I recently attempted to get on Azure because of their startup package, and I fail to understand how Microsoft holds anything together at all.
Docs are a mess with contradictory information, coordination between teams is a mess, azure UI is a mess. My support agent that was assisting on my PAID support went on vacation with no one to take over the case, and month after, after I asked for any sort of timeline (you have to actually nudge them, otherwise they won't ever communicate), I was told they couldn't fix the issue on their end and I have to create a new account, because my account was stuck in some sort of limbo where they can't see the state of it and their engineering couldn't figure it out.
The process I went through reminds me very much of Bill's internal thinking here.
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.
This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count
1. Leader escalates issue to his team
2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution
3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem
4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan'
5. nothinghappens.jpg
I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg
It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)
I drown in support tickets daily that used to go nowhere. Then people started realizing that I knew what I was talking about and not some standard business user. Now I still have to open tickets, but get visibility of the people who know what they’re doing on their end (having been moved up from lowly support to oversee some ticket filling company that doesn’t know crap). We get tom complain to one another how shit is broken, wait mandatory change periods and then get something working by exploiting loopholes because some process was developed and someone put a lot of money behind it.
Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)
The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?
Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.
Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.
As you get larger there is a fire everyday and ever more competing priorities on which fires get put out.
How much money does movie maker bring Microsoft? Now which executive would want to prioritize movie maker so much that they would directionally alter the company to fix this? Consider the issue that the execs had was fixing all the issues involved a huge number of teams.
Discredit to Bill here but I honestly think he was the only one who had the power to fix this. A Jobs-like figure is the only person with the organizational power and freedom to drive details like this to completion. Anyone else would end up in a power struggle
>"The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?"
Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual initiative mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.
You forgot the part where the leader gets more and more frustrated, it’s like a game of hot potato, if you’re the last one holding the potato when Leader finally cracks, all of it lands on you!
I’ve been in this situation in a small company as well. The owner wasn’t managing the company and there was no other manager. So the owner would express his frustration in an all hands meeting “I don’t like x” or “we’re going to do y from now on” but he would not assign the task to anyone, or give ownership. He would come up with some insane new goal but no plan, no equipment, and no one person who’s in charge of making sure the required resources, time and responsibility is assigned. So nothing would change, a month later there would be another meeting, with a middle aged man having a tantrum about why did no one do anything!? Why is no one listening to me?
You might be thinking it’s a good opportunity to accept some responsibility, it might get you a promotion or be a good learning opportunity. Yeah I tried that for a while, if you succeed, congratulations, you now have one new task for which you’re responsible for without any extra compensation or benefit. If you fail? Well guess who’s getting the blame..,
I have been this owner AND this employee, at different times in my career. As the employee, it's as you describe -- having goals described to the team without actual tasks being assigned to individual employees/teams is a recipe for things not getting done. As the owner (especially with a small team) nothing is more aggravating than having employees who sit around waiting to be told exactly what to do, with no real concern for how the company provides value for its customers; employees who think they're underpaid no matter how much they make and therefore do the bare minimum unless they're getting a bonus/raise/promotion.
Yeah I totally get it. In this situation you could see employees burning out because of the lack of management or leadership and the chaos of the company. Like everyone cared at first and tried real hard but eventually almost formed a learnt helpless. The implicit message was don’t try, just do the bare minimum and avoid trouble. We were also paid minimum wage. Many employees were doing unpaid hours as well.
If you provided leadership in your case then I think it’s different
I think the thing that really made it horrible is like I said. The boss would say x needs to happen but would not think through the details, buy the equipment, allocate the time or human resources. Someone still had to work out how to do those things and who was going to do what.
I’ve had “Boss I can fix this in one line of code.” situations, but nobody of 6 people wanted to make the call despite involving themselves excessively.
So nothing got done.
So the temperature on the issue went up.
So management whose failure was their own could only think of engaging more managers and processes….
Never ended.
I work at small companies now, less money but I enjoy it more. I just fix things and everyone is happy.
> This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies.
Agreed. Even at companies known for having a great culture and being "different from the rest", the Game of Thrones politics is still there - it's just more hidden and polite. I was a senior exec in the biggest BU at just such an F100 valley tech giant for >10 yrs (one level from the CEO). The company actually did have a nicer environment than its peers, no 360 reviews, no 'up or out' mandates, and a vibe genuinely a cut above.
While the net effect was more pleasant day to day and teams were insulated a few more levels down than most places, the brawling over headcount, budget and revenue attribution was simply practiced far more artfully. Sadly, I think it's just endemic to the breed of "large public corp" and while the best may be better, none are immune.
Both will eventually develop a strict hierarchy where you're only accountable to people up the chain of command, not down. There is no way to prevent that because it's a lot easier to keep one person satisfied than a whole team you're supposed to lead, so almost every manager naturally switches to working that way.
The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.
In my experience it's kinda different. The serious issue that raised by higher up usually means more scope, visibility, bonuses and potential bonuses. Teams usually fights to get the important issues(whichever the higher thinks that's important) as their team's work. The drawback is that it's very possible that multiple teams are fighting for the same pie and resulting in duplicated work.
In the end if there are enough incentives(usually money) people would work on those.
I think you're leaving out a key aspect of the problem: not one of those people had the scope of responsibilities to really fix the issue. There was the website, windows update, and OS team, all being fed by a variety of product teams with marketing and delivery concerns. At root, Bill's problems were a coordination issue spanning half the organization. If you were on that email chain, you wouldn't want ownership either because that herding the rest of the cats towards a comprehensive fix that would probably restructure the whole company.
I love how Google looks like an MLP. I suspect their leadership would agree with that portrayal. You can imagine the activation functions: "Will this get me promoted?" "Will this get us bad press?"
> 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.
This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess.
Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program.
One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.
Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.
Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,
Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.
These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.
That's why I like the "managed" model Debian uses. Programs are enforced to comply to the OS standards. If they don't, they either get changed by the Debian maintainers or just not included into the distribution. That's why I can know where things are in my filesystem.
The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.
From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.
For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals.
Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).
Ironically, they could have learned from Jack Welsh to separate the product divisions and make redundant teams on each one to solve the ownership issues.
When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
Exactly. Jack Welsh’s management philosophy just further incentivizes doing what you can to bring everyone else (ie the company) down to make yourself look better.
This comic was made a loooooonnnnnnggggg time ago (back when I worked at Facebook). It was actually a great place to work then, but that company no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
Well, except then the person who volunteered to "own website issues" clarified that they meant one specific issue (download links) among the five or so that Gates identified.
Given that the way the company worked was the cause of the problem, sending the email company wide would have caused more confusion that solve the problem.
Curious why it is so hard to find an owner to the issue. Gates' experience started with the web UI, then I'd expect that the team who owns the microsoft.com or owns the experience. To them there are only two types of bottlenecks: their web pages (usability, JavaScript performance, ways to get backend data, and etc), and their immediate dependencies. So, they drive improvement on both types of the bottlenecks, and the owners of the immediate dependencies recursively handle their own. For instance, the web team will identify that calling the catalog API has a P99 latency of 5 seconds and the network is fine, then they ask the catalog API to improve the API latency. If the catalog team does not do the obvious, the team's manager gets punished.
Of course, I'm being naive here, as I've seen too many companies fail to achieve such basic ownership. So, curious what I have missed. Of if the ownership is not a clean DAG, well, it goes back to Gates, as he was responsible for both the org charts and the company culture.
It wouldn't surprise me that what seems like whole things from the outside are split up even further on the inside of Microsoft. There's probably no single person responsible for microsoft.com (nor was there at the time). Instead the front page is one team, Windows Update (at the time) was yet another team, and sales another, and then there are 5 other teams doing other things, and no single individual or group is responsible for the whole thing. They've all got permission to push things to the website and change whatever just from time immemorial, and not through any defined authority, since that authority doesn't actually exist.
You can still see symptoms of this today. MS will (or at least would) spin up new domains rather than just update microsoft.com, or create newthing.microsoft.com, since both of those require talking to whomever is responsible for the main domain. Even if that person exists, knowing who they are in an org like MS is already a big ask when it's organised the way it is. Meanwhile, buying a new domain likely takes less than an hour, even if you include billing and such.
> 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.
And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".
I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.
There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies.
In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.
I think they also suspect/know that Gates won't revisit the issue. The email is a flame as the subject line admits. Gates wasn't going to go back every week for the next six months to track progress.
I mean, you're 100% right, but what's the alternative? They wanna keep the salary. The machine rewards political people, not people who pick fights to improve the product. It's a perfect pair. :/
>In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
This goes right back to the leadership failure on Bill's part. If your company is structurally incapable of producing good products (which Microsoft assuredly is and still was) then it's on you as the CEO to implement the correct structures.
That's literally the purpose of upper management: you create the conditions for success to happen.
It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok.
I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."
> When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
The crazy thing is that it's more likely that most people in Apple are using their own products, versus any of the Android phone manufacturers or within Google, where it's likely a few of them would be using the Apple ecosystem instead.
Many of them are definitely dogfooding it, but it's possible that there are communication or empowerment issues.
One thing that drives me nuts for example is the indicator for remaining disk space. I have this icon on my desktop that says "Macintosh HD | 995 GB, 273 GB free". This used to work great until a few years ago. Copy 1 GB onto the disk and it displays 1 GB less free disk space.
But since a few years it goes up and down daily by 100 GB or more. Sometimes I have 350 GB, sometimes I have 100 GB. I think it has to do with Time Machine snapshots and purgeable space (whatever that means) but it's totally useless now. I can't tell for sure if I can copy 250 GB to my disk or not. It may fail now but work 2 hours later. How come nobody notices such a fundamental thing not working? Somehow the dogfooding doesn't seem to work. Or maybe the Apple people all have 8 TB disks so they don't care.
> I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them.
Doesn't need to be that large, I worked for a company that ~4500 employees with about 1000 at HQ, that entire email chain looks exactly like what would ensue every time someone at the C-level flagged an issue.
I suspect the reason is much the same, no one wants to be in the hot seat to fix a problem they have no faith they can fix so everyone plays hot potato with the flaming sack of shit until it bursts and lands on someone.
> Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail. (13th Century Persian Proverb)
Also I suspect that there's no real teeth in that angry email.
If the big boss is frustrated by the UX, they might send an angry email or even yell at you in person. If your division doesn't meet its sales projection for the quarter, you might get fired.
If BillG had wanted a company that made good user experiences, he'd have hired (and fired) for that. Sending a pissy email is what you do when you're annoyed but don't actually care enough to do anything about it.
Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs.
They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.
Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues.
An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'.
That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him.
1000% actually.
He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink).
Like a cars coming out of the factory with missing parts ... blame it on the guy on the line?
No. Something is deeply wrong.
I really like Gates - but it's beyond shocking how these cultures work and how myopic they are.
I worked for a Fortune 50 - and it's pretty amazing to watch how an army of actually smart people with 'one eye' can be so competent many ways, but blind in others.
I don't like to put Jobs on a pedestal but obviously this is something he understood (even then with gaping holes).
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience.
I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
I have struggle to understand how someone could come to that conclusion, maybe I missed something?
The email is a 'rant'.
It's a 'list of broken stuff'.
It's not:
1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken
2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome
3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address
4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.
5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.
It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.
It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.
This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.
A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..
In 2003, Gates was no longer CEO; I think he was President of the Board and something like "Special Advisor"? None of the people involved reported to him, so he may actually correctly have felt he could not tell them what to do?--so he stuck to venting his frustration.
Exactly. bluegatty has great points for a CEO role but Bill stopped being CEO in 2000 three years earlier. The board and advisors cannot direct the company internally - this is by law. Separation of oversight and management. They can tell the CEO what to do but the CEO decides. Then they can fire the ceo if they don’t like it.
If the President of the board has an issue with how the company is fundamentally operating, they go to the CEO. If the CEO doesn’t understand or doesn’t prioritize the concerns of the board, then they get replaced.
He’s may not have been the CEO… but he was the boss of the CEO and represented all the individual owners of the company.
True but the separation of concerns is to put a wall up. Billg was relating his poor experience to the company he oversees. He is strictly forbidden from micro managing at this level. Eg "this is a problem" vs "fix the problem this way". Not his job
I’m not talking about micromanaging, I’m talking about relaying the information to the actual CEO (Steve Balmer I believe?) and ensuring they achieve the goals.
Even if he were still CEO, a message of, "This sucks", he does not have to explicitly add, "Fix it, please". That is well implied by the hierarchy. Your boss notes a problem, underlings try to correct.
