Flame from Bill Gates Re: Windows Usability

http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000/PX07199.pdf

by snikeris • 15 years ago

195 93 15 years ago

antitrust.slated.org

snikeris• 15 years ago

Bill's email is at the bottom. Hooray for top-posting!

sriramk3• 15 years ago

That's just standard Outlook email behavior. It works pretty well for corporate email

dredmorbius3• 15 years ago

No, it doesn't.

It's used frequently in corporate mail systems. This doesn't mean it works well.

Threaded mail clients FTW.

zmonkeyz• 15 years ago

For me the real meat is how the situation is handled after Bill G's email. Lots of hot potato going on. :)

watmough2• 15 years ago

Yes, this is the proverbial 'possum under the floor' problem.

No one really has the power to change any of this stuff, without buy-in, and relinquishment of power across a shitload of teams.

Ergo, it can't be done unless BillG or SteveB personally knocks a lot of heads together.

sriramk3• 15 years ago

Bill actually mentioned this in in another interview (can't find that now, I think it was around the time of his retirement from MSFT - it could have been at an internal event).

He basically said something like - I don't know why people think that the email is something weird or unique. This is my job and I do it all the time.

My personal take - I actually blame Bill for this. The real cause of the situation is how things had been allowed to drift to this stage over several years and Windows versions. I'd put the responsibility on Bill, as CSA and ex-CEO, to have stopped this, rather than send flame mail one late night. Also, if you see the follow-up email threads, none of the VPs or GMs were empowered to make end to end changes either

fraserharris• 15 years ago

Usability is hard. This superficially simple example crosses many products / teams (being Microsoft, we are talking about 100s of people involved). A small startup has the same challenges because your engineers build features, not user experiences. It takes a great product manager to advocate effectively for the user.

JeffffreyF3• 15 years ago

It's not at all hard, it's a philosophical problem. They simply believe their concerns are more important than the users. It's not hard or complicated, they're just philosophicaly fools because they believe what they want matters. It doesn't, and they can't wrap their heads around that. It doesn't at all when customers suffer because all they get depends on customers getting what they need. It's a simple concept that they don't understand because they are deluded into thinking they are worth more, by virtue of their status and positions. A delusion that they spend most of their energy defending. You simply cannot serve two masters, and this is Capitalism at it's finest.

wisty• 15 years ago

I know usability is hard, but this is just an install. It's not like he's actually up to making a movie, yet.

The user "stories" (are these even stories?) should be:

1 - Bill types "movie maker" or "moviemaker" into a search box (any search box) in the Microsoft website.

2 - A button / link that says "Download Microsoft Movie Maker!" appears on the first page (preferably the first link).

3 - Bill clicks the link.

4 - A dialogue box on Bill's computer say "Do you really want install Microsoft Movie Maker?"

5 - A dialogue box asks "Do you want to make shortcuts on the desktop / start menu?".

6 - A dialogue box asks "Do you want to launch Microsoft Movie Maker now?".

That's 6 steps. People should know what they have to do, if they are getting in the way of those steps.

lurker14• 15 years ago

People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he is in charge of everyone involved.

It's bizarre to see someone who knows he is doing everything wrong and is flailing about to stop it, yet is drowning in money coming from his mistakes.

Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years, surviving off the phenomenal success of early Windows, and it has been fascinating to get peeks inside the conflagration.

DaveMebs• 15 years ago

This mail is from 3 years after Gates stepped down as CEO. I think you are trying to use this to reaffirm your personal beliefs about MSFT, rather than use this form your beliefs about the company. You seem to think that because MSFT made Gates a ton of money, the company should be perfect. The fact that you find it bizarre for a founder to be actively involved in his company's products and working to highlight areas needing improvement is, frankley, bizarre.

Maro2• 15 years ago

Come on now.

> products that bring intense pain to it users

I'm a Mac user and I love Office (over OO and iWork).

> as frustrated as anyone else about the problem

It's not "a" problem. It's a large organization with tons of products, and some are more sucky then the rest.

> is completely powerless to stop it

He wasn't the CEO anymore when he wrote this. Also, even if he were the CEO, he can't go in and fix every annoyance himself. He's a leader, he needs people underneath him to do a good job. When they're not, he needs to remind them, that's what this email is.

> is drowning in money coming from his mistakes

If it weren't for Bill Gates, we might not be having this conversation...

> Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years

Have you looked at Win7? It's pretty good. C# 4.0 is much better than Java. Visual Studio kills anything else on the IDE market. Xbox rocks. A friend just got a Win7 phone, and the UI/UX seems to work very well, better than Android, about as good as iOS.

jcc80• 15 years ago

"intense pain to its users" "completely powerless" "flailing about" "drowning in money coming from his mistakes" "slow-motion train wreck"

You my friend, have a way with words. Comments like this make me sad that a "lol" response is not an option.

billmcneale2• 15 years ago

> People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he is in charge of everyone involved.

