10 ms·
Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
- MeteorMarc 9d agoCould it be the reboot thing is legacy code from Windows 1.0? Wait, then Gates himself was at th wheel.
- techteach00 9d agoI still reboot my desktop daily lol. I was born anti-tab pro fresh start
- illusive4080 9d agoHere I am mad that work does forced reboots every 2 weeks on windows workstations.
- jgilias 9d agoI chuckle that this is in Windows XP days. You know, the pinnacle of Windows usability in retrospect.
- MASNeo 9d agoThe 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.
- Levitating 9d ago> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? So even Bill Gates believed Windows wasn't usable in 2003. Yikes.
- u1hcw9nx 9d ago>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.
- ThrowawayB7 9d agoMicrosoft 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.
- pessimizer 9d agoThis happened under him. ---- 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.
- MomsAVoxell 9d agoPeter Principle.
- johnnyApplePRNG 9d agoRead 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.
- y-c-o-m-b 9d agoI'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.
- cyanydeez 9d agoEvery good business is one MBA away from enshittification.
- kylecazar 9d agoThat must be a different Michael Beckerman. This one was an executive at Microsoft in 2002...
- johnnyApplePRNG 9d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Beckerman 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?
- deleted 9d ago[deleted]
- muglug 9d agoIt specifically says he worked for the US gov during that period, so your comment needs an edit
- jtwaleson 9d agoCan someone in Microsoft confirm my suspicion that this thread is still going and nothing was fixed?
- jeanmichelselli 9d agoNo one from Microsoft will ever confirm, but the status of Windows "OS" says it all.. ;)
- dekhn 9d agoMovieMaker 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.
- antisthenes 9d agoBased 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.
- Capricorn2481 9d agoI 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.
- missedthecue 9d agoMy favorite thing is how it takes 34 seconds to initialize, every time you open it, for no particular reason.
- RaftPeople 8d ago> 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.
- 486sx33 9d agoInterestingly, Gupta didn’t reply at all, despite being named on bill’s original email directly. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/anoop/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/anoop/ He was natural-user-interface director at the time
- slipperybeluga 9d ago[dead]
- neko_ranger 9d agoProtecting his izzat
- vachina 9d agoLOL
- dyzone 9d agoGupta means "hidden" or "secret", kek.
- Rajsqr 9d agoGupta 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.
- whatever1 9d agoI 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.
- 12_throw_away 9d agoI 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)
- tech234a 9d ago(This appears to be a reference to https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/)
- prathje 9d ago[dead]
- rc1 9d agoAnyway to know this is real?
- aeurielesn 9d agoYou can verify it yourself if you read until the end.
- rc1 9d agoYou 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.
- adrian_b 9d agoAs 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.
- rc1 9d agoThank you! I didn’t know what it was. The downvotes suggest I should have.
- monkellipse 9d agoThe bit about updates not truly being critical if you’re behind a firewall doesn’t age too well lol
- techteach00 9d agoThis 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-millennials https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...
- MomsAVoxell 9d agoHoly crap, Thiel is using deep brainwashing techniques in his mail to Zuck and his people. If you know, you know ..
- Atreiden 9d agoI 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
- rawgabbit 9d agoThiel says Zuckerberg is special. He is the chosen one. He will lead an entire generation etc. This is a master class in ass kissing.
- MomsAVoxell 9d agoThe 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 ...
- hellohello2 9d agoThere 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/1883515485658226876 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.
- steve1977 9d agoJust as an aside, that Amir Majidimehr taking part of the conversation is Amir of audiosciencereview.com fame :)
- EGreg 9d ago“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…
- MomsAVoxell 9d agoThe 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 ..
- saaaaaam 9d agoIt’s from an email chain published as part of a 2007 lawsuit - so it looks like he did indeed say it.
- MBCook 9d agoWhy 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.
- EGreg 9d agoBecause he's trashing a project he himself oversaw for years? And his own judgment and leadership for all those years?
- adamsvystun 9d ago> So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated
- dfxm12 9d agoBased on my interactions with Microsoft support, it makes me feel a little better that I get the same treatment as the CEO.
- pu_pe 9d agoI 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.
- everybodyknows 9d ago2023 post, recounting an incident from 2003.
- slipperybeluga 9d ago[dead]
- 3eb7988a1663 9d agoMy 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.
- dmitriy_ko 9d agoMicrosoft is a company where you get promoted for playing politics, not taking ownership, improving things, fixing bugs.
- motoboi 9d agoGiven 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.
- knollimar 9d ago"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?
- TulliusCicero 9d agoFrom 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.
- hylaride 9d agoFor 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).
- simonebrunozzi 9d ago> "Bill's frustration is not unreasonable." LOL.
- sajithdilshan 9d agoRead 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.
- deleted 9d ago[deleted]
- saaaaaam 9d agoBut 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.”
