I always thought Gates was feared by his employees. Unless I'm missing something, all the following emails passed the buck with no one saying, "The boss is pissed and we had better fix the mess."
His position and influence still has enough weight to make a poor interaction with him a career limiting event.
I think that's what OP was referring to, he's still the guy that founded Microsoft. He's as figurative and influential as any boss I'd ever hope to meet.
I think he was wary of what it actually meant to the product. For instance, imagine we have a problem with the authentication on an internal component, and then, someone from quality control states “don’t worry, I’ll own the authentication issues”. What does that even mean? Is QA going to solve the issue? How? Are you going to oversee the way other team(s) solve the issue?
He knew exactly what he was saying - he didn't want to "OWN" the problem nor the solution....he was abdicating is sole responsibility for the mess... and rightfully so as its a cross organizational issues (based on the thread). This is a great example of what folks should expect when hiring/working at a large corp. So much time and effort is spent in this EXACT manner. Its amazing that anything does get done, in some respect. Its also why I found the startup experience amazing because there's no time/place for this, but if they succeed, then all end up in this type of environment / scenario.
AND, I can vouch for the pain and suffering that "Marketing" can place on tech teams and end product fails.... heck MS , to this day, cloud "EXPERTS" can not explain their pricing model, or just chose not to.
First they tried tiles. Then they tried to remove it. Then they tried to add websearch.
Mine now so bad that if I hit windows key and start typing it picks up from about the 4th character types and ofc
Then searches for the wrong thing. Literally unusable for the most basic of task for an OS - launching programs
If it wasn’t for a couple of windows only usage cases I’d have dumped this so fast
I still wish I had pirated software several times a year. Last it was Garmin stuff. I will never buy anything Garmin ever again. It was a Kafkaesque experience.
The list of banned companies is starting to get prohibitively long.
Oh yeah Garmin software was absolutely amongst the worst I have ever tried to use. Complete trash. Awful software for the simplest of tasks like loading maps onto your GPS.
My first experience was the purchase. There was a choice between downloading or getting an SD card.
I had a bunch of SD cards so I thought a download would be fine. Except it wasn't a download. It was "download our windows/Mac os exclusive software that refuses to run in a VM and use that to flash an SD card".
I went back and read through the site. Nowhere did it say "requires xyz". And since it was sold as a subscription I could not get a refund. Next season I will sell my plotter and buy a brand that respects it's customers.
Windows PC usability issues were already such a meme that they're a topic of a 2001 episode of the sitcom Frasier. Bill Gates appears as a guest on Frasier's radio show. Frasier has a long list of questions for his famous guest, but becomes frustrated as his callers use up the entire show's runtime to ask Gates tech support questions. Gates seems pleased to tell a caller that Windows XP installation does not in fact require a boot disk.
Yes, the source of these emails are court discovery proceedings, related to the many court cases Microsoft has been involved in. They're all public record, so they can safely be reproduced online.
Did it improve? Honest question as I haven't touched Windows since the late 90s because it was terrible (I went from Basic booting home computers to DOS to Unix to Linux and Mac OS X; I use mostly Linux still).
I just bought a Dell with blank-slate Windows 10 install. Windows Update came up on first boot. Most of the things billg said in this 2003 email remain true. e.g.
> This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
(But it was GB of stuff.)
> Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.
… and once that was done, it started harassing me to install Windows 11. “Harassing” like full screen takeovers with buried “no thanks” buttons and secondary “ARE YOU SURE?” screens once I found and clicked the close buttons. That hasn’t stopped.
I had this with the added bonus that it deemed my machine not good enough to install W11 on. So it would scream at me to "upgrade" Windows and then reject any attempt to do so.
I installed Linux, now that Proton means all my games work anyway.
This is why I go with Fedora Silverblue for my elderly family. When they had Windows installed, most support calls was about crazy and confusing full screen pop ups and forced upgrades.
With a stable disto, everything just works and keeps up to date without bothering the user.