I can see why you might think this but I think it is incorrect. Particularly because he's not in the hierarchy. Billg is not the boss at this point and has no meaningful effect on one's job unless you are in the top dozen execs and even then this is just an email about a user experience, it's not a command. Ballmer is your boss and the old man yelling at the cloud can keep screaming into the wind. Point: did anything change from this email? I don't think so.
It is helpful for me to understand corporate dynamics and how they actually work (or as supposed to) instead of a simplified version from outside. My brother is a CEO of a big company so I get to hear it from his side. Doesn't mean I'm right, I'm not the CEO.
[edit: softened the language]
[another edit]
Actually he isn't the CEO anymore. Private equity purchased the company years ago and he was made CEO from outside but in the industry. Eventually the PE people wanted to cut everything to make the company look good for a purchaser so that means high earners in the company have to go (this is a highly technical company with PhDs and researchers, etc).
But guess what? Those are the people that make the company special among other things. They demanded he fire some top people. He wouldn't because it would destroy the company's value. So they fired him and put in one of their lackeys to do the slaughter. They kept him on in a different role that I won't say because I don't want to reveal too much. Flash forward the company has not sold and is likely to have lost 50% of its value. I admire him but since they were going to be fired anyway shouldn't he have sucked it up and got a better price for the company? The PE people were total jackasses so working for them another day was poison in his veins.
> It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
It is absolutely a user rant, but it's entirely appropriate for a leader to call out "this is not okay; this is a garbage experience".
> who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
That was the intent. "Fix this." This was an email to a bunch of execs who are capable of driving the actual fixes. If Gates needs to hand hold them through this then they need to be replaced.
> A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this'
This is vacuous corporate speak, the kind of message you send to shareholders to soothe them. This is not leadership.
> hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught...
Again, if Gates needs to do this then everyone on the To line is dead weight.
1) sending the org into a reactive frenzy on the minor issue when the structural issue is the problem - is bad. He's also pointing them at the symptom and not the cause.
2) 'taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.
Gates failed to institute 'design and usability' as a fundamental aspect of the product and operational culture.
The email implies that some underling is to blame which is bad framing.
3) "hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught.." - that's literally his job.
I don’t see an actual “reactive frenzy” here. I see that Gates started a conversation with the execs he believes are responsible for fixing this mess.
And again, these are execs being paid millions. They do not need to be coddled. You are acting as if Gates sent this to a bunch of junior engineers.
> ‘taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.
It’s absolutely vacuous to say 'I take responsibility for this' when you are telling a group of people they need to fix their shit.
Any CVP/EVP who fails at a job and then hears someone above them take responsibility for the failure knows they are about to be out of a job.
> The email implies that some underling is to blame which is bad framing.
If by underling you mean “highly paid executives” then sure. At some point people have to take responsibility for their jobs. This wasn’t a failure of some individual engineers. It was a collective failure of a group of executives to deliver a good experience.
> "hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught.." - that's literally his job
It’s literally not. That’s not what CEOs of large corporations do and Gates wasn’t even CEO at this time. He was in an advisory role. His job was literally to give feedback.
-----> "It’s absolutely vacuous to say 'I take responsibility for this' when you are telling a group of people they need to fix their shit."
Totally false.
It's literally the opposite of vacuous to take responsibility for his failure to set up the culture and system wherein this kind of stuff would not happen - while at the same time starting a fire so that the work is done.
Allocating responsibility is one of the most important actions.
-----> he both 'started a conversation' and ... it's a frenzy.
Agreed - it's totally legit that he brought up the issue, and it doesn't have to be perfectly presented ... but that email chain is almost purely reactionary.
That is not people seeking root cause.
It's not people recognizing underlying systems.
It's a reactionary executive gaggle.
This is a 'put out the fire' type reactionary stuff.
The shocking thing to most people, would be how much of the world is actually run this way.
I concede that it's not horrible in and of itself - and sometimes a fire must be lit, but this is a frenzy. Not deliberative.
----> If by underling you mean “highly paid executives” then sure.
By 'underling' I mean anyone under him. The executives in this thread are acting like underlings.
You keep talking about “taking responsibility”. Unless the person taking responsibility is also taking action, which you aren’t even proposing, then it’s just words. It’s more sugar coating. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
> This is a 'put out the fire' type reactionary stuff.
After the fire fighting comes the postmortem where the systemic issues should be discussed. A fire is a great way to spur both short and long term action.
> By 'underling' I mean anyone under him.
I don’t know how you reconcile “accountability” with the idea that the a leader cannot expect members of the team to deliver. Is Gates the only person who has any accountability expected here?
Do you think personal responsibility travels uphill or downhill?
Each of the letters in CEO stand for a word with specific meaning, and when you put them together they tell you where the buck stops. It’s not a job for people who can’t take responsibility for their fuckups.
> Do you think personal responsibility travels uphill or downhill?
This is trying to be pithy but it’s not. Every leader from the CEO down has responsibility for their area of control and influence.
> It’s not a job for people who can’t take responsibility for their fuckups.
Neither is EVP or any other title that ends in “VP”.
The CEO ultimately owned The fact that installing movie maker was a shit show, but so did everyone in a position of leadership that contributed to that. Accountability does not mean everyone gets to point at the CEO and say “ultimately it’s their fault” as if that absolves them.
> I see that Gates started a conversation with the execs he believes are responsible for fixing this mess.
I think the point here might be that what created this mess in the first place is the structure of the organisation, not the execs that are temporarily embodying it. It's actually quite clear from the follow-ups, there is nobody who can claim responsibility even for the website, never mind any vision or philosophy spanning multiple media and products.
Maybe Gates simply wasn't in the position of doing anything else at that time, or maybe his rant was a clever way to expose this exact problem. But it's pretty obvious that "will someone fix the website" doesn't sound like someone analysing and addressing the root cause of the issue. (However, it's also perfectly possible that this email is just a small part of a bigger conversation at different levels- inform the responsible and patch the immediate issue while more high level analysis and planning takes place elsewhere, informally).
I think the real point is that this is a random email that Gates sent to some execs sharing a bad experience with the product, and some people on HN are trying to take it as a much deeper thing than it really is.
A leader should be able to send candid communication to other leaders. A culture where execs are unable to communicate candidly to their peers or other high-level leaders is a toxic one. It would be absurd to insist that every communication needs to be candy coated and framed in terms of “I take responsibility, so here’s a path forward, and I’ll handhold everyone through it.”
This is not about candor, it's about framing and respecting what kind of power people have, who is responsible for what.
"Hey gang - I know I'm not Dear Leader anymore - and - I don't want to get in the way of your new Dear Leader, but I want to share with you a bad experience I had with this product.
A, B, C, D. E .. was really bad.
After thinking about it - I think much of this lays at my feet. In the Golden Era of MS we didn't think much about design, or 'Whole Product'. I have to take responsibility for that.
But these kinds of outcomes are really bad, and this has to be nipped in the bud now - and in the future.
I suggest this probably happened because Product and R&D criss-crossed here, the Release Managers and Product Marketing dropped a lot in between.
That there was a ball dropped here must be the responsibility at the VP/Executive level at very least, for not ensuring smooth handoff.
Furthermore - that this experience could be so bad means we have to rethink and extend our integration testing all the way to 'end user experience'.
Finally, I think you'll need to engender a culture of design right from the start - that's going to take 2-4 years and a different kind of thinking, that is not a fire that can be put out, or a process to be fixed. I'll have to lave that on the lap of the new Dear Leader.
It borderline infantilizing and buries the message under a bunch of saccharine. I can practically see the fake smile plastered across the face of the manager saying this. I would be insulted if my manager sent a message like this to the team.
Your version also took away literally all of the concrete detail, turning into a generic “it’s bad” that isn’t an actionable. It sounds like you sent it through an LLM.
I would also imagine that there are a lot of other emails flying around that are discussing the general pattern of concern while this is more of a drive-by honest review of a specific experience. This is the kind of blunt feedback that execs do not usually get about their products and probably need more of. This kind of blunt feedback from a respected leader can’t be waived away the way anecdotes from individual customers can.
What does this mean? Fire the VPs who failed to do their jobs? Say what you mean.
> ensuring smooth handoff
“doing their jobs”
> rethink and extend
“fix”
> engender a culture of design
This is a meaningless phrase.
> different kind of thinking
What kind of thinking?
> or a process to be fixed
Processes are how things get done! If programmers push garbage into the list of installed applications, that’s a process failure. If a product team makes a download available but it can’t be found on the main web site’s list of downloads, that’s a process failure. When things get done wrong it’s definitionally a process failure. Process also doesn’t flow from culture, they each exert influence on the other. Bad process will lead to bad culture as much as bad culture will lead to bad process.
I will reiterate what a sibling commenter already said: Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon liberally drizzled in passive voice comes across as candid. Effective communication does not look like this. Effective communication is assertive. It offers direct actionable advice, or asks direct questions which result in actionable answers.
---> First - the notes about language are completely glib.
It's perfectly acceptable for someone to use personal tone.
"> After thinking about it
Just say the thing."
"> nipped in the bud
“stop”"
... would be ridiculous feedback to give anyone.
It's perfectly acceptable for any writer to have some personalized inflection in their prose.
There's no misunderstanding or lost context.
The fact that you would even try to pick apart language at level is just weird.
---> Second - "Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon"
There is nothing 'mealy mouthed' about that prose, and there is no 'corporate jargon' in the note.
None.
The writer in that scenario mean exactly what they said - with some allowance for personal inflection.
That's it.
---> Third - "> engender a culture of design
This is a meaningless phrase."
No - it's not a 'meaningless phrase' - it means exactly that, in so many words.
Obviously, I'm not going to write full follow up paragraph on that in HN, the implication is direct.
---> Fourth - and most importantly - you entirely missed the point by trying to nitpick on arbitrary language someone wrote crudely on a HN comment.
The 'point' is to illustrate in quick and rough terms how one could be 'candid' with the feedback about a broken feature - and to also to frame it responsibly, to direct some feedback and as to where the responsibility might lie and where the process might have broken down, and then to more broadly indicate strategic concerns over culture, because there clearly is, particularly around 'user centric concners'.
Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.
You're getting caught up literally in prose and notions of 'process' which is besides the point. This is not about 'process' - it's about a leader framing feedback.
And FYI it was Satya that finally did 'change the culture' (although on different terms) to generally widespread acclaim.
Consider that three people have given you substantially similar feedback about your “candor”. Your attempt at a “personal voice” here comes off extremely fake. Compare your proposed “candid” message with the actual candor in your message at the top of this thread.
Rather than continue to dismiss the feedback, you should digest it and potentially learn something from it. Or not. It’s your choice.
> Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.
And yet you, simply by reading the email Gates sent, were able to confidently ascertain that the culture itself was failing here. You give too little credit to the recipients of this email when you imply that they can’t make the same assessment.
Your point could be made by simply adding the following at the very top of the original email: “Besides fixing the specific issues in this flow, we should consider how it got this bad in the first place and make changes to prevent it from happening again. I’ll support you and provide whatever you need.”
Done. Let the people who are responsible figure it out. They’re smart and capable, no need to baby them. You’ve made clear that you see it and it’s not acceptable, but you also understand that to drive through bigger changes, you’ll need to back them up and chip in when they need you.
> 2) 'taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.
Tbh it seems like you're autistic and simply don't understand how such a "o take responsibility" message really looks like and what effect it'd have.
Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)
Most of the thread is lower level staff specifically trying to address the raised issues. We have no idea what conversations this triggered among the exec team about the broader strategic issues Bill raised.
It's actually funny that you're thinking they are 'lower level staff' because that's how it seems by their reaction, but those are literally top Execs.
That's really how these orgs often work.
'Dear Leader Is Angry' will set the whole org into a tizzy.
I've seen this countless times - 'XXX said it', and the littlest thing will get moved.
Often - this is good, it means the org is responsive to the direction of the founder, but it's 'abused' all the time. I think leaders forget their responsibility and truly believe that 'their whims' are essential.
25% of the US are looking at the insane things POTUS is putting out and believing there's some kind of 5D chess magic, when it's actually -5D - aka extraordinary bad leadership. That's the 'power of power'.
'Self Awareness' is probably the #1 superpower of a leader, because nobody is going to keep them in check.
Lower level than the former CEO And President of the board.
The point is this was not a round robin reply all buckpassing exercise with BillG and the senior corporate leaders still on the reply list. This is a specific downstream chain of email.
I’m not sure I understand what people here think the right thing to do is when the company founder emails a bunch of senior execs telling them they seem to have let things all go to crap.
