Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

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The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products.

At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; (c) the simplicity of System Preferences and Software Update; (d) the composited window manager, enabling things like Expose.

What finally converted him was the horrible experience around updating to Windows XP SP3. Recall at the time, Windows Update opened as a control in an Internet Explorer window. Well, he must have waited a very long time until Windows Update no longer supported IE6. So when he attempted to update to SP3, he got an error that the current version of Windows Update required IE7. But for some reason, he could not install IE7 without updating to SP3 -- again, likely because he waited a long time after the SP3 update became available. He told me "I'm never using Windows again" and promptly bought his first MacBook. To my knowledge, he still hasn't gone back.

Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are still bugs. But, all things considered it without a doubt the strongest OS Microsoft has ever built, and it is moving forward...where I feel like OSX is finally moving backward.

People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.

Not to mention plug-and-play finally started coming into its own. XP started the trend of having the massive generic driver repository so you could actually get your NIC to work so you could DL your other drivers without needing the CD/floppy with the NIC drivers :) Oh man, XP was great.

I loved that with XP, that you could actually turn the gui back into something WIN98 like- which ment, it was boring, grey and minimal. And thats how i want my gui to be. I dont want some fashionfacista to redesign it to his/her whims. I dont want it to grab my attention for unimportant crap. I want it laying there in the sun, grey, damp and featureless like a new born island. My work has enough excitment and new stuff to focus on- i dont want to be bothered by what other people consider important- security center rages, advertisements and by bothering i ment to be reminded of there existence in any way (that includes gobbling huge amounts of system ressources) - so in XP you could still shut the worst offenders down permanently. It is, and it was for the user who took time to settle in, the perfect system. Everything that came after, is a lovecraftian horror that trys way to much to please a preconcived user- who wants nothing more then to strangle all this unpleasant attempts of servitude.

I think it's a mix of both? I "loved" XP once two things happened: I got a computer with more than 256mb of ram, and I installed SP2. After that it ran really well and yes, so much better than Windows 98 did.

Don’t forget Windows ME which was truly a turd in a class of its own.

I still don't completely understand why they didn't make Win2k into a "consumer" product. A lot of techies here who installed Windows themselves in that era probably skipped ME and went to that. But all the consumer PCs shipped with 98 or ME.

I remembering hearing at the time that this was about hardware support and/or app compatibility. But my cynical side just thinks they wanted to justify charging more for a workstation SKU for another release cycle.

Actually, ME was the result of a development disaster similar to the one which resulted in Vista.

Microsoft was planning on building an entirely new Internet-focused consumer version of NT. It was too ambitious for its time, so to meet deadlines, most of it was scrapped and some UI elements were backported into an updated Windows 98 which became ME. This is why Explorer for both ME and 2000 look similar despite having little else in common.

Other elements of the scrapped project made its way into XP, but barely compared to what it was supposed to be. I think XP’s fancy login screen was one of them.

If anyone’s interested I’ll try to find where I read all of this. It might’ve been on Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite or another site that collected Windows betas.

Windows codename Neptune: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Neptune

It’s interesting to see twenty year old experiments with flat UI designs considering how dominant that style is today with Android 5, iOS 7, Windows 8, etc.

Indeed. Ironically, I think I remember reading that the Neptune apps’ UI was HTML-based, since Microsoft wanted IE to power everything.

And now many apps use HTML/JS/CSS for styling and rendering.

These apps looks like they are made in IE6-era Electron..

They are! The same tech powered Active Desktop and the "smart" Explorer sidebars in Windows XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

I think Win2K had higher memory requirements, which meant a more expensive machine for the same performance. (This was always an issue for WinNT and OS/2 versus the DOS/Win9x line)

I think software compat was also lacking. DOS games were still in people's libraries (eg Quake from June '96), and I remember needing an extra 4MB to run those inside Win9x versus booting to DOS mode. That stuff didn't Just Work (tm) on Win2K. For example, http://sandmann.dotster.com/djgpp/DJGPP_W2K.htm is a list of issues with the most popular GCC port to DOS. (The Quake DOS binary was actually built with an earlier version of that compiler)

I remember the WinXP DOS emulation was supposed to be much improved over Win2K, but don't recall specifics.

It's not the bugs that are an issue with 10. It's the mountains of nagware, spyware and advertisements built in to it.

Also the unbelievable amounts of inconsistent interfaces.

There should be some rule internally at Microsoft that institutes a complete ban on new settings UI unless it actually replaces old UI. The amount of times I need to fall back to the old UI is absurd. Also - I'm not sure programmers appreciate how jarring it even is to have the same settings presented in two places. It forces users to construct some kind of mental model of the behind-the-scenes-actual settings, because of course the two dialogs sort of match, but not quite. Usually there are a bunch of settings only in the old dialog, and a few new ones only in the new, and some interactions between settings are meaningful, so... you basically just fiddle till it works or breaks.

Any (significant) UI change is bad. Churn is bad. If you want to change the UI because the old one really isn't good enough anymore, you want to do so as infrequently as possible, and as completely as possible: no two-slightly-inconsistent-UIs-at-once. Realize that every change starts with a serious downside and needs a lot of upside to compensate.

