Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

by nickb • 18 years ago

116 89 18 years ago

blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com

raganwald2• 18 years ago

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

And rightly so. Anyone who tries to use the download page to download something will give up and never try it again, so after a while everyone will ignore it!

RobertL3• 18 years ago

Your logic is stunning raganwald... stunning..

I'm rolling on the floor...

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

How do you type while doing that?

jrockway3• 18 years ago

Why is this surprising? Bill Gates doesn't need to fanboi Microsoft internally; it's his company. He needs to be as critical as possible so the outside world gets a good product. It's his company that looks bad when things like this happen, so of course he is going to "rant" about it. It's his job.

thinkcomp• 18 years ago

It's surprising because you might think Bill Gates would have some pull at his own company. Most of these issues he raises have been problems for years, and have gotten even worse in some cases!

jrockway3• 18 years ago

That's a good point; he shouldn't have to point things like this out. It should be obvious that you shouldn't clutter add/remove programs with "tests" and so on. (etc.)

markbao3• 18 years ago

Many of these problems are still prevalent in Microsoft. Confusing processes and the like.

So, it's not Gates. Gates is a good guy and he sounds like he gets it. Is it the corporate structure then?

noonespecial• 18 years ago

What's scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They're like a mountain that can walk.

-Paul Graham

One of my favorite PG quotes.

edw519• 18 years ago

Not surprising at all. You reap what you sow.

This is a company built upon bullying, intimidation, skirting the law, and violating ethical practices in order to shove its monopoly down anyone and everyone's throat. Anything except technical excellence.

So the rest of us suffer until the market finds its way around the lawyers and corrects itself (as it usually does).

This memo is simply a representation of all the B.S. that must have been going on for years between sowing the seeds of arrogance and reaping the harvest of crap.

dhotson• 18 years ago

This reminds me of the bug report Linus Torvalds submitted when he couldn't figure out how to get youtube to work on linux.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858

staunch• 18 years ago

And that's how a guy with "no taste" critiques. Imagine Steve Jobs' emails!

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

I'm not sure Steve Jobs uses email. I think he uses ninjas.

neilc• 18 years ago

Steve Jobs said Microsoft has no taste, not Bill Gates. I think that if you're a good software developer (and BillG certainly qualifies), you need to at least have some degree of taste.

jey• 18 years ago

It's pretty clear that BillG has business, management, and technical acumen, but I'm not so sure that he has taste in the aesthetic sense. If he does have good aesthetic taste, he hasn't done a very good job of implementing it.

LPTS• 18 years ago

The problem is that microsoft doesn't need critiques as much as someone to fire the idiots in charge of the places the problems arise. The problem with microsoft is that no one fires the idiots who think it's OK to let customers see this kind of crap.

Bill Gates could be as good as critiquing things as Steve Jobs, but unless he fires the idiots who thought the dumb implementations were acceptable, all that valid criticism ain't worth two shits.

simplegeek• 18 years ago

Well, I think Bill Gates is just using common sense here. These are product management issues and he's rightly pointing them out. Any great programmer (like him) is expected to do that. But, IMHO, when Steve Jobs talks about taste his mind operates on a whole different level.

st3fan2• 18 years ago

"""Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"""

Haha

% uname -a

Darwin Galactica.local 9.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.3.0: Fri May 23 00:49:16 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.5.18~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

% uptime

19:08 up 23 days, 6 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.87 1.02 1.07

mhartl3• 18 years ago

I had the same thought when I read this. I used to turn off my computer every night, until I switched from Windows (98) to Linux. In grad school, my roommate and I had uptime contests with our Linux boxes, which he won with something like 6 months of uptime. The most common causes of lost uptime were electrical power outages and moving apartments.

Now, like you, I mainly run OS X, but it's on a laptop, which wreaks havoc with my uptime. Ah, well. I guess you can't have it all.

jauco• 18 years ago

I'm always amazed by this. Why would you keep your computer running if you're not using it? just for comparing lengths?

brk• 18 years ago

-sh-3.00$ uptime 08:36:21 up 254 days, 10:28, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

daveambrose• 18 years ago

My favorite lines:

"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.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess."

coffeeaddicted• 18 years ago

I also liked that one. But it also reminded me that I often use synaptic on Debian when I am looking for applications on my system which is rather similar to the "add/remove software" on Windows. The only place where I can do a sane search (including searching summaries what the applications actually do) and get an additional good categorization of the software. Funny how the package manager on both sytems seems to have better information about your applications than for example the typical startup menu (which is usually a mess after a few months - also on both systems).