Every single recipient on the thread was a Vice President, Corporate Vice President, or Senior/Group Vice President. Gates intentionally bypassed lower-level product managers and emailed the executive tier directly to demand accountability for platform-wide usability regressions.
If you think this is not missing the forest for the trees, please explain.
Becuase it was a typical MS user experience. MS was shipping their software on 25+ install floppies. Having an install fail on floppy 19 was a nightmare. Getting a fax modem that shipped with the PC to function could also be a problem MS would blame the vendor and the vendor blamed MS.
It’s not like his moviemaker experience was a rare occurrence.
It describes the culture of both companies at that time very clearly.
I think the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Steve was a "product" CEO. He would bot only send that email, but in addition he would somehow oversee/sypervise those changes ALL the way until he was satisfied.
As for Jobs, I bought a Mac Mini last summer. I wanted to use iMovie to clip the edges off of a movie file. I clipped the edges, but was unable to discover how to save the resulting file, and gave up. Microsoft's Movie Maker has a menu item to save a file.
I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.
yeah it's like one shortcut and a trim bar in QuickTime so that's the right tool for the job. iMovie isn't much harder but is a palaver with its whole pre-rendering thing just to export what should be a trivial edit.
Yes - this is a mind boggling design conceit of Apple that goes back almost 50 years.
They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.
They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.
We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.
I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.
It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.
Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.
"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.
There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.
There's a menu item. I believe it's File > Share > then you choose how (save to disk, email, export to photos app etc).
File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.
The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.
File > Share is the same, just more user friendly language. I get it's a bit confusing if you've been using computers for a long time (it's certainly caught me out), but 'Share' makes much more sense. Especially because export/save to disk is only one of the multiple 'Share' options available.
Yes! It makes total sense to share with myself a Pages document as PDF! I‘ll promptly think of sharing if all I want to do is save/export a file in a different format. I think we can extend that helpful language to the entire OS! No need for a “copy” or “download” button, it’s all sharing, one way or another! Share share share!
"Export" means "save this working file in one of many formats, including possibly other formats that are first-class in third-party apps but not this app"
How exactly do you think Bill Gates at peak Microsoft is going to fix this given "it's 100% on him?" And do you think the guys on the line are the ones on this email thread?
This is immensely more "ownership"/initiative than the vast majority of middle managers at any tech company would willingly take to solve a minor UX/CUJ failure, that's surely literally why he started the email thread and including the ones he did, to model that behavior for the the other middle management bozos and to try to instill a culture of caring about their work/whether it actually accomplishes the intended goals.
"eak Microsoft is going to fix this given "it's 100% on him?" A"
? The CEO doesn't do the work, they assume and allocate responsibility.
It's 100% 'on Gates' because he failed to engender the right culture and process for creating the necessary outcomes.
"And do you think the guys on the line are the ones on this email thread?"
Yes, the execs on this thread should be (and probably are) 'on the line' - that's how that works, and it's why they are so reactive .. and finger-pointing.
The fact they are all finger pointing is a really bad sign.
Bill Gates was horrible CEO in current standard. He was distant and not reachable. He berated and bullied people. (+sexually harassed women). His personality personified Microsoft.
But he was very effective CEO because he knew technology, but business competition was more important to him. He was brutal against competition using all dirty tricks you could come out with.
But it didn’t. And Microsoft is worth $3.5 trillion. So maybe actually everyone should take a leaf out of the Microsoft book.
When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
That says more about the US software industry than anything else. You “win” by being hostile to consumers while you lawyer up and bribe the powers that be.
Survivorship bias is a thing no? Microsoft succeeded despite their organizational flaws. Microsoft produced an insanely backwards-compatible[1] OS despite flawed overall strategy and lack of decisive leadership. Doesn't mean everyone should take a leaf out of their book.
I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
It made me cringe about three emails post-Bill because I recognized exactly what was happening. My first job was in a company past its glory days and couldn't adapt to the mobile-firstness of the smartphone era. They, too, had "product devs" whose sole job, as far as I could tell, was to forward emails to and from the right department/partner. It was even more egregious than MS---most of the emails forwarded were just "Hi sysads. The request below from engineering is authorized." or "Hi Engineering, see reply from $PARTNER below".
The company died a relatively quick death, spurned on by the Conglomerate Mothership. Thankfully I recognized the signs and jumped ship as soon as they were on borrowed time.
[1] I wouldn't know personally as I daily drive Linux but that _was_ the conceit of why you'd choose Windows. I won't be surprised if this one solid invariant that Windows could offer has changed lately.
> I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
Yeah, that’s basically what I mean. Dilbert made real.
It’s the only OS available for most computers. Sort no one cares about Linux or a BSD. Normal people only know Linux and Mac and you can’t get MacOS with your non-Mac.
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
Indeed... Their core product seems to be being an unavoidable blackhole of money where they are taxing all of society by virtue of inserting themselves into our lives by having acquired or squashed other competitors
A bunch of things like Nuclear submarines (which I think still run on Windows NT?) and gas turbines and things I think.
And then, presumably, their downstream supply chains and integration tooling and yadda yadda.
Every time I am in a railway station it seems that digital signage runs on Windows, because the digital signs are always throwing errors.
None of this stuff needs windows but most of the time I guess no one is going to switch away because they are all so embedded, and it requires work and a bunch of people to make a decision.
Maybe the Windows execs were just modelling how they hoped corporate culture would look in their perfect customer.
Which is why it’s nice when the Swiss and French and so on ditch Windows for more open alternatives.
But did they get any better at putting out fires by committee?
Or are there still groups of Microsoft employees saying “I saw a fire extinguisher in Bob’s office the other day. He was using it as footrest. I told Magda to warn him about the health and safety but she said it was Julian’s job… and the guy who pays for them to be filled and tested left three years ago and no one replaced him, so it probably doesn’t work anyway.”
Really? You’ve got this guy Dave Fester on there saying he was going to own the website issues and was coordinating everything to do with how the products surfaced on the web. That seemed like pretty clear accountability and ownership to me. What do you want? Some more performative mea culpas?
Point wasn't about fixing the exact issues, the point was how it even got that bad. Of course the easiest route to comprehending the complaint by Bill is to immediately fix the specified issues, making Bill a simple QA instead of concerned leader.
I think accountability would involve trying to understand how it got that bad, and figuring out a new process for preventing it from happening again. Though I'm sure that never happened.
In my humble opinion, some of the blame has to land on Bill himself as he has the full power and agency to build a style of management in his company that would've prevented this from happening. Instead he just scolded a bunch of senior execs who usually find a way to just delegate some work to tuck away any visible issues and go on with their merry lives.
I've been around these execs outside of professional settings. All they care about is their status (money) and getting blowjobs from their aides. I am not exaggerating. They do not give a damn about how software should work. The execs with humble beginnings often get sucked into the culture and eventually exhibit the same characteristics as the others within 5-10 years. As they say, dopamine is a hell of a drug.
For sure. This is consistent with how I would expect the TikTok generation to communicate. I would also add that not only does he know nothing about software development, but he knows even less about the basics of using his own computer.
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.
I honestly think that "doing nothing" was actually their best outcome. If they had actually been serious about solving it, it would have been something like
Situation: there are 14 competing and incompatible ways to obtain Windows software (owned by 23 different teams)
Ridiculous! We'll come up with a single unified interface
(After 3 years of development and delays) Situation: there are 18 competing and incompatible ways to obtain Windows software (owned by 31 different teams)
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.
MovieMaker was discontinued in 2017 and replaced by ClipChamp. MS acquired ClipChamp and it was integrated into windows in 2022. So basically closed, will not fix.
Based on how long corporate email chains go (without clearly accountable people), you're 50/50 on waiting for the feature to get fixed versus the feature becoming deprecated in a few years.
I know people rag on Windows programs a lot, but ClipChamp is the worst, most bloated piece of software I have ever used in my life. It's so confusing how bad it is. I wish we still had movie maker, earnestly.
I feel like if he said, I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.
But as I write this I realized that even that wouldn’t work...as they will create a committee and hire an consulting agency whose exec was in the same sorority as them. And the consulting agency will recommend teams to be laid off. And then the same exec will come in pitching the board to buy a startup which has a great team and apparently was invested by a VC who went to same class of Wharton of that exec.
> I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
I’d be ducking away from an issue that had just got someone fired.
Tangent: The irony in Microsoft making a product called ‘Teams’. It works about as well as their teamwork.
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.
> While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation.
My god these people… I didn’t even know you could be that self-absorbed. It’s jarring.
Musk has ingratiated himself with parts of the political spectrum, or at least had since he later alienated them. I have no idea what his current standing is.
So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.
I read through it and had a few things I've flagged in my head - the ego fluffing, repeated usage of "Millennial" to the point of redundancy, and the framing of things in terms of "big picture", but can you elaborate on "deep brainwashing techniques"? I'm genuinely interested. This entire email thread feels a bit surreal to me
The judicious use of the royal we, is where he triggered my spidey senses. Mark seems to deflect it in his response, also using the royal we. But yeah, the ego fluffing, the fixation on terms, and the dialectic generalizations, this all adds up to some controlled attention-gathering ...
Notice how often the keyword repeats. It is not repeated to communicate information, but to communicate affective state.
If you don't understand how it works, imagine the above letter instead said "Trump", and read it again.
Don't focus on what the letter says, instead on how it feels. Actually go and read it again, start to finish. Don't read past this line until you did.
Do you see how each time the keyword repeats, it affects your emotional state just a bit more? Can you start to feel it?
I'm assuming you hate Trump, but if you don't, just pretend you do. Then read the same letter one more time, imagine it said "Trump" instead and that the Republicans, which you really hate, just got re-elected. Do read it one more time.
You must understand that the keyword is repeated for affective impression.
Now read the letter again, one last time, slowly. Pay attention to the keyword, and how you feel each time it repeats. Imagine it said really "Trump", and that you really hate him, and what he did to your government.
The keyword does repeat, but there is no redundancy. It is repeated for affective impression. It only feels surreal because you are emotionally disinvested.
If you actually read the letter over and over, and really imagine how it feels, as if it were of deep concern to you, then you will understand. You seem smart, so I'm sure you will understand.
> For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days.
(Nick Clegg)
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.
Once they started passing the blame, almost immediately, I would expect the first thing to be a new email from Gates saying “Bob, you’re doing this, Frank, you’re doing that, no excuses, get it done.”
I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.
The logical outcome of an escalation like this is that there is no single threaded leader for this user experience, the org charts are wrong, and one or more sr. leaders are culpable. But no one wants to hear that.
I've always assumed his inclusion in the story was just to make the story more interesting. I wonder if anybody ever asked him about it at all.
After researching a bit, the story actually is from 1977, I found a PDF from the magazine and it does mention him, even though he wasn't famous except for those tech enthusiast circles. Maybe the story is embellished a bit, but at least it wasn't made up in internet times.
In 2002 after spending my first 30 minutes on windows XP (previously 98, 95 and 3.11 user) I realized that Microsoft will never improve their UX. Every new os will be different, but not better. So I left then and there and never looked back, after some distro tourism I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and use it even now.
This happens when you have people at the top of the chain who don't use the product and people at the bottom who are afraid to speak up, or use it so much they can't see the problems.
I suspect plenty spoke up. But once filtered through 35 layers of management “this is terrible and our users will hate us” becomes “best thing we’ve ever done, users love us”.
The most amazing thing about this isn't that ownership and lines of responsibility and politics are messed up, it's that the guy holding the reins is 100% aware of this and has no power to get the horse to move in the right direction. Is there not an org chart? How is there not a person above who knows what who below them owns? If these are the execs below Bill, how does Bill not know which one owns it? If he knows and they're not taking responsibility, why doesn't he fire them? Reading this I'm honestly more surprised that Microsoft lasted past 2004.
Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)
Don't underestimate working for the medium size business nobody has heard of but prints money doing something semi boring. They won't change the world but it's often a reliable paycheck without all the BS
I feel, many times, the way Bill did in that email. Seems most people don’t mind or care.
I wondered how anyone successfully filed for unemployment a few years ago when I had to. But many seem to do it successfully.
I tell my wife that I pay too much attention to the details and have a low tolerance for poor work. I wish I didn’t notice though as it seems like a nice life!
The fact he did is probably responsible for a lot of issues with Windows installing and problems. Normalizing a reboot as a common thing.
I also suspect the fact he keeps re-iterating that the download was fast is because the teams have been using slow internet as an excuse for code speed problems.
I shared a google search query today (q?=cabbage patch kids) and stripped the end of the spaghetti URL. The link preview showed as an advertisement for BigBoxStore (it won't get free placement here).
Platform usability has gone completely out the window (no pun truly) like I wish the product managers responsible for this should do instead.
