Boing Boing:
In 2003 Bill Gates tried to download Microsoft Movie Maker from Microsoft.com. His confusing, frustrating, futile experience prompted him to write a terrifically scorching email to the managers in charge of the project. It starts off pretty mild, with just a hint of the brutally funny sarcasm to come. (“I typed in movie maker. Nothing. So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist? So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”) It gets better from there.
Here’s a link to a PDF of the actual email exchange. Start at the bottom with Bill’s email, then work your way up.
I feel your pain, Bill.
“somebody decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable”. Jeepers.
Link is dead?
A more perfect summary of the issues with Windows I could not have written myself. That said, it’s much, much better today than it was then. I oversee IT at a company with a number of Windows machines (7,8, 10), so I’ve seen the evolution.
OMG this is an exhibit from Comes v. Microsoft. I recall downloading a 1Gb file of these exhibits after the case was over, but I can’t find the torrent file now, that was years ago. I wonder how many OTHER horror stories are buried in there. How did anyone find this needle in a haystack?
Good lord. They couldn’t even decide who was going to work on what. Completely dysfunctional. As an end user it’s even more frustrating because we were all experiencing this crap (and worse) and you never heard anything form MS publicly except how awesome they were.
Am I the only one that reads the original email from Bill Gates and questions whether or not it is real? The entire thing just reads to me more like a rant of a disgruntled customer, not the CEO of Microsoft. The typos, new paragraph for almost every sentence, making fun of the normal file paths, the fact that he only then realized how painfully slow their website was???
Am I crazy?
Would be nice if Apple had someone like this at the top, who has the technical acumen to recognize when the user experience sucks, and isn’t afraid to hold people/teams responsible. They used to have that guy – he was far from perfect, and occasionally fought for some really bad ideas (web apps only on the first iPhone?); but he knew how to motivate his teams to create a better, more cohesive overall user experience. It feels like that is slipping lately.
Why wouldn’t Bill Gates be frustrated just like anyone else? He was a very demanding boss just like Jobs.
When people email internally to colleagues, its not unusual to be less formal. Especially coming from an upset CEO to his lieutenants.
And you know Apple doesn’t have someone doing this how….?
I have no doubt there is an individual(s) inside Apple making these very same internal memos. We just don’t know how demanding their taste is, or whether they’re arguing for things you agree/disagree with. Cook very well could be that guy shaming teams and holding them accountable. None of us know, since none of us are there on the executive team.
And this was their answer to iMovie, right? Something marginally created by poorly-instructed engineers working in balkanized divisions for users that absolutely nobody seemed to care about.
This is the house that Bill and Steve built. A bunch of loud-mouthed salesmen with big bribes for CTOs, an effective monopoly on two cash cows, and trash-talk for anyone who had legitimate criticism of their products.
Actually Bill Gates was no longer the CEO by 2003, it was Steve Ballmer. Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 and became chairman of the board, and “chief software architect,” though I don’t know if that was just a title. By 2006 he was transitioning out of any day-to-day role at Microsoft to concentrate on philanthropy.
My point being that I think we can look at the email as coming from someone more detached than the CEO.
I looked this up via Google, by the way, and now I’m seeing a bunch of ads for memorabilia signed by Tigers outfielder Gates Brown and movies on DVD directed by Tony Bill.
Took ’em long enough. Difficult to imagine how it could’ve gotten worse.
Ah, memories. Not only do I remember the same frustrations as Mr. Gates, but that was also the same Microsoft era where you had to get and call a secret long-distance Microsoft number (when such calls cost money) to obtain patches to make your major-brand laptop work properly because they were “experimental” and neither Microsoft.com nor Windows Update nor your OEM could provide them to you.
The subsequent arrival of the “unfinished” and “incomplete” and “unusable” Mac OS X preview was a welcome change in my life.
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It’s real. I repeat: this is evidence from Comes v. Microsoft. The bottom of page one is clearly marked as a plaintiff’s exhibit. The attorneys for Microsoft stipulated they were authentic emails.
It wasn’t just Bill who enabled Microsoft to become the industry’s albatross that it became. Few of Gates’ creepy threats would’ve held as much power as they did had not Ballmer’s team of fratboys established the company’s stranglehold presence as effectively as it did.
No this is what BillG hath wrought. This document is from the anti-monopoly action against Microsoft. BillG told Apple to “knife the baby” (media players and editors) and they would allow Apple to keep Quicktime. Comes v. Microsoft ended with Microsoft paying $180 million. Microsoft wanted an unrestricted monopoly to help them push crapware like Movie Maker. They didn’t get it.
On a vaguely related monopolistic note, long ago I bought a product from Macromedia called Movie Maker. It was total crap. And Marc Canter still owes me money for destroying the Mac IIfx I rented to him.
Division silos were awesome, weren’t they?
its not slipping, your just trotting out the “Steve Jobs would never!” trope and wearing your rose-colored glasses. Puck mouse sucked. Ping sucked. iPods Socks, etc…
It took him until 2003 to realize that Windows was a hot pile of garbage?
IS a hot pile of garbage. Yesterday I updated a not-very-old i7/16gb windows 10 box to the latest Windows 10 v1803. It took 3 HOURS. On a gigabit network connection. and that was after I had to go find the Windows 10 1803 update because every time I tried to do it with Windows update it gave me error 0x0084-664528 or some such nonsense.
I’ve had my share of Mac issues but nothing remotely like that…
It took him until 2003 to realize that Windows was a hot pile of garbage?
IS a hot pile of garbage. Yesterday I updated a not-very-old i7/16gb windows 10 box to the latest Windows 10 v1803. It took 3 HOURS. On a gigabit network connection. and that was after I had to go find the Windows 10 1803 update because every time I tried to do it with Windows update it gave me error 0x0084-664528 or some such nonsense.
I’ve had my share of Mac issues but nothing remotely like that…
It took him until 2003 to realize that Windows was a hot pile of garbage?
IS a hot pile of garbage. Yesterday I updated a not-very-old i7/16gb windows 10 box to the latest Windows 10 v1803. It took 3 HOURS. On a gigabit network connection. and that was after I had to go find the Windows 10 1803 update because every time I tried to do it with Windows update it gave me error 0x0084-664528 or some such nonsense.
I’ve had my share of Mac issues but nothing remotely like that…
Marginally better, with detours like the abject horrors that were Windows Vista and Windows 8.
Marginally better, with detours like the abject horrors that were Windows Vista and Windows 8.