't turned a tin ear to early Vista criticism....

[Deozaan]

Interesting read.

I've done a few critiques like that on things for people I know. Most notable one I can remember is feedback on a few chapters of a book someone I know wrote.

[tomos]

at least the guy understood the common user experience with Microsoft.com was broken back in 2003

-zridling (June 26, 2008, 10:21 PM)

strange that it's never been fixed ...

[40hz]

Works every time. That's the beauty of The Big Lie propaganda technique. Make a statement and stick by it and about half the people that hear it will believe it no matter what. There's a bad function call (or maybe just a GOTO) coded somewhere in the human brain...

There was a great little strip in the papers some years back that really put it all in perspective. Voices were coming out of the top floor of Microsoft's headquarters building:

Voice: Sales of Windows XP have exceeded 100 million copies. Should we activate the secret mind control program now Mr. Gates?

Gates: I don't think it's really necessary anymore.

[J-Mac]

I saw that email from Gates yesterday morning - thought sure it had to be a spoof so I "googled" it and.... Oh my!  It's real!

Fantastic!  That was released by the court so I imagine MS never expected it to get out to the public.

If you locate and download the PDF of the entire exchange, it has five or six emails after that where the various MS dept. heads are bouncing this around like a hot potato, trying to pin the responsibility for fixing it on each other.  And their grammar and spelling are a complete disgrace, too.

Jim

[Edvard]

J-Mac: I thought it was fake too... I mean, things like:

... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

Shouldn't he be saying "we" have a download place? or is he simply referring to the department that manages the website?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

The mind boggles...

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

I guess I'm under the assumption that Bill actually knows what's going on in his own company. I mean, for all practical purposes, he is Windows. What's so surprising about "weird dialog boxes"? Ditto for the next line:

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

Wow Bill, you finally realize how scary Windows can be when it does things you don't understand? Reminds me of a movie I saw once, but replace Pee Wee with Windows Update, and Dottie with Bill:
"Pee Wee Herman: There's things about me you don't know, Dottie. Things you wouldn't understand. Things you couldn't understand. Things you shouldn't understand."

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

Translation: All my Outlook state are belong to reboot.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

If I had been drinking a Pepsi at the moment I read that, I would have blown it out my nose all over my keyboard.

All in all, I have a little more respect for Mr. Gates now. Not much, but more. As for his company... Well it's 2008, the email was sent 2003 and we still have these messes.
Let's hope Windows 7 is everything we can hope it will be.

[J-Mac]

Edvard,

The way I see it, Bill had long since stopped being involved with the technical end of the OS by then.  While he was once extremely knowledgeable regarding the technical/systems aspects of Windows, like any CEO he most likely became purely involved in the business end of the business, traveling the world, schmoozing politicians, addressing boards of directors, etc.  Also, he probably hadn't touched a computer except as an end user -- I would guess that IT techs always maintained his computer(s), updates, software installations, and the like.

But I believe that in 2003 he had recently announced that he was stepping away from active participation in the company - or at least starting to do so.  So for the first time in over 40 years he probably had some extended time at home and decided to install Moviemaker 2 himself.  Hey, he had to start acting like an end user at some point!

So, yes, I guess it should be a good thing that he finally sees just what everyone else has had to go through with Windows.  But unfortunately, as you mentioned, things haven't changed much for the better since 2003.

Bill probably ended up switching to Linux or a Mac since then!   

Jim

[Carol Haynes]

As I see it Bill's experience on the MS website was actually a design decision - it has always been like that - and it is done for a purpose ... they don't want people to use it or request help.

MS now has the mentality of no-support, no-interest box shifting - wasn't it ever thus (well maybe niot in the 70s and early 80s)? Their biggest problem is there are too many people who only do the job for the money and too many investors who are only interested in returns. They figure that since they have an effective monopoly on OS and Office (it doesn't look like changing any time soon) they can forget what the software is for and simply bring in the cash!

One thing they didn't say was whether Bill got more than an automated reply ...

[tomos]

One thing they didn't say was whether Bill got more than an automated reply ...

-Carol Haynes (July 01, 2008, 04:29 AM)