Perhaps the only real solution is that software developers are treated like realtors, name and face or gtfo.
At this level none of it is about moviemaker. It's a mix of coaching and testing.
Coaching as in: reminding people that this matters and encouraging them to care outside the strict lines of their task/scope.
Testing as in: who's capable of hearing it, taking it to heart, and driving the necessary change. And who's not.
Not evident in this thread but interesting how it impacted BillG's overall perspective on the people on the field and the impact of it on their careers with him.
As an IT person, the way this email was written makes me feel like I'm having a stroke. This was Gates whining about nothing.
Bill was in charge of MS at the time, he should not only have known how Windows works at this level (Dave Cutler on NT anyone?), he should have been able to figure this out.
Installing Movie Maker was easy back then and it is still easy now (on XP).
The entire point is that if he couldn't naively figure it out, no normal user would. I'm sure that he could have thought like a technical user and gotten there, but he shouldn't have needed to.
Oh I see .. they're actually taking Bill's email as a blueprint for how Windows should operate! That explains the mess we're in today (but laughs in Debian).
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.
Yes. When I was working at Apple, I was developing some animation stuff for Keynote. I came in to work one day, and my build was broken completely. Turned out that Roger Rosner had demonstrated this animation feature to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs hated it, and before then end of the evening the code had been stripped from the Keynote build.
You also don't need to live in a fluffy cotton candy world where everyone pretends to be nice. A CEO needs to be able to directly tell people they're doing a bad job and give out consequences for it. Wrapping the same feedback in fluffy feelings oriented language is a different kind of abusiveness (and why I hate California)
A CEO doesn't have to scream or use insults to tell people they're doing a bad job. Both Linus and Steve loved to make people feel bad, which is completely unnecessary to convey work productivity or give an ultimatum. Plenty of other people produce high-quality results without treating others poorly.
The justification of abuse is just that - the desire to be abusive, and trying to make it okay by pretending it's necessary. Some people see this behavior and like it, because they too would like to be abusive or see people abused. But it has nothing to do with productivity. It's emotional diarrhea.
The one time I got to ask Bill a question was probably why Windows didn’t have a “make world” that just works like in FreeBSD. I wonder if he remembered that question during his ordeal.
It's so sad that 17MB was at some point considered a humungous update filesize and now we need 330MB of a web browser everytime we want to install anything.
> I decided to download Moviemake and buy the Digital Plus pack r so I went to Microsoft.com
That "r" from "Moviemaker" pushed to the end of "and buy the Digital Plus pack" displays the universally shared experience of writing something, then deciding to come back to add something else and fucking up the first sentence.
> So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. Now just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
> Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
> Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
> This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
> So I did the download. That part was fast. 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.
> What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
> Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night - why should I reboot at that time?
> So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
It's amazing that Bill Gates experienced this 23 years ago, and yet nothing changed, at all.
Schadenfreude knowing that Gates, filthy rich owning the most popular OS ever, still have no agency on his own workflow, whereas the average Linux user, even a kid, has more. Love it.
I will give Bill this, he does know how to play a typical user. Yeah, MS has some shenanigans (putting it mildly) in its birth and climb, but it was obvious from that that he was a relatively competent nerd, programmer etc., and that he was trying to paint the thought process of someone trying to put together family videos not "hurr, where this go, what this do?" like a Neanderthal.
Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.
Try to open a support ticket with Microsoft and you'll get exactly the same experience: a maze of webpages that don't work, and the full corporate organization complexity to navigate.
Once a ticket is successfully opened, you'll realize that the support guy in India can't get the email answers you've sent them, and they'll close the ticket you've spent day to open. And you'll feel both powerless and speechless.
While reading this I pictured an irate BillG screaming at his shitty pc first thing in the morning, probably after getting off a Skype or WebEx call, like the guy in The Onion's classic "Sony releases stupid piece of shit that doesn't fucking work" https://youtube.com/watch?v=8AyVh1_vWYQ
And that's exactly how I felt trying to reinstall Windows 10/11 on a new motherboard recently.
Everyone here saying about execs and so on - don't seem to catch a few nuances in this chain.
1. Bill Gates is doing the "Internal Disruptor" CEO style
2. Everyone is reacting in a way Bill Gates expects them to react
3. The results of his disruptor style is that Windows is absolutely further unbearable and horrendous, as seen today own the line.
Make no mistake: "Internal Disruptor" CEOs kill their own products and people from the inside, rather than competing or building good products outside.
Microsoft can no longer engineer a software product, it simply cannot build anything innovative. It can certainly buy other companies and use what they have built. But even then they will over time ruin the product.
I don’t know why people forget that Microsoft is almost entirely outsourced to India. It’s the reason there is no coherent product or vision for anything at Microsoft.
If you put together an amazing team, in the same building, with the goal of getting Windows under control, then you would at least have a chance of succeeding. You would have a whole new set of problems though and that’s where you would need an amazing manager that had the final say on every decision. A trusted team that could be left alone to succeed.
Just last week, I was trying to sign up to Microsoft.com and got stuck in the captcha step. They have famously dysfunctional captcha system, people can't sign up to Microsoft and complain a lot about it online, and yet, it's not fixed.
Microsoft always built dysfunctional software. They were never good at this. Hotmail was an unusable product, it was so painful to use it and Gmail took over the entire market in a year. Nobody ever said: "oh, I miss X about Hotmail"
Windows products were also same. They were so easy to break, you'd need to format the disk and re-install once a month, otherwise it'd keep breaking all the time.
> Hotmail was an unusable product, it was so painful to use it and Gmail took over the entire market in a year. Nobody ever said: "oh, I miss X about Hotmail"
“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…
The email reads as if parts of it were dictated, and subsequent parts of it were taken from realtime notes, i.e. a third party is noting, episodic, everything Gates did during that attempt to install MoveMaker .. and then it was refactored into a "From Bill" mail at a later point ..
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.
Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"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."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.
Even after 23 years, it feels good to read how much of a mess BillG himself knew he and his dishonest company were fostering upon the world. Just like the Windows98 "keep going" video. BillG has been largely sidelined after his exit from MS, divorce and Epstein involvement, but MS and Windows keep being the same or worse trash than in 2003 and they're still thriving. A real shame they haven't yet gone into the trashcan they so richly deserve...
As it says at the end, this was evidence at the class action suit "Comes v. Microsoft Corp.", which was eventually settled by Microsoft by paying $180 million, after many years of litigation.
I recently attempted to get on Azure because of their startup package, and I fail to understand how Microsoft holds anything together at all.
Docs are a mess with contradictory information, coordination between teams is a mess, azure UI is a mess. My support agent that was assisting on my PAID support went on vacation with no one to take over the case, and month after, after I asked for any sort of timeline (you have to actually nudge them, otherwise they won't ever communicate), I was told they couldn't fix the issue on their end and I have to create a new account, because my account was stuck in some sort of limbo where they can't see the state of it and their engineering couldn't figure it out.
The process I went through reminds me very much of Bill's internal thinking here.
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.
This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count
1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg
I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg
It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)
I drown in support tickets daily that used to go nowhere. Then people started realizing that I knew what I was talking about and not some standard business user. Now I still have to open tickets, but get visibility of the people who know what they’re doing on their end (having been moved up from lowly support to oversee some ticket filling company that doesn’t know crap). We get tom complain to one another how shit is broken, wait mandatory change periods and then get something working by exploiting loopholes because some process was developed and someone put a lot of money behind it.
Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)
The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?
Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.
Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.
As you get larger there is a fire everyday and ever more competing priorities on which fires get put out.
How much money does movie maker bring Microsoft? Now which executive would want to prioritize movie maker so much that they would directionally alter the company to fix this? Consider the issue that the execs had was fixing all the issues involved a huge number of teams.
Discredit to Bill here but I honestly think he was the only one who had the power to fix this. A Jobs-like figure is the only person with the organizational power and freedom to drive details like this to completion. Anyone else would end up in a power struggle
>"The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?"
Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual initiative mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.
You forgot the part where the leader gets more and more frustrated, it’s like a game of hot potato, if you’re the last one holding the potato when Leader finally cracks, all of it lands on you!
I’ve been in this situation in a small company as well. The owner wasn’t managing the company and there was no other manager. So the owner would express his frustration in an all hands meeting “I don’t like x” or “we’re going to do y from now on” but he would not assign the task to anyone, or give ownership. He would come up with some insane new goal but no plan, no equipment, and no one person who’s in charge of making sure the required resources, time and responsibility is assigned. So nothing would change, a month later there would be another meeting, with a middle aged man having a tantrum about why did no one do anything!? Why is no one listening to me?
You might be thinking it’s a good opportunity to accept some responsibility, it might get you a promotion or be a good learning opportunity. Yeah I tried that for a while, if you succeed, congratulations, you now have one new task for which you’re responsible for without any extra compensation or benefit. If you fail? Well guess who’s getting the blame..,
I have been this owner AND this employee, at different times in my career. As the employee, it's as you describe -- having goals described to the team without actual tasks being assigned to individual employees/teams is a recipe for things not getting done. As the owner (especially with a small team) nothing is more aggravating than having employees who sit around waiting to be told exactly what to do, with no real concern for how the company provides value for its customers; employees who think they're underpaid no matter how much they make and therefore do the bare minimum unless they're getting a bonus/raise/promotion.
Yeah I totally get it. In this situation you could see employees burning out because of the lack of management or leadership and the chaos of the company. Like everyone cared at first and tried real hard but eventually almost formed a learnt helpless. The implicit message was don’t try, just do the bare minimum and avoid trouble. We were also paid minimum wage. Many employees were doing unpaid hours as well.
If you provided leadership in your case then I think it’s different
I think the thing that really made it horrible is like I said. The boss would say x needs to happen but would not think through the details, buy the equipment, allocate the time or human resources. Someone still had to work out how to do those things and who was going to do what.
I’ve had “Boss I can fix this in one line of code.” situations, but nobody of 6 people wanted to make the call despite involving themselves excessively.
So nothing got done.
So the temperature on the issue went up.
So management whose failure was their own could only think of engaging more managers and processes….
Never ended.
I work at small companies now, less money but I enjoy it more. I just fix things and everyone is happy.
> This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies.
Agreed. Even at companies known for having a great culture and being "different from the rest", the Game of Thrones politics is still there - it's just more hidden and polite. I was a senior exec in the biggest BU at just such an F100 valley tech giant for >10 yrs (one level from the CEO). The company actually did have a nicer environment than its peers, no 360 reviews, no 'up or out' mandates, and a vibe genuinely a cut above.
While the net effect was more pleasant day to day and teams were insulated a few more levels down than most places, the brawling over headcount, budget and revenue attribution was simply practiced far more artfully. Sadly, I think it's just endemic to the breed of "large public corp" and while the best may be better, none are immune.
The Soviet Union didn't fall, it got merged into Microsoft
It’s interesting how monopolistic corporations can fall prey to the same dynamics as authoritarian countries with centralized economies.
Both will eventually develop a strict hierarchy where you're only accountable to people up the chain of command, not down. There is no way to prevent that because it's a lot easier to keep one person satisfied than a whole team you're supposed to lead, so almost every manager naturally switches to working that way.
The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.
Capitalism at its finest! Or wait, never mind
In my experience it's kinda different. The serious issue that raised by higher up usually means more scope, visibility, bonuses and potential bonuses. Teams usually fights to get the important issues(whichever the higher thinks that's important) as their team's work. The drawback is that it's very possible that multiple teams are fighting for the same pie and resulting in duplicated work.
In the end if there are enough incentives(usually money) people would work on those.
I think you're leaving out a key aspect of the problem: not one of those people had the scope of responsibilities to really fix the issue. There was the website, windows update, and OS team, all being fed by a variety of product teams with marketing and delivery concerns. At root, Bill's problems were a coordination issue spanning half the organization. If you were on that email chain, you wouldn't want ownership either because that herding the rest of the cats towards a comprehensive fix that would probably restructure the whole company.
> every department is fighting for their lives against the others
https://bonkersworld.net/img/2011-06-27_organizational_chart...
I love how Google looks like an MLP. I suspect their leadership would agree with that portrayal. You can imagine the activation functions: "Will this get me promoted?" "Will this get us bad press?"
My fav is this :
> 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.
This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program.
I miss the days of simple executables.
> I miss the days of simple executables.
One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.
Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.
Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,
Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.
These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.
> Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.
Did I just dream up loading a mouse driver and MSCDEX in DOS?
> Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses,
And linked libraries are interfaces mapped into memory at certain names. I think that's an awesome improvement.