So I get that Microsoft wants to update some of the windows settings stuff (and other integrated apps). But the aim must be for a fairly quick transition; no years of overlap. And if for some reason overlap is absolutely inevitable, then sorry, you're going to have to make both systems 100% equivalent. Yes, that means adding features to the old UI, and adding legacy options to the new UI - but at least that way there's a migration path. The alternative is the mess we have now: little point in even having all those settings, because 99% of users are merely going to be hurt by all those options they cannot actually control correctly.

I'd honestly rather have retained some legacy win95 era controls and have only one control for each option, than this mess. If you're going to fix it... fix it already!

At least you can drop down to the old Control Panel and get at the settings that they haven't bothered to expose in the new UI.

Unfortunately, you have to do so so often that discoverability of where things are in the new UI suffers. It's not worth bothering to learn, particularly when the new UI is in flux and changing often.

I use 10 daily and see no ads. Where does windows 10 show ads?

Candy crush in the sidebar, ads all over the home page/new tab page of the built in browsers. Heavy annoying pushes for Microsoft products like starting Microsoft teams every time you boot when I never installed it or even have an account.

I have yet to see ads also, but I do turn off all the unnecessary stuff at installation time. There is this option on Lock Screen settings called Get fun facts, tips, tricks and more on your lock screen and Show more tiles on the Start settings that can bring stuff out and probably some other more spread around, of course they won't make it nicely like Opt out of all ads across Windows just because.

IIRC, start tiles, explorer bar, stub shortcuts.

Give a non-technical user a copy of Windows 10 and Chrome, wait a few days for the third party ad networks to catch up, and then watch as advertisement after advertisement pop up in the lower right hand corner.

I'd also like to mention the Microsoft News program as being an annoying delivery mechanism for such content (it seems to have some relationship with the browser based on how the user uses the Internet).

Also the logon screen that is now delightful except someone has sold on the idea that they should add clickbait ads for msn and bing - even on pro and enterprise Windows..!

I imagine management in Microsoft is like a fight in the wheelhouse:

Someone trying to make the best OS there is.

Others trying to do ads everywhere like Google.

Some trying to be a reaponsible reliable company, others somehow managing to to crazy price hikes.

Some trying to be friends with open source, others pushing Edge really hard (but, in fairness, still not as ugly as Google was pushing Chrome at its worst.)

Etc etc

If you use the windows search in the bottom left corner, you'll see all sorts of advertisements when you search for stuff on your computer.

Same. I suppose if you view lock screen as an "ad"... I built my own 10 home box which has had no problems for years now.

If you turn them off you dont see them. It's a dark pattern but not completely black.

In the start menu.

XP had a bad start due to relative slowness on the hardware on release (just like Vista).

But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS.

When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse.

8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...)

With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP.

And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.

I grew up with Windows. My jobs used Unix/Linux and I switched to Mac at home before Vista came out. I got a job using Windows during the Windows 8-10 transition. During that 10 year gap I'd help friends and family setup printers and stuff. I was aghast at the things that hadn't changed in the 10+ years. I really wished I had written it up because I fell back into things quickly. One thing I still remember is how often you get updates requiring a reboot--in macOS it's a few times a year and in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated.

Clicking around.

For example, setting your computer’s IP or gateway. Control panel -> Network -> right-click on the “IP interfaces” among a list of 5 abscon names -> Details -> Advanced -> Details -> And you can’t freely type the new IP, you have to use their fields with 4 numbers separated by dots.

Everything was like this. Installing Maven? You need to set a system property, it’s 15 clicks including 6 on a “Details” or “Advanced settings” button. They wanted to hide complexity behind “Advanced” buttons but they hid the wrong things, because each dialog was full of info you’d never use, and what you wanted was inevitably under the “Advanced” button.

Installing new software? Welcome to the installation assistant. We’ll guide you through the 20 clicks, including the mass-unticking of additional software we’ll inevitably select by default, notably the Ask Toolbar when you install Java. If you’re setting up a dev machine you had a dozen programs to set up, each of them requiring a dozen steps of a dozen clicks.

Windows+x => powershell => ipconfig

in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated

Fair enugh, but depending on what distro you run that seems to be fairly often as well. Like, more than 'a few times' a year.

Then again if you dont run a server for which downtime is a true loss, or something alike, is rebooting that much of a problem (honest question)?

I haven't really paid much attention, but I'm pretty sure CentOS/RHEL only do kernel updates with distro updates. If so, it's about once or twice a year: https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078

In practice, my companies have done them less frequently. Kernel packages are less often about security patches and more often around a magic combination of kernel+GPU driver+software--I think one of them paid Red Hat for custom cuts.

As for maintaining a personal machine, that distro would probably suggest rebooting more often than RHEL (you'd also have to effectively logout/"restart" for any core package for your Desktop Environment or X). I haven't measured, but I feel like my Synology gets updated every few months.

As for the impact of rebooting. Windows Updates (and macOS updates) are more than just a reboot. It's often an unknown amount of time. Even for a normal reboot, it's really really nice to just leave everything open so you can pick up where you left off. Personal or work it's more than just a browser, but terminals I have open, shell history, vim sessions.

