Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker
113 points by nrposner
113 points by nrposner
I don't think this is satire as the current tagging implies; it seems to be a real email thread uncovered during legal discovery: https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/25/gates-sends-angry-e-mail-sounds-just-like-a-customer/
Thanks! I figured it should be satire since it was meant for a laugh, rather than being a serious discussion, and the satire tag says (satire, parody, and other humor), though I agree it might imply that the material is fake. Wasn't sure which way to split it.
why would you not feel it was a serious discussion? it looked extremely serious to me, basically gates indulging in some straight talk about what a mess that part of the ecosystem was.
Mostly because I was laughing my butt off through the whole thing. If it wasn’t from discovery, I would have assumed it was a skit. Though I was only born at the turn of the millennium, so I might not remember the pain of actually dealing with these systems.
I mean ‘downloading something from the download page wasn’t something they anticipated’, come on, the cluelessness is off the charts.
This reminds me of another Microsoft tale, though one that may be apocryphal and certainly muddled in my own memory by the passing decades:
For a long time, the company stance at Microsoft was that adware and spyware were merely user error and readily handled by any competent professional. As the story goes, Steve Ballmer had a niece whose computer got infected with a nasty piece of pop up ads and he assured her that he could get it taken care of swiftly without reformatting the drive and starting over.
The machine was passed up the ranks of technical staff at Microsoft, but no one could actually remove all the spyware that had accumulated. As the niece kept asking for her machine back, Ballmer was finally told that backing up important files to external media and wiping the drive was the only path forward. This admission of defeat was what finally lead to Ballmer approving resources for creating Windows Defender.
That's very surprising to me. As far as I can tell, it was long known that the initial infection can be prevented with sufficient expertise (barring 0-day drive-by attacks), however, once the machine was infected, it was a goner, nothing was to be trusted and reformatting was unavoidable. Even in the early 2000's that seemed to be common knowledge among computer users.
In this, the Year of Our Lord 2026, my kid wanted to set up a Minecraft Realm.
I have Family Safety enabled. He can’t set up a Realm because of some setting there. It tells me to go to Family Safety and update his settings.
I literally could not enable online play for my 11yo’s Minecraft account by following any instructions or using any app. I finally had to find the URL to take me where I needed to go in some Reddit post. On the site, by the way, everyone is identified by gamer tag and there is no obvious mapping to email or name. I don’t know my 11yo’s randomly-assigned gamer tag and it doesn’t show up anywhere obvious.
It also apparently takes 24 hours to update?? And it’s also unclear what permissions need to be enabled for Minecraft, just “check your settings in your Microsoft account.”
Spoilers: it’s not your Microsoft Account. It’s your Xbox account. But it’s the Xbox account setting under “Windows 10”…never mind that (a) this is Windows 11 and (b) Windows 10 is EOL.
Oh! And they don’t take American Express to buy the necessary package for Minecraft, but they don’t say they don’t take Amex. Instead you get “oops! An unknown error occurred!” until I finally used a Visa.
Funny to see the fingerpointing in the followup emails. It's really exemplary of the toxic internal politics, which I think is a natural byproduct of the stack ranking they imposed at that time.
23 years later this is using any software in my field feels like. Abberant stiched horrors simulacring thougthful design.
If anything, this highlights the importance of the higher-ups doing some amount of dogfooding.
Nothing wrong with knowing your own products obviously.
In this case it seems more like an issue with a captain who is bad at telling the helmsman what their responsibilities and focus should be. Instead the captain is now telling everyone on the boat that the person in the crow's nest is not holding their looking glass properly.
Maybe that's a bit of a laboured metaphor, but my point is that the CEO of a company decides how much the company should focus on user experience and then rely on the rest of the executive team to translate the focus into work without having to talk about how to install a piece of software.
I disagree. In my opinion, leaving things in the abstract ("we need better user experience") leaves too much space for idiocy. For me, the only thing that explains so much of what I see as a user is that people who take decisions NEVER use the products at all.
I'm pretty sure all products with good user experience are dogfooded by people with decision power who use the products in similar conditions to the end users.
Of course, I don't think that Bill Gates should have had a daily complaint about Windows. For sure he had better things to do. But if he has a real bad experience as in this case, I see it quite useful to have a specific example to demonstrate what's broken.
I remember seeing this back in the day, but reading it now I'm scared because Bill Gates seems to behave eerily like me as a user: wander aimlessly trying to do things that make sense, but that the developers have never considered.
And it seems that it didn't work. I've had similar experiences with Microsoft.
Some time ago I read about Windows Sandbox and I thought it would be cool. But for ages it was not available to me. IIRC, it was because I was running es-es Windows- I don't quite remember if it was broken or just unavailable.
And since Microsoft announced the "full screen experience" in Windows, I've tried to set it up to no avail for around a year. The process is extremely tedious and there's no feedback at all. I have no idea if I don't get it because I'm not in one of the "supported markets" or whatever it is. And because it's a significant amount of work, having no idea of what's happening multiplies the frustration.
Trying to act like a normal user (or using your grandmother as a stand-in) is a very valuable thing to do in case you're invested in actually helping users (or asking for their money).
I dunno what Bill Gates was doing on a day-to-day basis in 2003, but I suspect there was a ton of meetings and emails involved, not software development. He could have asked a minion to prepare his computer with Movie Maker, but decided to try it himself, and discovered that the process was probably losing Microsoft customers.