- Saturday, 11 July 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
Infiniband will be a suitable bus for the next 30 years - Intel
Gates memo shows user frustration
AN ANCIENT EMAIL has turned up which shows King William Gates III, of Redmond, ripping into the design of Microsoft's website.
King Billy, who is about to abdicate this week, is ripping into his design and programming staff for over his personal experience when trying to download and install Windows Moviemaker in the electronic proclamation.
Bill was disappointed at how Windows Usability had been going backwards and the program management groups didn't deal with usability.
He said he was trying to download Moviemaker and buy the Digital Plus pack, so he went to Microsoft.com (you'd think he could get a free copy). The first five times he used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after a long delay he got it to come up.
Gates moaned that the site was so slow it was unusable and it was difficult to find file names.
"I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no Moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing."
In the end he emailed a developer to ask where the Moviemaker download was and it turned out that "using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated".
Billy was told to go to the main page search button and type movie maker – which was not even the name of the software.
"It is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations."
The install took six minutes and the machine was slow while it did it. Bill could not understand what the software was doing during those six minutes after the download had already finished.
"It told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time? The software insisted so he did that, but it meant completely getting rid of all his Outlook state.
"So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker. So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP!"
Then he got cross, saying that someone had "decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable". He meant the file system and the registry. "The program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up."
He said that after more than an hour of craziness and making his programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website he still had not run Moviemaker and got the plus package.
Gates said:" The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)". µ
L'Inq
Gizmodo
Share this:
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
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
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.
Maybe Bill got used to Debian and forgot what a hassle it was to use Windows Update and Windows registry.
He runs the company. If he knows so little about his products then it's a good thing he's stepping down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As you can see, this email is from 2003....
...finally someone at microsoft has actually tried to use their own software!
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.
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.
To the post above. . . actually MS uses all their software even before its released (as far as real products go).
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
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.
Gates: Hoist on his own petard !!!