It's like a recent article about fast software https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

If I have a few tens of applications open that all have their own separate state that is lost on reboot, then it’s fairly annoying to reboot because one thing updated.

Maybe it's what exactly you do then/how. I.e. apart from a REPL session in which I maually typed a bunch of commands, I don't seem to have that problem. Editors/IDEs/browsers all persist open documents/view state etc between runs.

Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were all fine. I just enabled the classic design and things largely worked and looked the same in key UX aspects. I'm still only using 7 (virtualized) and what I've seen from 10 on colleagues' computers looks much worse and more complicated UI than what xp-v-7 ever did. Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual -- which would be the sucessor to 7, if any. I sure won't ever touch a consumer version of 10...even if it's called (pseudo) pro.

> Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual

This is really a damn shame, because it is far away the best Windows distribution ever. If I didn't have access to it through MSDN, I'd pay a couple hundred bucks for a license.

Getting LTSC is as simple as getting Windows Embeded that it replaced.

> People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory.

I still boot an XP partition from time to time. To play old games that simply run with issues in more modern Windows. The issue is XP had the right APIs for game development, and then MS deprecated some great technologies in favour of XBox centered ones.

In new games I still miss the hardware accelerated positional audio XP has.

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products.

If you thought that was bad... look at the "app-ombinations" which pass for productivity software today. Wide expanses of useless whitespace, low-contrast ultra-thin fonts, monochrome hieroglyphic icons everywhere, patronising "cute" and unhelpful messages, the ridiculous levels of bloat, and of course the pervasive spyware --- or "telemetry".

This, but unironically.

We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements.

Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.

You’d have a great point if you only mentioned VB6 and left out AIM and that word processor that spat out binary files.

I still have a portable version of Word 2003 on a flash stick, because it still works better.

The most incomprehensible thing to me is how much worse all the IM software I have to use today is.

I think IM has such a low bar to entry (how hard is it to create a TCP connection and send and recieve stuff?) that encourages lots of churn and competing protocols.

Remember Trillian, Adium, or BeejiveIM? Seamless presence on IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk...

Are you arguing that hardware is software or something?

Everything enabling your pocket computer is hardware progress, nothing software related.

I'm not sure if you're serious, but

> Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print;

this is just the most obtuse way of doing things.

> usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash;

So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually. But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though?

There's a reason why certain large classes of disabled users are on Windows. Stephen Hawking used Windows.

Aside from the disabled, the mechanics of Windows have always been better, no matter how bad they actually were. That last bit is my opinion, but it is true that many, many more disabled users are on Windows. If they can figure it out, couldn't your roommate? I'm joking of course, some people just seem to have a completely different way of thinking about things and certainly it is a fact that at least some portion of the population prefers the way macOS does things just like there are some people who can only use their chin to move a mouse.

I figured out very early on Windows (this was the days of 3.x) that the Alt key could activate the menu and then let you browse the items with the cursor keys, and the underlined letters (which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently) work in combination with Alt to activate UI elements. I couldn't figure out how to do the equivalent in Mac OS. You had to inspect each menu first with the mouse (and hold down the mouse button while doing so), and hope that there was a keyboard shortcut assigned to the items you needed. It's possible to use Windows almost entirely without a mouse, although I've only had to do that to install mouse drivers or reload a glitched one. The same can't be said for Mac OS.

Some of the Finder keyboard shortcuts seem very counterintuitive; for example, the arrow keys move the selected item (same as in Windows), but although opening the selected item(s) is a very common task and one would expect that to be mapped to a very common key like Space or Enter like all the other file managers I've used, I believe one of those initiates a rename (a relatively uncommon operation) and the other does nothing, and the actual shortcut to open the selected item is Command+DownArrow or Command+O. I guess they make sense in their own way, but apparently I'm not the only one who finds this very unusual and confusing:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/why-does-the-...

https://superuser.com/questions/59007/enter-to-open-a-file-i...

https://superuser.com/questions/176450/open-file-shortcut-fo...

https://superuser.com/questions/134892/how-to-open-folder-wi...

https://superuser.com/questions/119871/how-do-you-open-a-fol...

You can press Command+Shift+? to open a search box for the menu items. Not the same thing, but I find it useful sometimes. I also believe you don't need to hold down the mouse button to inspect the menus.

In the end, I'd rate both (Windows nad macOS) as equally painful/unintuitive to use without a mouse.

>(which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently)

I can still see the underlined letters. Are you on Windows 10?

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

For max fun though, hold down opt/alt while you have a menu displayed and watch the options change.

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

The majority of Windows applications I've used also follow that (using Ctrl instead), because the unmodified keys will do something else (like inserting the pressed letter, in a word processor/text editor); the difference with Finder/Explorer is that browsing through the filesystem is the primary purpose, and arrows/Enter/Backspace to move selection/select/go back are far more convenient and easy to use than arrows/Cmd+O/Cmd+[.

I wonder if there is almost some sort of vi/emacs divide here.