- Dansvidania 9d agothey pivoted a few times since then in terms of what their core product is, though :D
- rolandog 9d agoIndeed... 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
- Dansvidania 9d agoI 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?
- saaaaaam 9d agoA 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.
- colechristensen 9d agoThe 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.
- herodotus 9d agoYes. 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.
- colechristensen 9d agoHow did/do you feel about that?
- herodotus 9d agoGood. 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.
- vachina 9d agoThis 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.
- Flux159 9d agoEven 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.
- FireBeyond 9d agoI 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.
- neilv 9d agoBig-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.)
- Melatonic 9d agoDon'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
- omoikane 9d agoI 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.
- LennyWhiteJr 9d agoThe 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.
- trencedamp 9d agoThis 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.
- MBCook 9d agoI 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”.
- bluegatty 9d agoThey 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).
- WalterBright 9d agoAs 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.
- dbtc 9d agoI've used QuickTime for that, which has the expected menu items.
- gizajob 9d agoyeah 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.
- basisword 9d agoThe Photos app (on Mac/iOS) has the same trim interface as QT too.
- 9d ago
- faizshah 9d agoThis thread should be on the first page of every book on microservices.
- jmathai 9d agoI 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!
- gryzzly 9d agoReads like Nikita from tonsky.me lol
- purpleidea 9d agoI was reading through it and figured it had to be AI generated... But ... it's not? This email from billg is unhinged! Hilarious though.
- ebcode 9d agoCulture 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.
- MBCook 9d agoThat 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.
- acuozzo 9d ago"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
- left-struck 9d agoI’m not sure tbh but it looks like he was not included in the thread after the first email
- ValentineC 9d agoAs 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.
- dvh 9d agoIn 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.
- M95D 9d agoIt was getting better until they integrated IE in Win98.
- ValentineC 9d agoI 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.
- strideashort 8d agoGnome was pretty good until they did exactly the same.
- danillonunes 9d ago> 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.
- danielb123 9d agoI'm sure MSFT used this as a learning lesson and things got better since then, right?.......
- zamalek 9d agoNow people get the downloads and bits that they don't want.
- wqtz 9d agoI 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.
- lostlogin 9d ago> 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.
- microcantbuilt 9d agoI'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.
- iJohnDoe 9d agoI 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.
- dzonga 9d agoBillG 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.
- pipes 9d agoReminds 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.
- Anamon 4d agoI just had a horrifying flashback to the Creative Labs driver download page... some wizard-style abomination three levels deep, nothing just a simple link. Still, the archive was complete and you'd end up getting what you went there for, so still infinitely better than the average experience today.
- akoculu 9d agoJust 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.
- ValentineC 9d ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com#Launch_of_Hotmail
- akoculu 8d agoyes?
- js2 9d agoTangent, 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-bg.htm https://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-j.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 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=petals+around+the+rose
- pvillano 9d agoThat was fun. I should have kept track of how soon I solved it.
- slazaro 9d agoI'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.
- christkv 9d agoEach little piece own by their own little hierarchy. Nobody owning the entire user journey. Classic.
- brailsafe 9d agoWhile 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 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.
- utopiah 9d agoSchadenfreude 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.
- mdavid626 9d agoIt’s not any better today. Probably the only difference is that you’ll get some ads too.
- SpacePortKnight 9d agoThis is one of the reasons why people have stopped installing software and moved all programs to web.
- rdsubhas 9d agoEveryone 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.
- dang 9d agoDiscussed a few times: Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421018 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 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 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 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 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!
- hmokiguess 9d agoI’m sure if he were to try and revisit this experience today he would learn that nothing has changed
- ripvanwinkle 9d agothis 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
- manbitesdog 9d agoIt'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.
- andai 9d agoThis is some Douglas Adams level comedy. My sides are in orbit.
- gherkinnn 9d agoThis explains my experience with any MS documentation. Links upon links, no information, feels circular but the UI changes every rotation.
- whywhywhywhy 9d ago> 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.
- xyzelement 9d agoAt 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.
- greazy 9d ago> Bill's frustration is not unreasonable. I find this single sentence not only awkward but frustratingly annoying. Bills frustration is beyond reasonable.
- pikuseru 9d ago“You do it” “No, you do it” “Get Bill to do it.”
- VCFundedGenYer 9d agoAs 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).
- jnaina 9d ago[dead]
- timnetworks 9d agoI 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.
- FerretFred 9d agoOh 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).
- oliviayii 9d ago[dead]
- harrouet 9d agoTry 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.
- croon 9d ago> 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.
- mike_tyson 9d agothis 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.
- rendaw 9d agoThe 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.
- TheRealVall 8d agoEven 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...
- MarkMc 8d agoRemember that while Bill Gates was worrying about downloading a video editor, he was ceding search to Google
- glub 7d agoI 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.