You're focusing on the negative and forgetting the positive. Yes, Windows can be counter-intuitive, but it has enabled millions of people in the world to be more productive. This is why most of the planet is using Windows.

> Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years

A lot of companies would love to be able to live for that long (and by the way, it's more like 30+ years).

Yes, you will be right at some point in the future, Microsoft will fall. It doesn't seem to be in the near future, though, considering their recent blow out quarters.

I'm a Mac user myself, but come on, let's be fair here.

equalarrow• 15 years ago

This is an easy one tho.

Just look at the thread on this email and you'll get the sense of the typical org finger pointing downward spiral.

But look at how Jobs handles something similar: "When you're the janitor, reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."

I'll leave it at that.

tzs2• 15 years ago

Is there a better link for that document? Slated.org blocks large swathes of the internet from accessing them. If they think your ISP uses something called "phorm" you get blocked and told to find a better ISP. Unfortunately, their block is not well done. For instance, Sprint the ISP apparently used "phorm" and was blocked. However, the block also caught anyone whose packets ended up getting routed over Sprint the major backbone.

(I can get to slated so don't need an alternate link. Just suggesting one for people who may be blocked).

edit: there's a copy of Gates' message in this thread: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=119340

edit2: and here's the same file as at slated.org, but without the blocks: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000... and if you go up one level, you can get the rest of the "comes" files.

sorbus2• 15 years ago

Does the link to scribd not work (such links are inserted in brackets whenever HN detects a story going to a pdf)? It doesn't give you the pdf, so you have to read it in the browser, but it seems perfectly functional otherwise.

tzs2• 15 years ago

I hadn't noticed that those [scribd] things were links! I thought it just meant that the link was to a PDF.

JamesBlair• 15 years ago

Not for me: http://i.imgur.com/Cw8Rx.jpg

__rkaup__• 15 years ago

Are you actually getting some message about 'phorm', or are you just getting redirected to slated.org like I am?

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Things are better, but yes, Windows would benefit (and possibly will with rumors regarding Windows 8) from real package management.

nhebb2• 15 years ago

Dear Bing,

I went to microsoft.com and entered "moviemaker" (one word, just like Gates) in the search box. The top site search result - powered by Bing - is an XP downloads page, which of course didn't have a Movie Maker download. I tried a Google site search with "site:microsoft.com moviemaker", and and the top result was the (correct) Movie Maker 2011 page.

I also searched google.com for "moviemaker", and again the top result was the Movie Maker 2011 page. Doing the same on bing.com, the page is the 3rd result. That, is why Google is eating your lunch (but I do like your pictures).

Michiel• 15 years ago

I tried finding software on OS X, and I could find many pieces of software by searching for them in the App Store application. Also, the app store seems to combine download and install with marketing, as it was heavily promoting OS X Lion at the time of my visit.

I also learned that OS X Lion solves the problem where after a reboot your program state is gone, something that Bill Gates was also complaining about.

OS X Lion costs 24 euros and that, among other things, is why Apple is eating their lunch (but I do like Visual Studio and .NET).

aristidb• 15 years ago

The price of a Lion upgrade is pretty much immaterial, as the relevant price of OS X is really bundled into the price of the hardware. You cannot buy a Lion DVD and install it on a non-Mac PC.

shabble• 15 years ago

I'm currently failing to install Lion, since it gets as far as the restart stage, and (from what I can gather) is attempting to create a recovery partition, fails, and thus doesn't install.

All workarounds I've seen so far seem to indicate that I need an external device of >13G which must be formatted in the process (making me exceptionally nervous about trying to repartition my current USB external backup disk)

So yeah, it's still not perfect.

tripzilch• 15 years ago

You realize this email discussion dates from 2003, right?

steventruong• 15 years ago

And you do realize his argument is base on how bing works in 2011, right?

keyle• 15 years ago

The title should probably say the year at which this happened. 2003. aka. not new.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

The responses were exactly what I would have expected to see: so many conflicting priorities and groups that nobody can actually solve the problem. This is a standard problem at large companies and one of the reasons they are able to be disrupted by technology and market changes.

There was a lot of jot potato in the thread, but I don't think it signifies anything negative about the people trying to solve the problem. If you don't worry about e "right" way to deal with cross-team issues, your life span at beaurocratic institutions will be very short (spoken from experience :).

However, one huge problem that was identified is that delivering bits isn't seen as part of the "product". Product managers (program managers at MS) need to view getting the bits the same way they would view getting shelf space at a big box retailer. If you don't make sure it is done right, your product will have problems no matter how good it is. If PMs aren't empowered to ensure that process is good, you are in trouble.

mrb• 15 years ago

And this is why Apple's software and devices are more usable than Microsoft's: one very powerful person at the top, Steve Jobs, dictates what he wants, precisely. No inter-group fighting, or conflicting priorities.

cubicle67• 15 years ago

No inter-group fighting, or conflicting priorities.