That's why I like the "managed" model Debian uses. Programs are enforced to comply to the OS standards. If they don't, they either get changed by the Debian maintainers or just not included into the distribution. That's why I can know where things are in my filesystem.
I love Debian so much. The amount of work done by volunteers is staggering, and the result is impeccable.
Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.
I really enjoy single-executable Rust things - that's what I use for building web apps (SSR). But it's not that widespread (for now ?).
The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.
Where does NPM play in to the build?
Beats me but somehow we do!
Every day I drop 1k lines of Python code and replace with go. Will be fully go soon!
Npm always finds its way in, usually for building web artifacts.
I don't think I'll ever learn what the folder structure on Linux actually means
man hier (https://man.archlinux.org/man/hier.7.en).
"I don't know what it means to "own website issues""
made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?
From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.
For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals.
Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).
Ironically, they could have learned from Jack Welsh to separate the product divisions and make redundant teams on each one to solve the ownership issues.
When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
Exactly. Jack Welsh’s management philosophy just further incentivizes doing what you can to bring everyone else (ie the company) down to make yourself look better.
> Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, ...
Instantly reminded me of this especially apt comic:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJfRwHWYAI0_yt?format=jpg
[1] Also available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
I am either misreading it or it almost makes me want to work at Facebook. If only their product wouldn't be so utterly disgusting.
This comic was made a loooooonnnnnnggggg time ago (back when I worked at Facebook). It was actually a great place to work then, but that company no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
Exactly what I was thinking of too lol
Well, except then the person who volunteered to "own website issues" clarified that they meant one specific issue (download links) among the five or so that Gates identified.
Yeah, and its extra funny with everyone agreeing Dave should own it, but he isn't on the email loop at all.
Given that the way the company worked was the cause of the problem, sending the email company wide would have caused more confusion that solve the problem.
Curious why it is so hard to find an owner to the issue. Gates' experience started with the web UI, then I'd expect that the team who owns the microsoft.com or owns the experience. To them there are only two types of bottlenecks: their web pages (usability, JavaScript performance, ways to get backend data, and etc), and their immediate dependencies. So, they drive improvement on both types of the bottlenecks, and the owners of the immediate dependencies recursively handle their own. For instance, the web team will identify that calling the catalog API has a P99 latency of 5 seconds and the network is fine, then they ask the catalog API to improve the API latency. If the catalog team does not do the obvious, the team's manager gets punished.
Of course, I'm being naive here, as I've seen too many companies fail to achieve such basic ownership. So, curious what I have missed. Of if the ownership is not a clean DAG, well, it goes back to Gates, as he was responsible for both the org charts and the company culture.
It wouldn't surprise me that what seems like whole things from the outside are split up even further on the inside of Microsoft. There's probably no single person responsible for microsoft.com (nor was there at the time). Instead the front page is one team, Windows Update (at the time) was yet another team, and sales another, and then there are 5 other teams doing other things, and no single individual or group is responsible for the whole thing. They've all got permission to push things to the website and change whatever just from time immemorial, and not through any defined authority, since that authority doesn't actually exist.
You can still see symptoms of this today. MS will (or at least would) spin up new domains rather than just update microsoft.com, or create newthing.microsoft.com, since both of those require talking to whomever is responsible for the main domain. Even if that person exists, knowing who they are in an org like MS is already a big ask when it's organised the way it is. Meanwhile, buying a new domain likely takes less than an hour, even if you include billing and such.
> 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.
And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".
I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.
There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies.
In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.
Yeah. In context the answers make a lot of sense: it’s a dysfunctional company where ownership is non-existent and getting shit done is hard.
This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.
I think they also suspect/know that Gates won't revisit the issue. The email is a flame as the subject line admits. Gates wasn't going to go back every week for the next six months to track progress.
> This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.
Must be nice being so useless, yet getting paid so much.
Though I guess these people must have been good at politicking to rise so high.
I mean, you're 100% right, but what's the alternative? They wanna keep the salary. The machine rewards political people, not people who pick fights to improve the product. It's a perfect pair. :/
>In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
This goes right back to the leadership failure on Bill's part. If your company is structurally incapable of producing good products (which Microsoft assuredly is and still was) then it's on you as the CEO to implement the correct structures.
That's literally the purpose of upper management: you create the conditions for success to happen.
It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok.
I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
> I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
Or they do and they don't think it's worth their time and energy to get them fixed. I think they just don't care about their products, unlike Jobs.
If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."
> When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
The crazy thing is that it's more likely that most people in Apple are using their own products, versus any of the Android phone manufacturers or within Google, where it's likely a few of them would be using the Apple ecosystem instead.
Many of them are definitely dogfooding it, but it's possible that there are communication or empowerment issues.
One thing that drives me nuts for example is the indicator for remaining disk space. I have this icon on my desktop that says "Macintosh HD | 995 GB, 273 GB free". This used to work great until a few years ago. Copy 1 GB onto the disk and it displays 1 GB less free disk space.
But since a few years it goes up and down daily by 100 GB or more. Sometimes I have 350 GB, sometimes I have 100 GB. I think it has to do with Time Machine snapshots and purgeable space (whatever that means) but it's totally useless now. I can't tell for sure if I can copy 250 GB to my disk or not. It may fail now but work 2 hours later. How come nobody notices such a fundamental thing not working? Somehow the dogfooding doesn't seem to work. Or maybe the Apple people all have 8 TB disks so they don't care.
Looks like this was covered by Eclectic Light:
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/02/28/friday-magic-how-to-make...
Yeah, I wonder what's going on within the macOS division, but then again Liquid glAss is a thing.
> I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them.
Doesn't need to be that large, I worked for a company that ~4500 employees with about 1000 at HQ, that entire email chain looks exactly like what would ensue every time someone at the C-level flagged an issue.
I suspect the reason is much the same, no one wants to be in the hot seat to fix a problem they have no faith they can fix so everyone plays hot potato with the flaming sack of shit until it bursts and lands on someone.
> Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail. (13th Century Persian Proverb)
I have worked at MS-sized orgs that are like this, but have also worked at 100 employee startups that are exactly the same.
Once bad culture gets to your company, it doesn’t matter the size.
Also I suspect that there's no real teeth in that angry email.
If the big boss is frustrated by the UX, they might send an angry email or even yell at you in person. If your division doesn't meet its sales projection for the quarter, you might get fired.
If BillG had wanted a company that made good user experiences, he'd have hired (and fired) for that. Sending a pissy email is what you do when you're annoyed but don't actually care enough to do anything about it.
Reminds of https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1300&fo...
Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs.
They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.
Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
Somebody really oughta do something about this mess!
Microsoft is a company where you get promoted for playing politics, not taking ownership, improving things, fixing bugs.
They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :)
It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues.
An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'.
That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him.
1000% actually.
He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink).
Like a cars coming out of the factory with missing parts ... blame it on the guy on the line?
No. Something is deeply wrong.
I really like Gates - but it's beyond shocking how these cultures work and how myopic they are.
I worked for a Fortune 50 - and it's pretty amazing to watch how an army of actually smart people with 'one eye' can be so competent many ways, but blind in others.
I don't like to put Jobs on a pedestal but obviously this is something he understood (even then with gaping holes).
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience.
I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
I have struggle to understand how someone could come to that conclusion, maybe I missed something?
The email is a 'rant'.
It's a 'list of broken stuff'.
It's not:
1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken
2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome
3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address
4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.
5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.
It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.
It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.
This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.
A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..
In 2003, Gates was no longer CEO; I think he was President of the Board and something like "Special Advisor"? None of the people involved reported to him, so he may actually correctly have felt he could not tell them what to do?--so he stuck to venting his frustration.
Exactly. bluegatty has great points for a CEO role but Bill stopped being CEO in 2000 three years earlier. The board and advisors cannot direct the company internally - this is by law. Separation of oversight and management. They can tell the CEO what to do but the CEO decides. Then they can fire the ceo if they don’t like it.
Fair point - but he's the 'godhead' of the company, ad the founder and major shareholder is still has the influence.
He could have either sent it to Ballmer, or, framed it better.
It's still not good to dump a rant on a company like that.
If the President of the board has an issue with how the company is fundamentally operating, they go to the CEO. If the CEO doesn’t understand or doesn’t prioritize the concerns of the board, then they get replaced.
He’s may not have been the CEO… but he was the boss of the CEO and represented all the individual owners of the company.
True but the separation of concerns is to put a wall up. Billg was relating his poor experience to the company he oversees. He is strictly forbidden from micro managing at this level. Eg "this is a problem" vs "fix the problem this way". Not his job
I’m not talking about micromanaging, I’m talking about relaying the information to the actual CEO (Steve Balmer I believe?) and ensuring they achieve the goals.
Even if he were still CEO, a message of, "This sucks", he does not have to explicitly add, "Fix it, please". That is well implied by the hierarchy. Your boss notes a problem, underlings try to correct.
The bear is sticky with honey, and people jump.
I can see why you might think this but I think it is incorrect. Particularly because he's not in the hierarchy. Billg is not the boss at this point and has no meaningful effect on one's job unless you are in the top dozen execs and even then this is just an email about a user experience, it's not a command. Ballmer is your boss and the old man yelling at the cloud can keep screaming into the wind. Point: did anything change from this email? I don't think so.
It is helpful for me to understand corporate dynamics and how they actually work (or as supposed to) instead of a simplified version from outside. My brother is a CEO of a big company so I get to hear it from his side. Doesn't mean I'm right, I'm not the CEO.
[edit: softened the language] [another edit]
Actually he isn't the CEO anymore. Private equity purchased the company years ago and he was made CEO from outside but in the industry. Eventually the PE people wanted to cut everything to make the company look good for a purchaser so that means high earners in the company have to go (this is a highly technical company with PhDs and researchers, etc).
But guess what? Those are the people that make the company special among other things. They demanded he fire some top people. He wouldn't because it would destroy the company's value. So they fired him and put in one of their lackeys to do the slaughter. They kept him on in a different role that I won't say because I don't want to reveal too much. Flash forward the company has not sold and is likely to have lost 50% of its value. I admire him but since they were going to be fired anyway shouldn't he have sucked it up and got a better price for the company? The PE people were total jackasses so working for them another day was poison in his veins.
> It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
It is absolutely a user rant, but it's entirely appropriate for a leader to call out "this is not okay; this is a garbage experience".
> who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
That was the intent. "Fix this." This was an email to a bunch of execs who are capable of driving the actual fixes. If Gates needs to hand hold them through this then they need to be replaced.
> A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this'
This is vacuous corporate speak, the kind of message you send to shareholders to soothe them. This is not leadership.
> hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught...
Again, if Gates needs to do this then everyone on the To line is dead weight.
completely disagree
1) sending the org into a reactive frenzy on the minor issue when the structural issue is the problem - is bad. He's also pointing them at the symptom and not the cause.
2) 'taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.
Gates failed to institute 'design and usability' as a fundamental aspect of the product and operational culture.
The email implies that some underling is to blame which is bad framing.
3) "hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught.." - that's literally his job.
> sending the org into a reactive frenzy
I don’t see an actual “reactive frenzy” here. I see that Gates started a conversation with the execs he believes are responsible for fixing this mess.
And again, these are execs being paid millions. They do not need to be coddled. You are acting as if Gates sent this to a bunch of junior engineers.
> ‘taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.
It’s absolutely vacuous to say 'I take responsibility for this' when you are telling a group of people they need to fix their shit.
Any CVP/EVP who fails at a job and then hears someone above them take responsibility for the failure knows they are about to be out of a job.
> The email implies that some underling is to blame which is bad framing.
If by underling you mean “highly paid executives” then sure. At some point people have to take responsibility for their jobs. This wasn’t a failure of some individual engineers. It was a collective failure of a group of executives to deliver a good experience.
> "hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught.." - that's literally his job
It’s literally not. That’s not what CEOs of large corporations do and Gates wasn’t even CEO at this time. He was in an advisory role. His job was literally to give feedback.
-----> "It’s absolutely vacuous to say 'I take responsibility for this' when you are telling a group of people they need to fix their shit."
Totally false.
It's literally the opposite of vacuous to take responsibility for his failure to set up the culture and system wherein this kind of stuff would not happen - while at the same time starting a fire so that the work is done.
Allocating responsibility is one of the most important actions.
-----> he both 'started a conversation' and ... it's a frenzy.
Agreed - it's totally legit that he brought up the issue, and it doesn't have to be perfectly presented ... but that email chain is almost purely reactionary.
That is not people seeking root cause.
It's not people recognizing underlying systems.
It's a reactionary executive gaggle.