Dragging things around is not required on macOS. There are always ways to do things without it. It's just that it's a generally pretty intuitive way to accomplish a task, and it's something that macOS embraced in a way that Windows never did. Want to trash an app? Drag it to the trash. Want to print a PDF? Drag it onto a printer. You can do it other ways, of course — right click and "move to trash", or right-click and "print".

the other really great life-saver for me is the proxy icon on windows... just drag it out to another app to open itinerary another editor/viewer, or right click it to get the path and click one of the folders in the pop up to open it in finder.... always miss that in windows and linux... always hunting for where the file i’m currently viewing is

want to remove a device? drag it to the trash where the icon suddenly changes to eject

"intuitive"

Or right click > eject, which I’m pretty sure is the same as Windows.

> > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print;

> this is just the most obtuse way of doing things.

Perhaps that was a bad example of the incredible leg-up Mac OS X had over Windows around printing... all-around, printing was so much more straightforward on the Mac.

To extend the example: (a) printing to PDF has always worked - no need to install a 3rd party "PDF printer"; (b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, hence "drag a PDF to a print spool" works fine. (c) Accidentally printed to the wrong printer? Easy to fix - just open the intended printer and drag the job from the wrong one over.

This kind of thing also got me to OS X. Now I'm looking at fiascos like the MBA/MBP keyboards, the bug-fests that are x.0 OS updates, and the way Catalina kills 32-bit applications for little reason (that I can discern), and I find myself wondering if I should quit the Mac world.

A few years ago, after following the same path as you, I switched to Linux and never looked back.

I'd recommend KDE (e.g. Kubuntu) if you like out-of-the-box productivity, with built-in settings for pretty much everything useful, and a strong ecosystem of default apps.

How long should Apple keep 32 bit support? Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac for a little over a decade, warned developers back in the 10.6 - 10.7 era and they cancelled 64 bit Carbon.

Should Apple also still maintain Classic MacOS support? PPC support? 68K support? As far as “no good reason” with as bad as Intel is falling behind ARM - especially Apple’s own ARM designs, it’s widely expected that Apple will move away from Intel to ARM in their consumer laptops. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their ARM chips two or three years ago.

Besides, every bit of code you can get rid of is less of a service area to support, maintain and for security vulnerabilities. The more than half dozen ways of defining a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities by itself.

Even MS dropped support for 16 bit apps in 64 bit Windows.

Ditto. I love my MBP, it's still tottering along after 10 years (!), but it's on its last legs. the keyboard fiasco had me thinking that maybe my next backpack computer might not be a Mac...and then here comes Catalina with no 32-bit support and App Store-onerous requirements to get software signed, and fuck that.

MS' Surface Books look pretty cool. Or maybe I'll just get a bigger backpack and tote my 17" gaming laptop around.

Try Windows. I migrated from Macbook to Windows PC and I like it. It's far from perfect as everything seems today, but it works for my needs.

2) Right click - print

2) Double click setup

3) open setup again - remove option or the more opaque way, uninstall through configuration - software

Your points wouldn't convince me actually.

> 2) Double click setup

Press next. Click "I agree" radio button. Press next. Press next. Press install. Press finish.

Ops, you forgot to uncheck the "create link on desktop", and now you have one (if you're lucky, could be more - Register now!) more desktop icon. You can delete it, but if you are running XP I think it would complain that you are not actually deleting the program, just the link. Click yes.

The exercise of installing a pre-xp program with a limited user account is left to the reader.

I thought it was pretty clear this argument was being made in the early 2000s, not today.

But anyway, a few months ago I tried to install Office on a new laptop for my daughter, using a legit code I bought through work. However the laptop had a previously installed demo copy of a different office version. Oh. My. God. I spent 2 hours going through a handful of different Office download, install and upgrade sites, which were completely different in different domains and didn’t refer to each other or even look similar. I entered the product key into a dialog in the pre-installed office and into at least two different office web sites. I tried uninstalling it but it seemed to just end up broken.

Finally I found an MS online support site and got into a chat with a support rep. He remotely uninstalled the pre-install, which had to be done using some power shell command line utility to clean that up properly, then installed the proper version. Unbelievable.

2) You could (maybe still can I haven't tried it for a while) drag documents onto printers in Windows. There was a printto verb for the shell that enabled this. The problem was not many developers supported it.

After OS X, has anybody ever switched back to Windows from a Mac OS for daily use (i.e. not for a specific application that is only available on Windows)?

I don't even want to look at Windows now. It's so unsightly in a way that you don't notice until you switch away.

After 15 years on OS X, I won't be buying another Mac. The MB keyboards with no Escape key and constant breakage, and dropping support for 32-bit apps, would have been enough for me. The newly onerous restrictions on software signing, and Apple's general obsession with sacrificing anything and everything to get thinner and lighter, only make it worse.

Work gave me an MBP. I am a vim user, so I need my Escape key.

Mapping Caps Lock to Escape is easy to do now, even through the Settings GUI.

I am not trying to convince you to stay with Mac, I am just saying that this particular thing helped me immensely.

It always surprises me when people remap the caps lock key. I find that I use it quite often.

For vim you case use 'C-[' I believe which does the same thing as escape.

I have been on Apple devices since the early days of the shift to Intel, and regularly use a PC for home projects.

