
Flame from Bill Gates Re: Windows Usability - snikeris
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000/PX07199.pdf
======
nhebb
Dear Bing,

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
w1ntermute
Of course, that doesn't mean that running Lion on a PC is out of the question:
[http://lifehacker.com/5823837/how-do-i-upgrade-my-
hackintosh...](http://lifehacker.com/5823837/how-do-i-upgrade-my-hackintosh-
to-mac-os-x-lion)

~~~
bad_user
It is if you care about staying withing legal bounds and thus respecting their
EULA.

Also, OS X is not designed to run on any hardware, like Windows or Linux --
basically you have to ensure that you get the same configuration that Macs
have, or you're sure to run into trouble.

This means that if you already have a desktop or a laptop, you most definitely
won't be able to run OS X on it, at least without pain; instead you're far
better off buying new hardware and you're even better off going for an
original Mac instead, or just not using OS X altogether.

I mean, yeah, I know some people are happy with their hackintoshes, but it has
been a poor experience for me and I just reverted to my reliable Ubuntu /
Windows combo.

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

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

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

~~~
lurker14
People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill
Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that
bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else
about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he
is in charge of everyone involved.

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

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

~~~
Maro
Come on now.

> products that bring intense pain to it users

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

> as frustrated as anyone else about _the_ problem

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

> is completely powerless to stop it

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

> is drowning in money coming from his mistakes

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

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

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

~~~
podperson
Clicked you up but:

1\. Seriously, try iWork ;-). Not only does Pages kick Word's butt, it can sit
in the middle of a Word-based workflow (e.g. preserving change tracking).

2\. Visual Studio doesn't kill Realbasic (from a tiny developer) or Xcode.
Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs
consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes,
it's pretty darn good.

3\. Win7 is a tactical success but a strategic failure.

If you want an end-to-end picture of just how big a hole Microsoft finds
itself in, go to <http://microsoftstore.com>

1\. Their back-to-school incentive is a free XBox with each PC sold. Aside
from just how big a loss this must represent (given the XBox 360 is, itself, a
loss-leader) parents are going to LOVE this. Here's $25k college tuition and
you want a computer with a free game console?

2\. Because they're selling a weird hodgepodge of third-party products they
need to provide things like a "recommend a PC for me given I am this kind of
person" tool, and it makes no sense (e.g. I picked "develop with power" and
got no results).

3\. The chief selling point of the PCs they're selling is "no crapware".

4\. Try to figure out their Win7 phone comparison tool.

And this is what happens when Microsoft goes out and deliberately tries to
build an imitation Apple Store.

~~~
o1iver

       Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs
    

What is that statement based on? It is an absurd idea. If "more polished"
means better code then this statement is just not true.

I just completed an internship in a big technology company and the code
produced there (for automation/control in the energy and utilities sector) is
quite certainly "more polished" than any iPhone application or whatever else
people develop in Xcode (certainly not automation/control applications). And
they use, amongst other more specialized tools, Virtual Studio.

Xcode is an IDE with a very small user-base, alone because of the fact that
the Mac still has a small user-base within the industry. It probably even
still has a small user-base in the developer community (aside from the hipster
apps world).

I would love to see some evidence that apps developed in Xcode are usually
"more polished" than apps produced in Visual Studio.

And in my personal opinion Visual Studio, especially IntelliSense kicks
Xcode's butt every day. And same with MS Office...

Note: I don't use an IDE unless developing in C/C++, C#, Java or Objective-C

~~~
mikecsh
I never understand people who think that VS is the greatest IDE. Sure, when I
first started using VS2003 having been doing all of my C coding on the command
line prior to that point it felt revolutionary and the best thing since sliced
bread. Having used every iteration since then for my day job programming C#
applications, I actually cannot stand VS. My dev machine is a dual core 3GHz
processor with 4GB of RAM. Yet, compiling a reasonably sized project takes an
age.

Frequent recompilations which are unnecessary as no code has changed. I can't
make a code change while the application is being debugged. The sliding panels
really get on my nerves, it's slow to open projects and to close projects.
It's difficult to get fine grained control over the build process within the
IDE itself. Every single "visual" feature, such as ASPX designer is dog slow
to switch into from code view, or back out of. This has been the case with
every version of VS and every dev PC I've had for the last four years.

However there are some things which I like about it - it has a good plugin API
(Resharper _is_ awesome) and a nice integrated debugger. My biggest issue is
that it is a resource hog and incredibly slow.

I've also coded in Xcode and before that Project Builder for even longer than
I've been using VS. The lack of published plugin support is annoying in Xcode
but that is probably my biggest gripe. I make no comments about the level of
"polish" that an IDE allows a user to provide as I don't think the IDE makes a
difference. I would however say that I find myself probably twice as
productive coding in XCode than I am in VS.

~~~
Maro
Compiler != IDE.

I don't know much about the WYSIWYG parts of VS, I only write textual code.

If your machine is too slow, get more RAM and an SSD. It's your daily tool,
it's worth the investment.

"I don't think the IDE makes a difference" - Huh? Then why are we having this
discussion =)

I myself spend the vast majority of my time in XCode [writing a database],
using VS only to maintain the Windows port and C# client libraries. I find
that I'm roughly equally productive in both, but if I had a choice I'd take VS
over XCode.

