Gates: Hoist on his own petard !!!

It's impossible that I would agree with anything Bill Gates says: " thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places" is closely paraphrased by me in a post I made yesterday on the Netgear forum pointing out the need for Windows networking setup that is more appropriate to home users.

Sure its "Cool: to Bash William, yet Bills' work is through, more technically oriented peoples can sweep up mess & Vola': Instant Quality.

William has Lifetime to Figure Out haw much 40 billions is, 2 billions at time. I believe Heart is into serving & service so far has been beyond Most.

Without Gates lifetime Push, NO Public Digital useage would exist. NONE.
von Drashek

To the post above. . . actually MS uses all their software even before its released (as far as real products go).

When I interviewed with Microsoft, I told them my motivation was to improve usability and make the UI more efficient, then presented specific ideas and functional examples from my laptop.

Yeah, I wasn’t hired.

He does sound like a guy who've never dealt with technology or computers and doesn't understand them at all, and yet he writes book and people buy those in the millions.
Is this even confirmed to be real? Because it seems rather unlike him, as does the speech pattern.
Oh and they did fix the complaints somewhat, they included moviemaker in update so people don't have to use the download site anymore, much easier fix than messing with the site eh.

The chances of that email being genuine are close to zero, I would have thought. For all his faults, Gates is technically aware - the idea that he wouldn't know why Windows needs to be rebooted after installing software is ridiculous in fact.

Slashdotters appear to agree:

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/26/026237

The funny thing about the microsoft site content and its programs is that it's much, much easier to find anything of them using google than ms live search, really, if Bill just typed moviemaker on google he would find exactly what he wanted... the sad part is that the developers don't even listen their boss, as the site is still a pile of crap.

Why isn't Bill running Vista??

Initially I was excited at the prospect of disillusionment for Mr. Gates. Maybe this is just what Microsoft needs to get things back to form and concern themselves with their customers instead of their bulging pockets. Then I recalled the words "ancient e-mail" in the opening lines. Seems Gates just passed his frustrations right down the Microsoft sewer line to us. Thanks for the scraps.

...finally someone at microsoft has actually tried to use their own software!

As you can see, this email is from 2003....

Some will write gleefull stuff rejoicing how the evil Gates got sick eating his own dog food. But I wouldn't be mean to the man.

I would say MS's chief cultural mistake is that all of them are not actually required to use what they produce.

Bill, and I'm not being sarcastic - use Google to find stuff on MS web site! It will help you as a user and will give you an opportunity to see what to improve, as a manager.

Finally, it's probably more Ballmer's fault, than Bill's that the culture at MS is such, that usability has low priority. They apparently spend most of their time cramming more sh*te into both their software and theit web site.

What he wrote is not embarrasing. What is embarrasing and why peple do not respect MS, is that he doesn't write it more often, and preferably in a publicly accessible blog of his own.

When I read that e-mail yesterday, I didn't look at the date - and I was sure it was written recently and that maybe they will finally fix the usability of MS website, now that BillG has complained - but nooooo, the e-mail is from 2003 and nothing hasn't changed since. Still the same mess of useless clutter, dead links and bad search.

Well WinXP is complete shit. If this was Vista you know it would be all over the headline and bad remarks about it throughout the article.

Microsoft should swallow its pride and do some research using Google. Find all the products that match what they offer (except for the most part offer more and work better) then steal their ideas and claim that they didn't.

He runs the company. If he knows so little about his products then it's a good thing he's stepping down.

Maybe Bill got used to Debian and forgot what a hassle it was to use Windows Update and Windows registry.