This is a 'put out the fire' type reactionary stuff.
The shocking thing to most people, would be how much of the world is actually run this way.
I concede that it's not horrible in and of itself - and sometimes a fire must be lit, but this is a frenzy. Not deliberative.
----> If by underling you mean “highly paid executives” then sure.
By 'underling' I mean anyone under him. The executives in this thread are acting like underlings.
You keep talking about “taking responsibility”. Unless the person taking responsibility is also taking action, which you aren’t even proposing, then it’s just words. It’s more sugar coating. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
> This is a 'put out the fire' type reactionary stuff.
After the fire fighting comes the postmortem where the systemic issues should be discussed. A fire is a great way to spur both short and long term action.
> By 'underling' I mean anyone under him.
I don’t know how you reconcile “accountability” with the idea that the a leader cannot expect members of the team to deliver. Is Gates the only person who has any accountability expected here?
Do you think personal responsibility travels uphill or downhill?
Each of the letters in CEO stand for a word with specific meaning, and when you put them together they tell you where the buck stops. It’s not a job for people who can’t take responsibility for their fuckups.
> Do you think personal responsibility travels uphill or downhill?
This is trying to be pithy but it’s not. Every leader from the CEO down has responsibility for their area of control and influence.
> It’s not a job for people who can’t take responsibility for their fuckups.
Neither is EVP or any other title that ends in “VP”.
The CEO ultimately owned The fact that installing movie maker was a shit show, but so did everyone in a position of leadership that contributed to that. Accountability does not mean everyone gets to point at the CEO and say “ultimately it’s their fault” as if that absolves them.
> I see that Gates started a conversation with the execs he believes are responsible for fixing this mess.
I think the point here might be that what created this mess in the first place is the structure of the organisation, not the execs that are temporarily embodying it. It's actually quite clear from the follow-ups, there is nobody who can claim responsibility even for the website, never mind any vision or philosophy spanning multiple media and products.
Maybe Gates simply wasn't in the position of doing anything else at that time, or maybe his rant was a clever way to expose this exact problem. But it's pretty obvious that "will someone fix the website" doesn't sound like someone analysing and addressing the root cause of the issue. (However, it's also perfectly possible that this email is just a small part of a bigger conversation at different levels- inform the responsible and patch the immediate issue while more high level analysis and planning takes place elsewhere, informally).
I think the real point is that this is a random email that Gates sent to some execs sharing a bad experience with the product, and some people on HN are trying to take it as a much deeper thing than it really is.
A leader should be able to send candid communication to other leaders. A culture where execs are unable to communicate candidly to their peers or other high-level leaders is a toxic one. It would be absurd to insist that every communication needs to be candy coated and framed in terms of “I take responsibility, so here’s a path forward, and I’ll handhold everyone through it.”
This is not about candor, it's about framing and respecting what kind of power people have, who is responsible for what.
"Hey gang - I know I'm not Dear Leader anymore - and - I don't want to get in the way of your new Dear Leader, but I want to share with you a bad experience I had with this product.
A, B, C, D. E .. was really bad.
After thinking about it - I think much of this lays at my feet. In the Golden Era of MS we didn't think much about design, or 'Whole Product'. I have to take responsibility for that.
But these kinds of outcomes are really bad, and this has to be nipped in the bud now - and in the future.
I suggest this probably happened because Product and R&D criss-crossed here, the Release Managers and Product Marketing dropped a lot in between.
That there was a ball dropped here must be the responsibility at the VP/Executive level at very least, for not ensuring smooth handoff.
Furthermore - that this experience could be so bad means we have to rethink and extend our integration testing all the way to 'end user experience'.
Finally, I think you'll need to engender a culture of design right from the start - that's going to take 2-4 years and a different kind of thinking, that is not a fire that can be put out, or a process to be fixed. I'll have to lave that on the lap of the new Dear Leader.
Keep up the great work.
- BG"
That's how to write a 'candid' note.
That’s not candid. It’s candy.
It borderline infantilizing and buries the message under a bunch of saccharine. I can practically see the fake smile plastered across the face of the manager saying this. I would be insulted if my manager sent a message like this to the team.
Your version also took away literally all of the concrete detail, turning into a generic “it’s bad” that isn’t an actionable. It sounds like you sent it through an LLM.
I would also imagine that there are a lot of other emails flying around that are discussing the general pattern of concern while this is more of a drive-by honest review of a specific experience. This is the kind of blunt feedback that execs do not usually get about their products and probably need more of. This kind of blunt feedback from a respected leader can’t be waived away the way anecdotes from individual customers can.
> Hey gang
“How do you do, fellow kids?”
> After thinking about it
Just say the thing.
> kinds of outcomes
What outcomes specifically?
> nipped in the bud
“stop”
> I suggest this probably happened because
“I think”
> ball dropped
“failure”
> must be the responsibility at the VP/Executive
What does this mean? Fire the VPs who failed to do their jobs? Say what you mean.
> ensuring smooth handoff
“doing their jobs”
> rethink and extend
“fix”
> engender a culture of design
This is a meaningless phrase.
> different kind of thinking
What kind of thinking?
> or a process to be fixed
Processes are how things get done! If programmers push garbage into the list of installed applications, that’s a process failure. If a product team makes a download available but it can’t be found on the main web site’s list of downloads, that’s a process failure. When things get done wrong it’s definitionally a process failure. Process also doesn’t flow from culture, they each exert influence on the other. Bad process will lead to bad culture as much as bad culture will lead to bad process.
I will reiterate what a sibling commenter already said: Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon liberally drizzled in passive voice comes across as candid. Effective communication does not look like this. Effective communication is assertive. It offers direct actionable advice, or asks direct questions which result in actionable answers.
This such a ridiculous comment.
It feels like it was written by 'Dwight Schrute'.
---> First - the notes about language are completely glib.
It's perfectly acceptable for someone to use personal tone.
"> After thinking about it
Just say the thing."
"> nipped in the bud
“stop”"
... would be ridiculous feedback to give anyone.
It's perfectly acceptable for any writer to have some personalized inflection in their prose.
There's no misunderstanding or lost context.
The fact that you would even try to pick apart language at level is just weird.
---> Second - "Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon"
There is nothing 'mealy mouthed' about that prose, and there is no 'corporate jargon' in the note.
None.
The writer in that scenario mean exactly what they said - with some allowance for personal inflection.
That's it.
---> Third - "> engender a culture of design
This is a meaningless phrase."
No - it's not a 'meaningless phrase' - it means exactly that, in so many words.
Obviously, I'm not going to write full follow up paragraph on that in HN, the implication is direct.
---> Fourth - and most importantly - you entirely missed the point by trying to nitpick on arbitrary language someone wrote crudely on a HN comment.
The 'point' is to illustrate in quick and rough terms how one could be 'candid' with the feedback about a broken feature - and to also to frame it responsibly, to direct some feedback and as to where the responsibility might lie and where the process might have broken down, and then to more broadly indicate strategic concerns over culture, because there clearly is, particularly around 'user centric concners'.
Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.
You're getting caught up literally in prose and notions of 'process' which is besides the point. This is not about 'process' - it's about a leader framing feedback.
And FYI it was Satya that finally did 'change the culture' (although on different terms) to generally widespread acclaim.
Consider that three people have given you substantially similar feedback about your “candor”. Your attempt at a “personal voice” here comes off extremely fake. Compare your proposed “candid” message with the actual candor in your message at the top of this thread.
Rather than continue to dismiss the feedback, you should digest it and potentially learn something from it. Or not. It’s your choice.
> Gates barfed some 'things that were broken' - instead of providing any contextualization at all - it was totally absent anything a leader would nominally provide.
And yet you, simply by reading the email Gates sent, were able to confidently ascertain that the culture itself was failing here. You give too little credit to the recipients of this email when you imply that they can’t make the same assessment.
I would hate to receive an email like this.
Your point could be made by simply adding the following at the very top of the original email: “Besides fixing the specific issues in this flow, we should consider how it got this bad in the first place and make changes to prevent it from happening again. I’ll support you and provide whatever you need.”
Done. Let the people who are responsible figure it out. They’re smart and capable, no need to baby them. You’ve made clear that you see it and it’s not acceptable, but you also understand that to drive through bigger changes, you’ll need to back them up and chip in when they need you.
> 2) 'taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.
Tbh it seems like you're autistic and simply don't understand how such a "o take responsibility" message really looks like and what effect it'd have.
Thanks for this reply. I learned something today!
Really good reply, well put
Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)
Most of the thread is lower level staff specifically trying to address the raised issues. We have no idea what conversations this triggered among the exec team about the broader strategic issues Bill raised.
Those are all Executives.
It's actually funny that you're thinking they are 'lower level staff' because that's how it seems by their reaction, but those are literally top Execs.
That's really how these orgs often work.
'Dear Leader Is Angry' will set the whole org into a tizzy.
I've seen this countless times - 'XXX said it', and the littlest thing will get moved.
Often - this is good, it means the org is responsive to the direction of the founder, but it's 'abused' all the time. I think leaders forget their responsibility and truly believe that 'their whims' are essential.
25% of the US are looking at the insane things POTUS is putting out and believing there's some kind of 5D chess magic, when it's actually -5D - aka extraordinary bad leadership. That's the 'power of power'.
'Self Awareness' is probably the #1 superpower of a leader, because nobody is going to keep them in check.
Lower level than the former CEO And President of the board.
The point is this was not a round robin reply all buckpassing exercise with BillG and the senior corporate leaders still on the reply list. This is a specific downstream chain of email.
I’m not sure I understand what people here think the right thing to do is when the company founder emails a bunch of senior execs telling them they seem to have let things all go to crap.
Every single recipient on the thread was a Vice President, Corporate Vice President, or Senior/Group Vice President. Gates intentionally bypassed lower-level product managers and emailed the executive tier directly to demand accountability for platform-wide usability regressions.
If you think this is not missing the forest for the trees, please explain.
He bypassed the new CEO, that's the really ugly one there. That's borderline backstabby.
Probably phoned Ballmer, and Ballmer told him who to send his rant to.
The degree of overthinking going on in this thread…
Becuase it was a typical MS user experience. MS was shipping their software on 25+ install floppies. Having an install fail on floppy 19 was a nightmare. Getting a fax modem that shipped with the PC to function could also be a problem MS would blame the vendor and the vendor blamed MS. It’s not like his moviemaker experience was a rare occurrence.
People forget the "if Microsoft invented the iPod" parody video."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvh5k1RWER4
It describes the culture of both companies at that time very clearly.
I think the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Steve was a "product" CEO. He would bot only send that email, but in addition he would somehow oversee/sypervise those changes ALL the way until he was satisfied.
I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
As others have pointed out, it's all in the follow-through, and there was no follow-through.
As for Jobs, I bought a Mac Mini last summer. I wanted to use iMovie to clip the edges off of a movie file. I clipped the edges, but was unable to discover how to save the resulting file, and gave up. Microsoft's Movie Maker has a menu item to save a file.
I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
Jobs has been dead for a long time.
And it shows.
He had bad ideas too but was much better at holding the line on good UI (unless the bad idea was his). We haven’t had that in a long time.
Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.
I've used QuickTime for that, which has the expected menu items.
yeah it's like one shortcut and a trim bar in QuickTime so that's the right tool for the job. iMovie isn't much harder but is a palaver with its whole pre-rendering thing just to export what should be a trivial edit.
The Photos app (on Mac/iOS) has the same trim interface as QT too.
Yes - this is a mind boggling design conceit of Apple that goes back almost 50 years.
They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.
They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.
We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.
I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.
It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.
Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.
"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.
There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.
There's a menu item. I believe it's File > Share > then you choose how (save to disk, email, export to photos app etc).
File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.
The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.
There's no File > Export?!
File > Share is the same, just more user friendly language. I get it's a bit confusing if you've been using computers for a long time (it's certainly caught me out), but 'Share' makes much more sense. Especially because export/save to disk is only one of the multiple 'Share' options available.
Yes! It makes total sense to share with myself a Pages document as PDF! I‘ll promptly think of sharing if all I want to do is save/export a file in a different format. I think we can extend that helpful language to the entire OS! No need for a “copy” or “download” button, it’s all sharing, one way or another! Share share share!
Pages has an export menu (File -> Export To -> PDF).
Well they should fix that ASAP
"Share" really means send to someone else
"Export" means "save this working file in one of many formats, including possibly other formats that are first-class in third-party apps but not this app"
Share doesn't really make any sense. And other macOS applications have an Export menu all right.
> just more user friendly language
you try to justify it in a logical way, but you fail to realize that this is inherently subjective
Yes, yes, everyday I share myself a glass of milk from the fridge. Sure.