Why anyone uses Windows today is a mystery to me. My guess is force of habit and lock-inn effects.
It's weird, because for me XP was really the high point. I don't think I ever used the site they're discussing, but XP itself had a nice consistent UX that I was happy to use. A couple of years I ago I tried out windows for my main Dev environment for nearly 2 years and completely regretted it. What a disaster it is.
Pretty much yeah, by service pack 2 they'd sorted most of it. SP3 was almost good. As far as I was concerned Windows 2000 was the superior choice till well into the XP life cycle. And XP was definitely the better choice till 7.
There isn't a dumpster rotten enough for ME, Vista, or 8.
> There isn't a dumpster rotten enough for ME, Vista, or 8.
Vista was pretty good after SP2, so was Windows 8.1.
In fact I find 8.1 (with StartIsBack installed) much better than the adware mess that's Windows 10.
What most people don't know is that vista was not all that different from 7. As you mention after SP fixed the bugs. The main issue was hardware requirements were quite hefty with all the new stuff and people put it on 2gb ram laptops with 5400rpm disks.
In any case the issues got much worse with 10 and now even worse with 11. The os itself is not good but it is what it is. Now the invasive trash happening lately is truly bad and should be enough to move people away. Seems there is not much of an effect so they will keep pushing.
It really was. XP gets looked back on with rose-tinted glasses but only because successive iterations of windows have been so extraordinarily bad. The Microsoft.com website was so bad it was almost comical.
To Microsoft's credit, they have made some improvements in some areas but the same old DNA is on display when you use e.g. Teams.
"I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues."
While it is amazing that windows did actually continue to go backwards in usability with Vista, Tiles, in-OS advertising, etc, windows was never great at usability in the sense of Bill's complaints here.
Microsoft at this point already had a decade-long track record of dumping alphaware on the market from Windows Me, Windows 1.x/2.x, Office packages, backoffice, Outlook, half-baked features, smorgasborg of apis on apis on apis, security and viruses everywhere (didn't start with the internet, folks).
They are an entrenched monopoly, and all that matters is the money coming in and the monopoly keeping its power. Bill is PERFECTLY aware of Microsoft's monopoly power, it was his goal since the MSDOS days.
So this entire post by BillG is just a big disingenuous lie. Bill is trying to whitewash his hands of building a terrible monopolistic handicap he has foisted on computing and the world now that he'd gone into semi-retirement as him being some white knight savior of endusers everywhere.
It is total bullshit. He knows very well why all this doesn't work and the company is functioning exactly as he designed it. He never gave a shit about quality except in the bare minimum.
So yeah, let's yuck up the one time the hundred billionaire was bored and played end user and got a little taste of his own medicine. But lets not pretend this was any real impediment, he could pay some person to do whatever he needed thousands of times over in the time it took for him to write the emails.
The point of the post is "look, I know we make shit software at Microsoft, but cmon people, THIS shitty? We need to look like we are trying a little".
The best part are the follow-up emails of people trying to cover their ass and pass the buck within the giant corporation. I'm sure all those emails and the time it took to read and respond to all of them, and all the meetings about them that we don't see, really helped the world. /s
I always thought Gates was feared by his employees. Unless I'm missing something, all the following emails passed the buck with no one saying, "The boss is pissed and we had better fix the mess."
He's not the boss anymore at this point (2003). Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000.
I don't take the term boss literally here.
His position and influence still has enough weight to make a poor interaction with him a career limiting event.
I think that's what OP was referring to, he's still the guy that founded Microsoft. He's as figurative and influential as any boss I'd ever hope to meet.
Yes, that was my point. He loomed large over Microsoft regardless of the org chart.
I found it hilarious one of the execs did not know what owning a product means:
> I don't know what it means to "own website issues"
I didn’t interpret that sentence like you did.