Windows 10 has refined the usability while Apple has stagnated recently trying to bring iOS apps into the desktop mainstream. Even though both have plenty of problems, the biggest issue right now is that Microsoft seemingly wants all of your metrics, whereas Apple is marketing heavily that they are building everything around privacy.

I am looking forward to seeing how well the Windows Subsystem for Linux works with the new Console. That is the main reason so many engineers went to Macs in the first place.

I have so far on two occasions swapped work given MBP's for Windows laptops after having made considerable effort to get used to osx. I myself own a MBP and my daily driver OS is manjaro linux.

me. the Java ecosystem used to update too slow and unreliably. After spending many hours wrestling the default jdk and ways to make different programs use a different install I just gave up. I still use my Mac for media production because it's still a power house after this many years but for everything else I'm back in Windows. it's ugly and not ergonomic when you go to the insides, but it sits in the background and let me do my things instead of pretending to know better at every step.

I have. OS X and Windows are similarly usable for me, but there are more apps on Windows.

The windows classic shell is still the best, the kernel is great as well. The layers between, well plenty of garbage mixed in.

This letter is what inspired my similar O365 rant. Usability is just as bad as ever, if you find yourself in the wrong places of the suite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809

Windows 7 with its constant mandatory automatic updates did it for me... Windows, never again, and I switched happily to Ubuntu.

Chrome and Firefox auto updates too. But those are fast, done in the background and they don't require reboots.

Windows is still terrible at this.

I don't think updating an application is really comparable to updating an operating system. The OS is vastly more complex.

Nevertheless, Firefox on Linux via package manager definitely requires a restart. Typically I know when Firefox has been updated because I get a window saying "your browser needs to restart".

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9s78fh/sick_of_get...

The restart is not the problem, the time it takes is. (And that it prompts rather aggressively to reboot.)

They do require you to restart the application. Same with Windows, it updates in background and requires a relaunch.

I have no problem with the relaunch, but it takes a lot of time to do the actual update at relaunch time. So the launch time with update is at least a magnitude larger than it should be.

This coupled with the fact that Windows update is rather monolithical yet it should be simple to update most of the non-kernel parts without reboot leads to too many slow reboots :/

"The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products."

Windows 2000 was actually a pretty stable system, considering MS previous standards.

"user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like:"

For me Mac OS was always a terrible system. I was forced to work with some Mac OS during my PhD studies in the lab. Terrible. Today Mac OS is a tax for people who are either to stupid or to lazy to put a decent linux on their machine.

>So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

Quote for the ages.

I have a quote that I personally heard in a meeting at the time I was a contractor at GE:

The green check marks mean nothing!

The quote itself maybe isn't too descriptive, so here's some background: Our team's work was dependent on another team's progress, and so they maintained a progress indicator to know what parts they finished working on. Our team didn't progress very fast, because we encountered a lot of little problems in the parts that were marked 'done' by the other team, and our manager kept nagging us about missing deadlines. After we explained the situation enough times to our managers, they called a meeting with the other team's managers. After 15 minutes of manager-talk, the other team's leader finally said the above quote that would end the meeting almost immediately.

Bill was doing a fantastic job here, but it is a bit too sad to see how most of the executives in the mail show much less concern for the company's and customer's goals, and more concerns on who should own the problem. I think this is a bit too common in any corporate environment.

I actually think it makes sense.

There are a lot of issues raised in the email. Some of them are small bugs that could just be fixed on the spot. But many of them are more like design flaws, which could only be fixed by designing and implementing new features. That requires time and planning, so it makes sense that they would be talking about who should be responsible for it.

This was my takeaway too. Too much talking about doing at big corporate companies, and not enough actual doing. Drives me up a wall.

But isn't it the exec's job to make sure there are people aligned to problems worth solving? Yelling about problems does nothing without staffing and accountability.

Just blindly handing off problems has no added value.

No, if the CEO tasks an executive with something that guy/gal should responsibly* think about the task, analyze it, break it down, and hand off "smaller" chunks to underlings.

And smaller could even mean a lot more detailed but with better scoping. Fixed budget, concrete goals, etc.

* - said exec should/must ask the CEO about the priority of this task, what other tasks will be demoted, is it possible, do they have enough budget, resources, timeframe, etc.

This is not a fantastic job, IMO

He’s complaining like he’s a user not trying to fix the dysfunctional communication directly.

The CEO should own making sure ownership is clear and minimizing opportunities for such problematic outcomes in the first place.

To me this reads like Bill wasn’t paying attention to his company until 2003. Sounds like they were poorly supervised and made a sprawling mess before he seemed interested in wondering what they were all up to.

He wasn't the CEO.

When he sent the email. Who was CEO when the sprawling mess he was complaining about was planned and implemented?

Wiki says: "Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000".

Isn't Microsoft the poster child for siloed groups?

Yup, that stood out to me too. I've seen this all too often too.

> Bill was doing a fantastic job here

Fantastic job of what? Building a company that has a typical type of organization, employees and incentives that this can happen at? It's like the CEO of Comcast (Brian Roberts) going into a Comcast store (in stealth; or phoning them) and then experiencing the frustration of a normal customer and the idiots they deal with.

There is ZERO reason a large company with resources can't make sure that things like this don't happen. They simply choose (and get rewarded) for looking at the big picture and not the small everyday details.