As opposed to exporting yourself a glass of milk from the fridge?
How exactly do you think Bill Gates at peak Microsoft is going to fix this given "it's 100% on him?" And do you think the guys on the line are the ones on this email thread?
This is immensely more "ownership"/initiative than the vast majority of middle managers at any tech company would willingly take to solve a minor UX/CUJ failure, that's surely literally why he started the email thread and including the ones he did, to model that behavior for the the other middle management bozos and to try to instill a culture of caring about their work/whether it actually accomplishes the intended goals.
"eak Microsoft is going to fix this given "it's 100% on him?" A"
? The CEO doesn't do the work, they assume and allocate responsibility.
It's 100% 'on Gates' because he failed to engender the right culture and process for creating the necessary outcomes.
"And do you think the guys on the line are the ones on this email thread?"
Yes, the execs on this thread should be (and probably are) 'on the line' - that's how that works, and it's why they are so reactive .. and finger-pointing.
The fact they are all finger pointing is a really bad sign.
Bill Gates was horrible CEO in current standard. He was distant and not reachable. He berated and bullied people. (+sexually harassed women). His personality personified Microsoft.
But he was very effective CEO because he knew technology, but business competition was more important to him. He was brutal against competition using all dirty tricks you could come out with.
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.
But it didn’t. And Microsoft is worth $3.5 trillion. So maybe actually everyone should take a leaf out of the Microsoft book.
When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
That says more about the US software industry than anything else. You “win” by being hostile to consumers while you lawyer up and bribe the powers that be.
I read this somewhere else in HN (possibly in one of the Azure threads):
Microsoft's moat continues to be in the number of enterprise contracts that have already been signed.
It's easy for someone to get access to Copilot Copilot because their large company already has an Azure billing agreement set up somewhere.
Something is really broken when a broken company produces broken products and is doing great financially.
I would not call this success. I would not want to emulate this.
Sorry, it was satire which doesn’t always come through in the written word, I wasn’t being serious :)
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Survivorship bias is a thing no? Microsoft succeeded despite their organizational flaws. Microsoft produced an insanely backwards-compatible[1] OS despite flawed overall strategy and lack of decisive leadership. Doesn't mean everyone should take a leaf out of their book.
I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
It made me cringe about three emails post-Bill because I recognized exactly what was happening. My first job was in a company past its glory days and couldn't adapt to the mobile-firstness of the smartphone era. They, too, had "product devs" whose sole job, as far as I could tell, was to forward emails to and from the right department/partner. It was even more egregious than MS---most of the emails forwarded were just "Hi sysads. The request below from engineering is authorized." or "Hi Engineering, see reply from $PARTNER below".
The company died a relatively quick death, spurned on by the Conglomerate Mothership. Thankfully I recognized the signs and jumped ship as soon as they were on borrowed time.
[1] I wouldn't know personally as I daily drive Linux but that _was_ the conceit of why you'd choose Windows. I won't be surprised if this one solid invariant that Windows could offer has changed lately.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qgMKq2aOeEg
> I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
Yeah, that’s basically what I mean. Dilbert made real.
It’s the only OS available for most computers. Sort no one cares about Linux or a BSD. Normal people only know Linux and Mac and you can’t get MacOS with your non-Mac.
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
they pivoted a few times since then in terms of what their core product is, though :D
Indeed... Their core product seems to be being an unavoidable blackhole of money where they are taxing all of society by virtue of inserting themselves into our lives by having acquired or squashed other competitors
I agree, but I think their hold on the monopoly is starting to erode, what with the gaming on linux momentum and all.
What else is there that _needs_ windows?
A bunch of things like Nuclear submarines (which I think still run on Windows NT?) and gas turbines and things I think.
And then, presumably, their downstream supply chains and integration tooling and yadda yadda.
Every time I am in a railway station it seems that digital signage runs on Windows, because the digital signs are always throwing errors.
None of this stuff needs windows but most of the time I guess no one is going to switch away because they are all so embedded, and it requires work and a bunch of people to make a decision.
Maybe the Windows execs were just modelling how they hoped corporate culture would look in their perfect customer.
Which is why it’s nice when the Swiss and French and so on ditch Windows for more open alternatives.
But did they get any better at putting out fires by committee?
Or are there still groups of Microsoft employees saying “I saw a fire extinguisher in Bob’s office the other day. He was using it as footrest. I told Magda to warn him about the health and safety but she said it was Julian’s job… and the guy who pays for them to be filled and tested left three years ago and no one replaced him, so it probably doesn’t work anyway.”
https://www.workchronicles.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cure
It did. Outlook, Windows and the rest of the MS products are nightmare. Lumia and Nokia are dead.
If it wasn’t for corpo contracts, Microsoft would be long dead.
Windows MovieMaker remained a nightmare and did indeed die.
The book is simply: acquire monopoly, wield power ruthlessly to keep it. Everything else is orthogonal.
Those bits are in a completely different set of emails
Really? You’ve got this guy Dave Fester on there saying he was going to own the website issues and was coordinating everything to do with how the products surfaced on the web. That seemed like pretty clear accountability and ownership to me. What do you want? Some more performative mea culpas?
Point wasn't about fixing the exact issues, the point was how it even got that bad. Of course the easiest route to comprehending the complaint by Bill is to immediately fix the specified issues, making Bill a simple QA instead of concerned leader.
I think accountability would involve trying to understand how it got that bad, and figuring out a new process for preventing it from happening again. Though I'm sure that never happened.
In my humble opinion, some of the blame has to land on Bill himself as he has the full power and agency to build a style of management in his company that would've prevented this from happening. Instead he just scolded a bunch of senior execs who usually find a way to just delegate some work to tuck away any visible issues and go on with their merry lives.
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.
I've been around these execs outside of professional settings. All they care about is their status (money) and getting blowjobs from their aides. I am not exaggerating. They do not give a damn about how software should work. The execs with humble beginnings often get sucked into the culture and eventually exhibit the same characteristics as the others within 5-10 years. As they say, dopamine is a hell of a drug.
Every good business is one MBA away from enshittification.
Wrong Michael Beckerman. Source: I know the TikTok Beckerman, but not the MSFT one.
That must be a different Michael Beckerman. This one was an executive at Microsoft in 2002...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Beckerman graduated in 2001, although it says nothing of any employment at Microsoft on his Wikipedia page... so you might be right?
It specifically says he worked for the US gov during that period, so your comment needs an edit
For sure. This is consistent with how I would expect the TikTok generation to communicate. I would also add that not only does he know nothing about software development, but he knows even less about the basics of using his own computer.
This was an email Bill Gates sent in 2003. Not sure you can hold the ‘TikTok generation’ accountable for that.
Boomer/Millennial brain sees TikTok and shuts down instantly.
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.
Azures brutal in terms of UX. One of the best things about AI is that it has made dealing with Azure a heck of a lot easier.
at least you managed to sign up to MS. Many people can't even get that done in MS websites.
>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.
Unix philosophy: tools should be simple and composable
Windows philosophy: don't get sued by AT&T
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.
I honestly think that "doing nothing" was actually their best outcome. If they had actually been serious about solving it, it would have been something like
(This appears to be a reference to https://xkcd.com/927/)
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.
Can someone in Microsoft confirm my suspicion that this thread is still going and nothing was fixed?
MovieMaker was discontinued in 2017 and replaced by ClipChamp. MS acquired ClipChamp and it was integrated into windows in 2022. So basically closed, will not fix.
Based on how long corporate email chains go (without clearly accountable people), you're 50/50 on waiting for the feature to get fixed versus the feature becoming deprecated in a few years.
I know people rag on Windows programs a lot, but ClipChamp is the worst, most bloated piece of software I have ever used in my life. It's so confusing how bad it is. I wish we still had movie maker, earnestly.
My favorite thing is how it takes 34 seconds to initialize, every time you open it, for no particular reason.
No one from Microsoft will ever confirm, but the status of Windows "OS" says it all.. ;)
> nothing was fixed
The issue was determined to be a documentation issue and was assigned to that group to add a knowledge base article with additional information.
I feel like if he said, I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.
But as I write this I realized that even that wouldn’t work...as they will create a committee and hire an consulting agency whose exec was in the same sorority as them. And the consulting agency will recommend teams to be laid off. And then the same exec will come in pitching the board to buy a startup which has a great team and apparently was invested by a VC who went to same class of Wharton of that exec.
> I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
I’d be ducking away from an issue that had just got someone fired.
Tangent: The irony in Microsoft making a product called ‘Teams’. It works about as well as their teamwork.
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...
Zuck:
> While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation.
My god these people… I didn’t even know you could be that self-absorbed. It’s jarring.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. We're trying for something different here.
(and particularly not unsubstantive+indignant ones, which are the worst for the kind of discussion we're trying for)
For all the pontificating, Zuckerberg is disliked more than Musk. According to this 2025 survey: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/19/how-ameri...
Musk has ingratiated himself with parts of the political spectrum, or at least had since he later alienated them. I have no idea what his current standing is.
So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.
Zuck has no one.
Holy crap, Thiel is using deep brainwashing techniques in his mail to Zuck and his people. If you know, you know ..
I read through it and had a few things I've flagged in my head - the ego fluffing, repeated usage of "Millennial" to the point of redundancy, and the framing of things in terms of "big picture", but can you elaborate on "deep brainwashing techniques"? I'm genuinely interested. This entire email thread feels a bit surreal to me
The judicious use of the royal we, is where he triggered my spidey senses. Mark seems to deflect it in his response, also using the royal we. But yeah, the ego fluffing, the fixation on terms, and the dialectic generalizations, this all adds up to some controlled attention-gathering ...
Thiel says Zuckerberg is special. He is the chosen one. He will lead an entire generation etc. This is a master class in ass kissing.
There is no redundancy, the keyword is repeated for affective impression.
Consider the following example, read this letter while paying close attention: https://xcancel.com/PierrePoilievre/status/18835154856582268...
Notice how often the keyword repeats. It is not repeated to communicate information, but to communicate affective state.
If you don't understand how it works, imagine the above letter instead said "Trump", and read it again.
Don't focus on what the letter says, instead on how it feels. Actually go and read it again, start to finish. Don't read past this line until you did.
Do you see how each time the keyword repeats, it affects your emotional state just a bit more? Can you start to feel it?
I'm assuming you hate Trump, but if you don't, just pretend you do. Then read the same letter one more time, imagine it said "Trump" instead and that the Republicans, which you really hate, just got re-elected. Do read it one more time.
You must understand that the keyword is repeated for affective impression.
Now read the letter again, one last time, slowly. Pay attention to the keyword, and how you feel each time it repeats. Imagine it said really "Trump", and that you really hate him, and what he did to your government.
The keyword does repeat, but there is no redundancy. It is repeated for affective impression. It only feels surreal because you are emotionally disinvested.
If you actually read the letter over and over, and really imagine how it feels, as if it were of deep concern to you, then you will understand. You seem smart, so I'm sure you will understand.
The keyword is repeated for affective impression.
> For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days. (Nick Clegg)
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.
Discussed a few times:
Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421018 - Sept 2024 (38 comments)
Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34397436 - Jan 2023 (64 comments)
Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396958 - Jan 2023 (46 comments)
Bill Gates Tries to Install Movie Maker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34392126 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34391649 - Jan 2023 (2 comments)
p.s. Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers!
this is my favorite bit
>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
Culture flows from the top. Bill doesn’t take responsibility in his email, so he’s teaching everyone downstream to pass the buck like he does.
As another thread has made it clear, Bill was no longer CEO at this point.
His role was pretty much the biggest shareholder having direct access to some of the company's top executives.
That was one thing I noticed.
Once they started passing the blame, almost immediately, I would expect the first thing to be a new email from Gates saying “Bob, you’re doing this, Frank, you’re doing that, no excuses, get it done.”
Nope. Nothing like that.
"Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until his resignation in 2014."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
I’m not sure tbh but it looks like he was not included in the thread after the first email
> So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated
Based on my interactions with Microsoft support, it makes me feel a little better that I get the same treatment as the CEO.
I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.
The logical outcome of an escalation like this is that there is no single threaded leader for this user experience, the org charts are wrong, and one or more sr. leaders are culpable. But no one wants to hear that.
Tangent, but my favorite "Bill Gates does X" story is "Bill Gates Plays Petals Around the Rose":
https://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
https://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-j.htm
HN has never found it very interesting though:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=petals+around+the+rose
I've always assumed his inclusion in the story was just to make the story more interesting. I wonder if anybody ever asked him about it at all.