I think he was wary of what it actually meant to the product. For instance, imagine we have a problem with the authentication on an internal component, and then, someone from quality control states “don’t worry, I’ll own the authentication issues”. What does that even mean? Is QA going to solve the issue? How? Are you going to oversee the way other team(s) solve the issue?
That’s how I interpreted it.
> Is QA going to solve the issue? How? Are you going to oversee the way other team(s) solve the issue?
Owning an issue means you're the one that answers those questions.
He knows exactly what owning a product means. His subtext is "if you're going to talk about owning something, please add specificity to your claim."
He knew exactly what he was saying - he didn't want to "OWN" the problem nor the solution....he was abdicating is sole responsibility for the mess... and rightfully so as its a cross organizational issues (based on the thread). This is a great example of what folks should expect when hiring/working at a large corp. So much time and effort is spent in this EXACT manner. Its amazing that anything does get done, in some respect. Its also why I found the startup experience amazing because there's no time/place for this, but if they succeed, then all end up in this type of environment / scenario.
AND, I can vouch for the pain and suffering that "Marketing" can place on tech teams and end product fails.... heck MS , to this day, cloud "EXPERTS" can not explain their pricing model, or just chose not to.
Same for start menu.
First they tried tiles. Then they tried to remove it. Then they tried to add websearch.
Mine now so bad that if I hit windows key and start typing it picks up from about the 4th character types and ofc Then searches for the wrong thing. Literally unusable for the most basic of task for an OS - launching programs
If it wasn’t for a couple of windows only usage cases I’d have dumped this so fast
Join us, become one of the linux desktop people.
Will give it another go. Quite comfortable with server/cli flavour linux, but desktop has always been a challenge
I still wish I had pirated software several times a year. Last it was Garmin stuff. I will never buy anything Garmin ever again. It was a Kafkaesque experience.
The list of banned companies is starting to get prohibitively long.
Oh yeah Garmin software was absolutely amongst the worst I have ever tried to use. Complete trash. Awful software for the simplest of tasks like loading maps onto your GPS.
My first experience was the purchase. There was a choice between downloading or getting an SD card.
I had a bunch of SD cards so I thought a download would be fine. Except it wasn't a download. It was "download our windows/Mac os exclusive software that refuses to run in a VM and use that to flash an SD card".
I went back and read through the site. Nowhere did it say "requires xyz". And since it was sold as a subscription I could not get a refund. Next season I will sell my plotter and buy a brand that respects it's customers.
It’s a remarkably detailed and patient message. Can’t fathom getting such a message from my leadership
Windows PC usability issues were already such a meme that they're a topic of a 2001 episode of the sitcom Frasier. Bill Gates appears as a guest on Frasier's radio show. Frasier has a long list of questions for his famous guest, but becomes frustrated as his callers use up the entire show's runtime to ask Gates tech support questions. Gates seems pleased to tell a caller that Windows XP installation does not in fact require a boot disk.
https://frasier.fandom.com/wiki/The_Two_Hundredth
> Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
Are those emails legit?
Yes, the source of these emails are court discovery proceedings, related to the many court cases Microsoft has been involved in. They're all public record, so they can safely be reproduced online.
What was Gates' role at the time? He seems very disconnected from how anything in Windows works. I'm surprised how far removed he is.
Was it really that bad back in 2003?
Did it improve? Honest question as I haven't touched Windows since the late 90s because it was terrible (I went from Basic booting home computers to DOS to Unix to Linux and Mac OS X; I use mostly Linux still).
I just bought a Dell with blank-slate Windows 10 install. Windows Update came up on first boot. Most of the things billg said in this 2003 email remain true. e.g.
> This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
(But it was GB of stuff.)
> Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.
(But it was more than 10 minutes multiple times.)
> Then it told me to reboot my machine.
(Probably six reboots after 5 software updates.)
… and once that was done, it started harassing me to install Windows 11. “Harassing” like full screen takeovers with buried “no thanks” buttons and secondary “ARE YOU SURE?” screens once I found and clicked the close buttons. That hasn’t stopped.