I wonder how many times Bill has been aggravated with his own operating system and then had to work hours and hours (with nobody to ask and a normal person's brain and no internet resources) to have to get out something in order to earn a living.

>There is ZERO reason a large company with resources can't make sure that things like this don't happen

The fallacy that if you have a lot of resources, you can make a good product is repeated over and over again and it's easy to see why. But the fact is that making high quality is hard, very hard. You can't just hire your way out of it. You can't just spend on tools or whatever. A small-ish team of talented people that work well together (that last part is important and not trivial at all) can accomplish amazing things. A dysfunctional team or organization can easily get stuck in a rut that is next to impossible to improve, no matter how many resources you throw at it.

> There is ZERO reason a large company with resources can't make sure that things like this don't happen

IMHO, large companies don’t always work in perfect, laser-focused speculation.

As a result lots of big companies have competing “pulls” — eg fiefdoms. Interference from investors. New CEOs who are still finding their feet. Lame duck CEOs. Regulatory distractions.

In theory a company would be laser focused on customer satisfaction and doing the best possible thing for their customers. In practice these gaps in BigCo attention gives nimble newcomers a chance to shine.

> As a result lots of big companies have competing “pulls” — eg fiefdoms.

Exactly. Why? Because they suck plain and simple. My wife (a highly paid and educated professional) just wasted 3 hours today trying to get a simple new cable box installed from Verizon. Earlier she tried to have Best Buy do a simple TV pickup and ended up having to cut her losses cancel Best Buy and just get 800junk to pick it up (at a higher cost). There is ZERO reason large companies can't get things like that right that they do over and over and over again every day.

I say this as someone who has actually operated and run a small company and had employees. Yes it was not a large corporation. But it had way less resources available and very generally not even enough people to get done what needed to get done. Don't let anyone tell you different. It's the same thing people have had shoved down their throats ever since (ironically) 1981 when the IBM PC came out along with that crap that Microsoft put on it. 'It's not us it's you'. People just buy that thinking and that is why companies get away with what they do. (There is also consumers and businesses making poor choices and not wanting to pay for quality for sure).

Corporations are officially aligned with the interests of shareholders, and unofficially aligned with the interests of management, many of whom are more interested in turf wars and power plays than in doing their jobs.

Customers come at the bottom of that list.

In a worker-hostile culture, employees at all levels can easily become passive aggressive towards customers, because they're caught between bullying by management, which they have no control over, and pushback from angry customers, which they also have no control over.

MS has always operated like this. It's a huge machine that spends far more energy on internal politics, PR and impression management, and status games than it does on producing solid, reliable, beautifully crafted products. Personally my experience of MS products has been that the absolute best products are ok, I guess, while the worst have been so incompetently made they've been barely usable.

Apple has begun to operate like this. Jobs was User Number 1 and could push back on UX he didn't like. He wasn't always right, and he couldn't cover everything, but his influence was always there.

Cook is more of an autocrat and I strongly suspect he has an unconscious passive aggressive stance towards users. Apple has consistently produced high-profile user frustrations during his tenure - Maps, keyboard-gate, the reluctance to support pro users, Catalina, general software quality, among others - and there's been no move to make structural and cultural changes that could make future mistakes less likely.

Meanwhile the share price is doing just fine.

The original iPad UI would have been just a blown up iPhone UI without any accordances to the larger screen if Jobs had of had is way. There was push back from other developers at Apple. This came out in some of the Debug podcast’s interviews with former Apple employees.

Also don’t forget that all of the pre iCloud service disasters happen under SJ including MobileMe.

Apple moved away from “Pro users” under Jobs. It was clear that he even said before he came back to Apple that if he was in charge he would “milk the Mac for all its worth and move on to the next big thing”.

Until you cannot remember (and frankly, don’t care about) the names of all your employees any more, I don’t think you can call something a large company.

There is theoretically zero reason why a large company should be so inefficient, but practically that’s always what happens.

It’s a company that made a lot of millionaires has had its share of problems.

2003 wasn’t a good time for Microsoft, but events like internet worms made them double down on security and made it a stronger company.

[OP - I posted the tweet]

If you liked this, you might like my collection of business memos here. https://sriramk.com/memos

I remember this particular memo very well as I was at Microsoft at the time and it felt so unfair to see the reaction to what you expect any good CEO to do.

Can you provide an alternate link to the PDF that works worldwide? Some people are getting a 451 error.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120227011332/https://blog.seat...

Are the folks getting 451 in Europe? Might be GDPR...

Nah, I am in Europe and I have no problem viewing the PDF.

It's pretty much exclusively GDPR.

I'm really enjoying this memo collection. One suggestion for future memos you might add: it would be great if each document had a date.

I love this! I've been wanting a page just like this - a lettersofnote but for business.

Good times. I remember when this was part of the court case.

Sounds like what we need is for Tim Cook to try to use iOS 13 and lose access to one of his favorite apps by upgrading to Catalina, and then to get a crumb or something into his keyboard.

...or try using Google Docs in Safari on iOS 13 with a text editor in split view.