After researching a bit, the story actually is from 1977, I found a PDF from the magazine and it does mention him, even though he wasn't famous except for those tech enthusiast circles. Maybe the story is embellished a bit, but at least it wasn't made up in internet times.
That was fun. I should have kept track of how soon I solved it.
In 2002 after spending my first 30 minutes on windows XP (previously 98, 95 and 3.11 user) I realized that Microsoft will never improve their UX. Every new os will be different, but not better. So I left then and there and never looked back, after some distro tourism I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and use it even now.
Gnome was pretty good until they did exactly the same.
I thought Windows 7 was a sweet spot. Windows 10 was acceptable too.
I abandoned Windows almost entirely for macOS and server Linux before 11 was forced onto everyone.
It was getting better until they integrated IE in Win98.
This happens when you have people at the top of the chain who don't use the product and people at the bottom who are afraid to speak up, or use it so much they can't see the problems.
I suspect plenty spoke up. But once filtered through 35 layers of management “this is terrible and our users will hate us” becomes “best thing we’ve ever done, users love us”.
The bit about updates not truly being critical if you’re behind a firewall doesn’t age too well lol
The most amazing thing about this isn't that ownership and lines of responsibility and politics are messed up, it's that the guy holding the reins is 100% aware of this and has no power to get the horse to move in the right direction. Is there not an org chart? How is there not a person above who knows what who below them owns? If these are the execs below Bill, how does Bill not know which one owns it? If he knows and they're not taking responsibility, why doesn't he fire them? Reading this I'm honestly more surprised that Microsoft lasted past 2004.
Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)
Don't underestimate working for the medium size business nobody has heard of but prints money doing something semi boring. They won't change the world but it's often a reliable paycheck without all the BS
I feel, many times, the way Bill did in that email. Seems most people don’t mind or care.
I wondered how anyone successfully filed for unemployment a few years ago when I had to. But many seem to do it successfully.
I tell my wife that I pay too much attention to the details and have a low tolerance for poor work. I wish I didn’t notice though as it seems like a nice life!
> I reboot every night
The fact he did is probably responsible for a lot of issues with Windows installing and problems. Normalizing a reboot as a common thing.
I also suspect the fact he keeps re-iterating that the download was fast is because the teams have been using slow internet as an excuse for code speed problems.
I shared a google search query today (q?=cabbage patch kids) and stripped the end of the spaghetti URL. The link preview showed as an advertisement for BigBoxStore (it won't get free placement here).
Platform usability has gone completely out the window (no pun truly) like I wish the product managers responsible for this should do instead.
Perhaps the only real solution is that software developers are treated like realtors, name and face or gtfo.
At this level none of it is about moviemaker. It's a mix of coaching and testing.
Coaching as in: reminding people that this matters and encouraging them to care outside the strict lines of their task/scope.
Testing as in: who's capable of hearing it, taking it to heart, and driving the necessary change. And who's not.
Not evident in this thread but interesting how it impacted BillG's overall perspective on the people on the field and the impact of it on their careers with him.
This thread should be on the first page of every book on microservices.
> Bill's frustration is not unreasonable.
I find this single sentence not only awkward but frustratingly annoying. Bills frustration is beyond reasonable.
As an IT person, the way this email was written makes me feel like I'm having a stroke. This was Gates whining about nothing.
Bill was in charge of MS at the time, he should not only have known how Windows works at this level (Dave Cutler on NT anyone?), he should have been able to figure this out.
Installing Movie Maker was easy back then and it is still easy now (on XP).
The entire point is that if he couldn't naively figure it out, no normal user would. I'm sure that he could have thought like a technical user and gotten there, but he shouldn't have needed to.
> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?
So even Bill Gates believed Windows wasn't usable in 2003. Yikes.
Just as an aside, that Amir Majidimehr taking part of the conversation is Amir of audiosciencereview.com fame :)
Remember that while Bill Gates was worrying about downloading a video editor, he was ceding search to Google
Oh I see .. they're actually taking Bill's email as a blueprint for how Windows should operate! That explains the mess we're in today (but laughs in Debian).
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.
Yes. When I was working at Apple, I was developing some animation stuff for Keynote. I came in to work one day, and my build was broken completely. Turned out that Roger Rosner had demonstrated this animation feature to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs hated it, and before then end of the evening the code had been stripped from the Keynote build.
This rigor is also upheld to the ODM too. This is why we like to work with them, we all come out learning a lot at the end of the project.
How did/do you feel about that?
Good. One of the things I loved about my years working at Apple is that everyone I had dealings with really cared about the user experience.
Was the animation objectively bad? like was it bad for the user and he was right or were you wronged?
Sorry - it was so long ago I really do not remember that particular feature.
You don't have to be an asshole to get better quality work. But it's a great way to chase off talented staff that don't need to work with assholes.
Correct. Jobs was mentally unstable. That is not a role model anyone should look up to.
You also don't need to live in a fluffy cotton candy world where everyone pretends to be nice. A CEO needs to be able to directly tell people they're doing a bad job and give out consequences for it. Wrapping the same feedback in fluffy feelings oriented language is a different kind of abusiveness (and why I hate California)
A CEO doesn't have to scream or use insults to tell people they're doing a bad job. Both Linus and Steve loved to make people feel bad, which is completely unnecessary to convey work productivity or give an ultimatum. Plenty of other people produce high-quality results without treating others poorly.
The justification of abuse is just that - the desire to be abusive, and trying to make it okay by pretending it's necessary. Some people see this behavior and like it, because they too would like to be abusive or see people abused. But it has nothing to do with productivity. It's emotional diarrhea.
It’s also a great way to retain talent that care about working with like minded people.
BillG discovering the negative effects of BigCo's not having a Directly Responsible Individual.
in the whole email thread - no one owns up to fix it - they're just passing the hot potato around.
26 years later - windows is still a mess.
The one time I got to ask Bill a question was probably why Windows didn’t have a “make world” that just works like in FreeBSD. I wonder if he remembered that question during his ordeal.
It's so sad that 17MB was at some point considered a humungous update filesize and now we need 330MB of a web browser everytime we want to install anything.
> I decided to download Moviemake and buy the Digital Plus pack r so I went to Microsoft.com
That "r" from "Moviemaker" pushed to the end of "and buy the Digital Plus pack" displays the universally shared experience of writing something, then deciding to come back to add something else and fucking up the first sentence.
I've been there too, Bill.
Reminds me of trying to download printer drivers or manual from Epson.
Actually motherboard manufacturers are just as bad.
Some god awful user hostile interface. Never just a direct link.
This explains my experience with any MS documentation. Links upon links, no information, feels circular but the UI changes every rotation.
2023 post, recounting an incident from 2003.
I chuckle that this is in Windows XP days. You know, the pinnacle of Windows usability in retrospect.
I’m sure if he were to try and revisit this experience today he would learn that nothing has changed
This is one of the reasons why people have stopped installing software and moved all programs to web.
> So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. Now just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
> Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
> Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
> This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
> So I did the download. That part was fast. 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.
> What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
> Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night - why should I reboot at that time?
> So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
It's amazing that Bill Gates experienced this 23 years ago, and yet nothing changed, at all.
Could it be the reboot thing is legacy code from Windows 1.0? Wait, then Gates himself was at th wheel.
I'm sure MSFT used this as a learning lesson and things got better since then, right?.......
Now people get the downloads and bits that they don't want.
It’s not any better today. Probably the only difference is that you’ll get some ads too.
Schadenfreude knowing that Gates, filthy rich owning the most popular OS ever, still have no agency on his own workflow, whereas the average Linux user, even a kid, has more. Love it.
I will give Bill this, he does know how to play a typical user. Yeah, MS has some shenanigans (putting it mildly) in its birth and climb, but it was obvious from that that he was a relatively competent nerd, programmer etc., and that he was trying to paint the thought process of someone trying to put together family videos not "hurr, where this go, what this do?" like a Neanderthal.
Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.
This is some Douglas Adams level comedy. My sides are in orbit.
I still reboot my desktop daily lol. I was born anti-tab pro fresh start
Here I am mad that work does forced reboots every 2 weeks on windows workstations.
Try to open a support ticket with Microsoft and you'll get exactly the same experience: a maze of webpages that don't work, and the full corporate organization complexity to navigate.
Once a ticket is successfully opened, you'll realize that the support guy in India can't get the email answers you've sent them, and they'll close the ticket you've spent day to open. And you'll feel both powerless and speechless.
I was reading through it and figured it had to be AI generated... But ... it's not? This email from billg is unhinged! Hilarious though.
While reading this I pictured an irate BillG screaming at his shitty pc first thing in the morning, probably after getting off a Skype or WebEx call, like the guy in The Onion's classic "Sony releases stupid piece of shit that doesn't fucking work" https://youtube.com/watch?v=8AyVh1_vWYQ
And that's exactly how I felt trying to reinstall Windows 10/11 on a new motherboard recently.
Everyone here saying about execs and so on - don't seem to catch a few nuances in this chain.
1. Bill Gates is doing the "Internal Disruptor" CEO style
2. Everyone is reacting in a way Bill Gates expects them to react
3. The results of his disruptor style is that Windows is absolutely further unbearable and horrendous, as seen today own the line.
Make no mistake: "Internal Disruptor" CEOs kill their own products and people from the inside, rather than competing or building good products outside.
Each little piece own by their own little hierarchy. Nobody owning the entire user journey. Classic.
I've said this before but it's worth repeating.
Microsoft can no longer engineer a software product, it simply cannot build anything innovative. It can certainly buy other companies and use what they have built. But even then they will over time ruin the product.
I don’t know why people forget that Microsoft is almost entirely outsourced to India. It’s the reason there is no coherent product or vision for anything at Microsoft.
If you put together an amazing team, in the same building, with the goal of getting Windows under control, then you would at least have a chance of succeeding. You would have a whole new set of problems though and that’s where you would need an amazing manager that had the final say on every decision. A trusted team that could be left alone to succeed.
“You do it”
“No, you do it”
“Get Bill to do it.”
Just last week, I was trying to sign up to Microsoft.com and got stuck in the captcha step. They have famously dysfunctional captcha system, people can't sign up to Microsoft and complain a lot about it online, and yet, it's not fixed.
Microsoft always built dysfunctional software. They were never good at this. Hotmail was an unusable product, it was so painful to use it and Gmail took over the entire market in a year. Nobody ever said: "oh, I miss X about Hotmail"
Windows products were also same. They were so easy to break, you'd need to format the disk and re-install once a month, otherwise it'd keep breaking all the time.
> Hotmail was an unusable product, it was so painful to use it and Gmail took over the entire market in a year. Nobody ever said: "oh, I miss X about Hotmail"
Hotmail was a 1997 acquisition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com#Launch_of_Hotmail
yes?
“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…
It’s from an email chain published as part of a 2007 lawsuit - so it looks like he did indeed say it.
Why in the world do you think that? It’s an email that came out in discovery for a lawsuit. It’s absolutely him.
Because he doesn’t talk like this in public? I promise you no big executives talk the same in public as they do internally.
Because he's trashing a project he himself oversaw for years? And his own judgment and leadership for all those years?
The email reads as if parts of it were dictated, and subsequent parts of it were taken from realtime notes, i.e. a third party is noting, episodic, everything Gates did during that attempt to install MoveMaker .. and then it was refactored into a "From Bill" mail at a later point ..
> "Bill's frustration is not unreasonable."
LOL.
this is really great.
Bills typo-filled rant followed by his minions passive-aggressively trying to pass the problem down.
it's reminds me of those Dilbert strips.
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.
This happened under him.
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Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"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."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.
Peter Principle.
Even after 23 years, it feels good to read how much of a mess BillG himself knew he and his dishonest company were fostering upon the world. Just like the Windows98 "keep going" video. BillG has been largely sidelined after his exit from MS, divorce and Epstein involvement, but MS and Windows keep being the same or worse trash than in 2003 and they're still thriving. A real shame they haven't yet gone into the trashcan they so richly deserve...
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
Protecting his izzat
LOL
Gupta was Bill's TA (Technology Assistant) and he was looped in to ensure the issues are fixed, not to respond to. He didnt own any of this.
Gupta means "hidden" or "secret", kek.
Reads like Nikita from tonsky.me lol
Anyway to know this is real?
As it says at the end, this was evidence at the class action suit "Comes v. Microsoft Corp.", which was eventually settled by Microsoft by paying $180 million, after many years of litigation.
Thank you! I didn’t know what it was. The downvotes suggest I should have.
You can verify it yourself if you read until the end.
You know, I did read it. Without the full context, it isn’t entirely clear. I have looked again, and don’t feel it is wrong to come away unsure.