I had this with the added bonus that it deemed my machine not good enough to install W11 on. So it would scream at me to "upgrade" Windows and then reject any attempt to do so.
I installed Linux, now that Proton means all my games work anyway.
This is why I go with Fedora Silverblue for my elderly family. When they had Windows installed, most support calls was about crazy and confusing full screen pop ups and forced upgrades.
With a stable disto, everything just works and keeps up to date without bothering the user.
Why anyone uses Windows today is a mystery to me. My guess is force of habit and lock-inn effects.
Online games don’t run on Proton.
It's weird, because for me XP was really the high point. I don't think I ever used the site they're discussing, but XP itself had a nice consistent UX that I was happy to use. A couple of years I ago I tried out windows for my main Dev environment for nearly 2 years and completely regretted it. What a disaster it is.
Pretty much yeah, by service pack 2 they'd sorted most of it. SP3 was almost good. As far as I was concerned Windows 2000 was the superior choice till well into the XP life cycle. And XP was definitely the better choice till 7.
There isn't a dumpster rotten enough for ME, Vista, or 8.
> There isn't a dumpster rotten enough for ME, Vista, or 8.
Vista was pretty good after SP2, so was Windows 8.1. In fact I find 8.1 (with StartIsBack installed) much better than the adware mess that's Windows 10.
What most people don't know is that vista was not all that different from 7. As you mention after SP fixed the bugs. The main issue was hardware requirements were quite hefty with all the new stuff and people put it on 2gb ram laptops with 5400rpm disks.
In any case the issues got much worse with 10 and now even worse with 11. The os itself is not good but it is what it is. Now the invasive trash happening lately is truly bad and should be enough to move people away. Seems there is not much of an effect so they will keep pushing.
It really was. XP gets looked back on with rose-tinted glasses but only because successive iterations of windows have been so extraordinarily bad. The Microsoft.com website was so bad it was almost comical.
To Microsoft's credit, they have made some improvements in some areas but the same old DNA is on display when you use e.g. Teams.
Microsoft is just plain bad at Product.
Their web stuff is still awful.
Trying to sign in to email? Let me take 10 seconds redirecting you across 5 different domains
Does anyone know if office is coming to Linux. That's our main lockin currently.
"I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues."
While it is amazing that windows did actually continue to go backwards in usability with Vista, Tiles, in-OS advertising, etc, windows was never great at usability in the sense of Bill's complaints here.
Microsoft at this point already had a decade-long track record of dumping alphaware on the market from Windows Me, Windows 1.x/2.x, Office packages, backoffice, Outlook, half-baked features, smorgasborg of apis on apis on apis, security and viruses everywhere (didn't start with the internet, folks).
They are an entrenched monopoly, and all that matters is the money coming in and the monopoly keeping its power. Bill is PERFECTLY aware of Microsoft's monopoly power, it was his goal since the MSDOS days.
So this entire post by BillG is just a big disingenuous lie. Bill is trying to whitewash his hands of building a terrible monopolistic handicap he has foisted on computing and the world now that he'd gone into semi-retirement as him being some white knight savior of endusers everywhere.
It is total bullshit. He knows very well why all this doesn't work and the company is functioning exactly as he designed it. He never gave a shit about quality except in the bare minimum.
So yeah, let's yuck up the one time the hundred billionaire was bored and played end user and got a little taste of his own medicine. But lets not pretend this was any real impediment, he could pay some person to do whatever he needed thousands of times over in the time it took for him to write the emails.
The point of the post is "look, I know we make shit software at Microsoft, but cmon people, THIS shitty? We need to look like we are trying a little".
Gates is underappreciated as a real monster.
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-balla...
The best part are the follow-up emails of people trying to cover their ass and pass the buck within the giant corporation. I'm sure all those emails and the time it took to read and respond to all of them, and all the meetings about them that we don't see, really helped the world. /s