Two blinking cursors and no easy way to choose which window is active. To enter text in the Google Doc after using my text editor, I have to tap the URL bar twice, dismiss the suggestions, and then it's active.

Given that my iPad is my only computer, this release has been really rough. It's getting there, and I'm sure with time it will only get better.

Just wish it was more reliable and less buggy: I've used iPads constantly since the very first one, but this has had me looking at laptops and Microsoft's Surface...

I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure any fix for your workflow would break the workflow of many people. Both windows being active seems like the entire selling-point of splitscreen, right? (I don't have an iPad so I'm just guessing). The right solution is probably a Google Docs app that is able to be aware of other instances of itself.

You couldn’t even use Google Sheets in Safari well before iOS 13. I don’t know about Google Docs.

I'd love for him to use a Mac with two monitors and wrestle with his dock constantly switching from one to the other with no way to lock the dock and keep sane window setups.

I’m not sure “the dock moves to the display where your mouse has hit the bottom of the screen” is quite the problem you’re making it out to be, compared with the founder of Microsoft calling their pride and joy a dumpster fire of usability.

I use a rMBP 2015 with two monitors (in addition to the laptop monitor) daily. One over HDMI and the second via Thunderbolt/DisplayPort to HDMI (so two cables into the rMBP).

I’ve never had this issue? What is your setup? I always thought it was funny that in a Mac you can’t set your default monitor, but I’ve never run into the issue you are describing.

I use a rMBP 2016 with one additional monitor over Thunderbolt to HDMI. I constantly have the same issue as OP.

Shouldn't you, though? Display arrangement lets you relocate the menu bar—imo that's as good a signal as any about which monitor should be the default.

Do you have "Displays have separate spaces" unchecked in mission control settings?

Click on one monitor and then move mouse to another monitor and move mouse down to the edge (without clicking anywhere). Of all alien, obscure and mind bogingly bizzare ux behaviors this would be probably in my top 5.

I would hope that my dock would be on whichever screen my mouse is, so I don't have to drag my mouse across a large monitor to get way over there to get to the trash.

What you term "alien, obscure, and mind-bogglingly bizarre" is the only way I think should work.

2003 was the pinnacle of MS Office for me. The introduction of the ‘Ribbon of Confusion’ in 2007 around the time of the adoption of 16:9 screens was appalling. The ribbon was welded to the top of the screen leaving a letterbox sized area for your documents. It was like using a toolbar encrusted IE.

This all happened when Adobe were demonstrating excellent UI design in their pro apps with pallets that could be docked or moved about as required. It was like MS looked at InDesign and Photoshop and simply didn’t understand what they were copying, which imho typifies many MS design decisions.

A huge amount of user research went into the original ribbon. However, it looks like they decided that no further research was needed and just started moving everything into the ribbons without any thinking whatsoever.

Using the new ribbon version of office I found out that document properties could only be inspected by clicking on a golden orb and going into a menu called "Publish". Similarly most other less-often used features became impossible to find. I've refused to use office for any substantial document ever since. I can only assume that this research was targeted at new users and not existing users.

Microsoft destroyed their old blogs and with them a lot of knowledge they contained.

Thankfully, Internet Archive preserved the "Why the new UI" series of posts: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...

Relevant parts: by Office 2003 they had 250 top-level menu items and 50 toolbars (Part V), and this was becoming unmanageable. In Office 2003 they started collecting info on how people are using Office: About 1.3 billion sessions since shipping Office 2003, over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days (Part VI).

I won't quote the rest because it's a very good series of articles.

Similarly for editing charts in excel which became a multi-click hell. Whereas in 2000/XP office you could quickly rearrange series in charts by dragging and enable chart elements at a click now it’s a tedious unintuitive affair.

I haven’t used Excel for any serious work since.

I’d be curious to see some of that research. Some technical tools I use have migrated to ribbon UIs. Matlab is one example and it’s utterly broken. Tiling the main IDE window beside a text editor (a standard way of using matlab) on a 15” MBP results in many of the ribbon sections turning into big empty gray spaces requiring yet another click into a cascading shitshow. Fortunately I rarely need to use anything in there as the wasn’t enough there to warrant a ribbon in the first place.

Another example is CAD software like Solidworks, but that’s a masterclass in awful UI design all on its own.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21363156

The word "research" implies "science", but to me is valid only if you go all the way, and publish the methods and the data for peer review. Until then my take is, someone had a bunch of opinions and didn't allow users to keep the old menu.

I think that's a very narrow view of research. There are many private for profit entities that don't publish their findings because they'd rather capitalize on their findings.

And it was a completely different UI, forcing all the users to relearn most of the functionality. I suspect that such a user-hostile change was done in order to achieve a patentable UI, something that LibreOffice and others would not be able to copy.

LibreOffice was still OpenOffice at the time, but that does sound like a plausible theory.

It isn't stopping Libre though... https://www.reallinuxuser.com/how-to-enable-the-tabbed-ribbo...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/04/17/the-size...

I’d really like to see those images.

In older office I could move toolbars around. If I could have moved the ribbon to be vertically arranged on the right side (hence my Adobe comments) it would have been at least usable.

EDIT: via the Wayback machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20060423092652/http://officeblog...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060423092624/http://officeblog...