I'd put good money on the opposite being the case. I get the impression there's a lot of passionate people working at apple, and passion doesn't yield lightly

vedantk• 15 years ago

Reading the last email was gratifying and cathartic. I used to have experiences like this on Windows all of the time. There's some savage pleasure in knowing that Bill Gates had to put up with stuff like this too.

indrax• 15 years ago

My favorite part is where they think they can solve the problem by solving the problems.

nxn2• 15 years ago

Urgh, there is so much corporate styled lingo and behavior going on here that I feel like they forgot how to concern themselves with actual problems. It seems like at some point sounding "professional" became more important to their career than actual communication. I mean, a lot of those replies are so high level you can't even see the original problem from that height.

Instead of concerning themselves with better search results and better download links/navigation they somehow arrive at needing to "promote" some downloads because they're "cool"? How is showing crap you THINK a user is interested in going to solve the problem of them not being able to get what they actually want? You can almost actually see the original message degrade and lose meaning with each new email that gets sent out.

bluesmoon• 15 years ago

2 days between the first and last email. No real decisions made in this time.

Shenglong• 15 years ago

Oh boy. If this happened recently, after Bill downloaded Moviemarker, he'd be terribly angry that some genius decided Moviemaker no longer needs a TIMELINE because apparently it's a feature that no one used.

nkp007• 15 years ago

Poor Dave...

res0nat0r• 15 years ago

Can we blame Microsoft for starting the trend of top replying to emails? Since I had to scroll to the bottom of this pdf to read the original message from Bill Gates I'm going to say yes. That is a terrible usability issue I've have to deal with every day for years which I hate. I'd love to go back to the days of plain text and > indented replies.

Steko• 15 years ago

There's pluses and minuses to any implementation. I'd guess new emails on top has won out because it makes previews more useful. Dozens of times a day when I get an email I'm able to digest the entire new content of an email from a 2 line preview that fades in and out of excel. Or when I look through my client I can see the first couple lines of each email and quickly find what I'm looking for.

acabal• 15 years ago

A perennial classic. While I would say that Windows usability has improved significantly since 2004 (when the mail was written) it's shocking see how the big kanuna's own company became too mired in politics and bureaucracy for even a fire lit directly by Bill under his underling's asses to take 5 years to make a difference.

That's one of the advantages of a distro like Ubuntu: while you may disagree with Shuttleworth's decisions, and while the quality of early releases of supposedly stable software is questionable at best, at least the man can make a decision and see it become reality in 6 months.

iradik• 15 years ago

Bill should have put his vps in line:

http://nullisnull.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-work-with-me.h...

throwmeahway• 15 years ago

My dear Bill, how have you been this century?

Please consider making a true light and modular Windows OS. I cannot do simple things like Alt-Tab on Windows 7.

I beg you, create a streamlined Windows XP-like OS that allows full functionality based on a modular approach. I'd also like to know what all the programs and services are running (am I running adware/malware/virus or is this vital etc). And not Windows 7 starter.

Something like XPLite but created by Microsoft!

Mr. Throwaway, your most obedient.

beernutz• 15 years ago

What the hell are you talking about?

Alt-tab works just like it always has. the task manager works better than it ever has.

Ohhhhh..... I see. Obvious troll is just being obvious.

babel17• 15 years ago

I have seen that before here on hacker news; something should be done to supress old stories, or at least to show them only to newbies ...

geon• 15 years ago

My question is: Didn't anyone at some point say "Hey, this UX sucks. I'd be embarrased to ship this."?

I know from experience how certain people can be completely unconcerned with quality, only qorking for a salary without any pride of their craft. But a whole company like that? It blows my mind.

mtkd• 15 years ago

This is a now legendary email thread.

You can build some great software and leverage the revenue to acquire and expand further - but if you lose sight of the big picture then stagnation, disfunction and decay is not far away.

When I first saw Google+, my first reaction was that Google has risen to this challenge that Microsoft faltered on - and may have just bought themselves another decade of stellar growth.

kia• 15 years ago

Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227045

brudgers• 15 years ago

Microsoft's website is still a mess - or rather their 100's of websites are. Typing a term into the search box from an Microsoft blog might give you top results from a social forum, typing it from the main page at Microsoft.com will take you someplace else, from MSDN documentation another place still. It's a constant case of, I know I saw it somewhere, but I can't find it again right now.

On the other hand, they encourage everyone to put their work up on the web. And there is an insane amount of helpful information from really smart people who know what they are talking about - even if it isn't well indexed and cross referenced at least it is there.

jpdoctor• 15 years ago

My favorite part from Bill:

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

The fact that you can lose Outlook state by a reboot doesn't seem to bother anyone. It doesn't seem to have dawned on MS or Bill that maybe saving the state as you go might be a useful thing.

Flame from Bill Gates Re: Windows Usability

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