~~~
mikecsh
Yes your'e right that the compiler != the IDE. The compile time should be
attributed to the compiler, of course, but VS has a habit of invoking the
compiler unnecessarily, even if no source has changed.

I don't really use the WYSIWIG aspects either but _all_ aspects of the UI seem
slow and cluttered in my experience. And whether or not you and I use those
aspects of the IDE is somewhat immaterial. It is called _Visual_ Studio after
all and touts the visual designers.

My point regarding the specs of my dev machine were that it is a fairly
decent, new machine and the load being placed on it really isn't that high.
Comparatively I run XCode on a 4 year old laptop with 2GB RAM, slower disk,
slower processor and it is far more responsive. (And FWIW the compiler is
faster too, especially now they are using LLVM).

When I say the IDE doesn't make a difference to the level of polish you can
apply to an application what I'm trying to say is that if you're writing
mostly textual code as I do too, then the IDE doesn't really factor into the
polish of the application. Although, I suppose I'm contradicting myself as if
I'm more productive in XCode then I have more time available to polish, so
there is an indirect relationship there :P

At the end of the day, they're both decent tools and and everyone will have
their preference. My comment was really just because a lot of people have
started using XCode in recent years, having moved from VS due to the "iPhone
effect" and I see an awful lot of comments and posts about how much better VS
is, and my experience contradicts that :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
cubicle67
_No inter-group fighting, or conflicting priorities._

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

~~~
zyphlar
Absolutely. Have you seen some of the "off the cuff" town hall style meetings
he's had? The one before the release of OSX was telling, he repeatedly said
that if he were making the decisions, he'd do X, but he's not. It was very eye
opening that sometimes it isn't all Steve's fault (of course it isn't.)

Likewise, it's amazing to see that it isn't all Bill's fault. Here he is
advocating passionately for a huge change in usability and getting nowhere.
Lots of these problems still haven't been solved as of Windows XP (Vista/7
have fixed a lot of update quirks by virtue of being a native app.)

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

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

------
res0nat0r
Can we blame Microsoft for starting the trend of top replying to emails? Since
I had to scroll to the bottom of this pdf to read the original message from
Bill Gates I'm going to say yes. That is a terrible usability issue I've have
to deal with every day for years which I hate. I'd love to go back to the days
of plain text and > indented replies.

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

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

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

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

edit2: and here's the same file as at slated.org, but without the blocks:
[http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000...](http://edge-
op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000/PX07199.pdf) and if you go up
one level, you can get the rest of the "comes" files.

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

~~~
JamesBlair
Not for me: <http://i.imgur.com/Cw8Rx.jpg>

~~~
sorbus
That's odd. It's not as readable as the PDF for me (under Chrome 12 and
Windows 7), but it's still legible. Maybe you should send a bug report to the
people at scribd? Or at least tell them that some files are unreadable in your
browser/os combination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
mtkd
This is a now legendary email thread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
dredmorbius
No, it doesn't.

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

Threaded mail clients FTW.

~~~
sriramk
Stuff gets forwarded around, attached to various systems, etc. Having the
entire thread, unmodified, has been a lifesaver for me more times than I can
remember.

~~~
dredmorbius
Having the entire thread is also a major PITA _most_ of the time it's
included.

With a threaded mail client, if it's necessary to send the entire thread to
someone, I can select "Attach mail" -> Tag _the entire thread_ -> and forward
it as a MIME-attached mbox.

If the recipient has, say, a powerful, thread-capable mail client, they can
_open the mbox, read it, filter it, search it, expand it, and collapse it_ in
ways that _aren't_ possible with the horribly lossy Microsoft Outlook format.

As I said: it's used extensively. This doesn't mean it works.

~~~
muppetman
Yea, you do. Sadly you've just gone 6 levels over the head of Sandy the PR
person. And that's why it's still the default, because it works for everyone.

~~~
dredmorbius
Don't you dare start putting reality in the way of my geek fantasy!

You've got a point, and throwing mutt at your typical office worker might not
go far. Then again, my (very technophobic) father was dealing with mainframe-
based "business productivity tools" in the 1980s. Including some (by current
standards) very, very clunky email tools.

I'd throw the problem at Apple. I think you'd find that they'd figure out a
way to sort out when it made sense for someone to forward an entire thread to
someone and handle it that way. Probably, these days, within a Web interface,
though possibly through a mail client / app.

------
kia
Previous discussion:

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

------
jpdoctor
My favorite part from Bill:

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

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

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

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

------
iradik
Bill should have put his vps in line:

[http://nullisnull.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-work-with-
me.h...](http://nullisnull.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-work-with-me.html)

------
babel17
I have seen that before here on hacker news; something should be done to
supress old stories, or at least to show them only to newbies ...

------
drivebyacct2
Things are better, but yes, Windows would benefit (and possibly will with
rumors regarding Windows 8) from real package management.

------
nkp007
Poor Dave...

------
throwmeahway
My dear Bill, how have you been this century?

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

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

Something like XPLite but created by Microsoft!

Mr. Throwaway, your most obedient.

~~~
beernutz
What the hell are you talking about?

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

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

