Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

u1hcw9nx

>So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated And it get worse from there. This is funny as hell. Billg eating his own shit.

MeteorMarc

Could it be the reboot thing is legacy code from Windows 1.0? Wait, then Gates himself was at th wheel.

ThrowawayB7

Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.

johnnyApplePRNG

Read it. Stopped halfway through thinking "Damn, this Mike Beckerman is a piece of work. Doesn't understand English grammar let alone software development." Looked him up... >Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok. Not surprising at all.

jtwaleson

Can someone in Microsoft confirm my suspicion that this thread is still going and nothing was fixed?

486sx33

Interestingly, Gupta didn’t reply at all, despite being named on bill’s original email directly. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/anoop/ He was natural-user-interface director at the time

techteach00

I still reboot my desktop daily lol. I was born anti-tab pro fresh start

whatever1

I love the fact that 2 days after the ceo surfaced basic usability issues there was still no tangible action plan. It’s insane how much runway a monopoly can buy you.

rc1

Anyway to know this is real?

monkellipse

The bit about updates not truly being critical if you’re behind a firewall doesn’t age too well lol

techteach00

This is a good and bit surprising one. I have a hard time believing the CEO of Palantir has this many generational points I agree with, Zuck too, but I do. https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...

EGreg

“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.” That does not sound like something Bill Gates would say…

adamsvystun

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

pu_pe

I often wonder how CEOs and executives fail to notice how obviously broken their products are. This e-mail thread is quite illuminating. Most "work" in there is figuring out who will be blamed for it and why it shouldn't be your team.

everybodyknows

2023 post, recounting an incident from 2003.

3eb7988a1663

My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee. This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.

sajithdilshan

Read the whole thing and all I saw was zero accountability, zero ownership and zero consequences. That’s how great products die or become a nightmare. Every team keeps on passing the ball to other team and nothing gets fixed or done or improved.

colechristensen

The reason why Apple won is Steve Jobs cared about quality and was an asshole about it and the inertia from that after his death has not entirely decayed yet. The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.

steve1977

Just as an aside, that Amir Majidimehr taking part of the conversation is Amir of audiosciencereview.com fame :)

Flux159

Even today Microsoft can't get their shit together on a decent user experience. Tried to use Azure since I needed to code sign a binary on Github. My two previous accounts setup on Azure errored out with obscure errors and there was no way to fix them. I had to create a new account just to sign up for Azure Artifact Signing (which is now waiting for Microsoft to approve - no updates in a week). I don't know how anyone figures any of this out without reading pages of documentation. I honestly believe that no one actually cares about their products or user experience at Microsoft.