GrandMasterBirt2• 18 years ago

Its good that these sort of issues are exposed, even if by Bill. The scary thing is that MS QA does not pick this stuff up.

As more of this stuff gets exposed this will hopefully make MS work harder. And as Apple is becoming a REAL contender, hopefully MS will pull their head out of their ass.

RobertL3• 18 years ago

ain't gonna happen GMB.. ain't gonna happen.

I do agree with your observation though..... I'm just not as optimistic in regard to the outcome.

holygoat• 18 years ago

MS's QA is oriented towards making sure that individual pieces function, not that the right thing happens. Their aim is 100% automated unit testing... but nobody ever tests that doing something is intuitive.

The UX folks do, but that doesn't mean they get their way.

GrandMasterBirt2• 18 years ago

MS having unusable products is like Exxon not selling fuel. Very quickly users will abandon windows in favor of Apple if it gets too bad.

markbao3• 18 years ago

Looks like Bill Gates knows how to communicate his thoughts easily for the reader.

Neither I nor the recipient of the email would have read that entire thing if it was in a large paragraph block.

s3graham• 18 years ago

I agree, it was a nice user story.

But, I'm damn sure that all the recipients would have carefully read every word of that email, even if it had been written in one large leetspeek paragraph.

RobertL3• 18 years ago

Well... BG isn't the only one who get's frustrated with windows.

I gave up on that crap environment a long time ago and started using Mac's...... the only way to go. Definitely worth the extra money.

xlnt3• 18 years ago

Equivalent macs don't really cost extra money.

rms4• 18 years ago

Because of the extra value of the system just working?

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Duh, Bill:

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=download+moviemaker

I thought I'd try to install it to see if they streamlined it, but it turns out it was part of SP2. I guess I never needed to know about it...

joshwa• 18 years ago

too many cooks in the kitchen. MS needs a strong product management voice ala Jobs/Schiller to cut through the crap and insist on a coherent, consistent, and comprehensible product vision and user experience.

JesseAldridge• 18 years ago

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if Gates saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship to preserve his legacy.

anirbas• 18 years ago

If he did, it's surprising he didn't go years before this.

ComputerGuru3• 18 years ago

errr... he did - he's been stepping out since 2001.

bprater2• 18 years ago

It makes me nervous that I didn't see it as a rant as all. Am I that callous?

To me, it looks like something constructive that every CEO should do -- spend time dealing with their product like their customers do, and make sure the troops know when it isn't up to standards.

ardit33• 18 years ago

It is kind of suprising how much disconnected he is with the flagship product of his company.

He should have been able to be a lot more specific and detalied about what was going on, and not complain in generic terms "downloaded more stuff, this popup here, that thing there".

It seems that back then he was not involved at all with the development of windows. It feels like comming from somebody that just started using it, and not somebody that build it (or gave guidance on building it). And this was in 2003, so Windows XP had been out for about two years.

jm4• 18 years ago

I'm not so sure the level of detail is an indication that he's disconnected with his own company's products. The vibe I got was that he was trying to describe to the people who build this stuff what it's actually like to be an end user. I think the whole point is that they're the ones who are disconnected and completely out of touch. I seriously doubt that Bill Gates _needs_ to download and buy Movie Maker from microsoft.com like a customer would.

Even if he is the one who is totally disconnected I thought all of his points were excellent and a perfectly accurate illustration of how Windows has gone wrong. What I'm left wondering is what's been going on there the past several years. If these critiques by Gates are something new it's a real shame for Microsoft that he didn't start sooner. If his statement that it's his job to do this every day is accurate then I'd say they have even bigger problems.

ComputerGuru3• 18 years ago

You can't deny that this is someone who gets software and knows how things are supposed to be. Now whether Microsoft gets software or not is debatable, but BillG most certainly does. Anyone that's spoken to him in real-life (even some of the most fanboyish Apple users) has confirmed this fact time and time again - it's a real shame for the software industry he "decided" to pull back from his company in 2001.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that this rant would come from Steve Jobs long before the products were actually shipped.

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

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