My point regarding 16:9 screens stands. Many people would have migrated to cheap 16:9 panels (this was certainly the case for the cheap Dells most of the PhD students in my lab were given). The 97 UI has a lot of unused space To the right where you could drag the lower toolbar and expand as needed. You could also customise it and place your frequently used buttons where you wanted them. I always had super/subscripts in easy reach.

The inflexibility of the ribbon to and the endless clicking about at least helped me move away from Microsoft and embrace *nix.

It's unfortunate that when they have migrated so many of these older Microsoft blogs around, so many of the images and links have rotted.

I very rarely use Windows now (at the time this happened I was working with it M-F doing support) - I’m not convinced it’s any better now is it? I downloaded an “IETester” image from Microsoft to confirm behaviour of a clients site from a Windows PC - it literally spent more time installing updates and rebooting than I did either downloading the entire vm image file or actually testing the thing I wanted to test.

How fucking convoluted is Windows that every single update that can only install via a reboot, then suddenly produces more such updates?

How on earth does anyone still use this on a daily basis?

From a user's perspective, there are signs it's getting better. The most noticeable is that applications that were unloved for years, those low-priority no-group-wants-to-own-them ones like the terminal and Notepad, are finally getting attention. It feels like in the past development was much more design-by-committee with little room for anyone to actually fix broken or substandard things.

The biggest problem seems to be that there is insufficient pushback against bloat. E.g., the calculator is 10MB and takes a quarter second to load on a very fast PC. Lots of little things like that. The whole push for the a new, separate mobile/tablet/Metro environment was a major mistake. It's left a schism between the extant and greenfield worlds. This is exemplified by the disaster of what are effectively _two_ control panels, each of which can only control half of the OS's settings.

This isn't the typical user experience if you power on your computer more than once every few months.

No, but it is a typical experience for many developers that need to test our versions of IE.

Why do Microsoft think it is OK to waste our time when we are validating against their software?

Why is MS making the work developers and testers need to do so hard and wasteful?

At the time I was using Windows, and downloaded these VMs, and I swore black and blue at Microsoft for the very same thing GP noticed.

And the VMs expire after six months, so you have to go through the whole process again if you are not careful - arrgh.

I use the Microsoft IE vm's to do IE testing in virtualbox and I have never had to install an update.

You seem to be assuming that behavior is a daily occurrence for most users?

End users are not updating dependencies or even installing that much new software on a weekly basis, let alone daily.

Also a lot of software wants to reboot for no reason other than “just to be sure”. That’s hardly a Windows issue when a random developer includes behavior that isn’t needed.

None of the rebooting or installing I’m talking about was new or third party software.

Just whatever the hell they call windows update now.

I have an Ubuntu dedicated server. I reboot it every Sunday, yet there is rarely a week where on Friday I don't see this when SSHing in due to auto-updates:

    0 packages can be updated.
    0 updates are security updates.


    *** System restart required ***

    Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS

    Linux ubuntu 4.15.0-34-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 27 15:21:48 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

In 99% of cases this is efficiently mean that your kernel been upgraded, but it's doesn't affect system usability at all and rarely affect security. I have servers that been continuously upgraded over years, never got single reboot and still function properly.

As far as I know, Linux doesn't support library hotswapping any more than Windows does, so if you have a security update in libc for example, you can either manually restart all programs which use it, or reboot the system. Unless you do one of these, you don't have the security patch up and running, right?

Yes it does but differently: the library is placed on disk and the symlink pointing to the new version is updates. Services depending on this library are restarted. Ssh handles this exceptionally well in that it keeps running sessions open and new sessions use the new library. There is alsof no risk of having locks on files during installation: Unix keeps a gidsen copy of a file until the last process closes it. All in all, almost no reboots required unless a critical kernel bug is found that can be exploited remotely.

Still, each individual process using an updated library needs to be restarted for the update to take effect.

The way I see it, Linux does give you much more flexibility in how to deal with these restarts; and the ability to overwrite libraries on disk guarantees you don't get into the horrible Windows update-restart-update-restart cycles: you only ever require one restart at most.

However, there are also risks. For one, if you don't restart long-running processes which use updated shared libraries your system may be at risk; also, even if the update was not a vulnerability fix, it is technically possible for processes that communicate through a shared library to misbehave if they have different versions (one using the old library with an old data-structure for example).

This probably doesn't happen so much in Linux, where IPC is commonly done through text streams, but may be a much bigger problem on Windows if you update some COM library for example, reducing the usefullness of no-restart updates.

This is just an Ubuntu-ism. Linux doesn't require a reboot for anything other than kernel updates (and dbus in special cases).

On a side note it's a bad idea to run Ubuntu on a server in prod. Ubuntu is great for desktop and pretty trash for everything else. You'd be better off just running Debian, it's a lot more stable.

> Linux doesn't require a reboot for anything other than kernel updates

You can say the same about Windows updates.

Ubuntu has a new kernel update every 3 weeks, unless CVEs force sooner ones.

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kernel/StableReleaseCadence

Anyway, parent was saying that Windows is shit because it forces frequent updates. Ubuntu, which as you say it's the closest to a user friendly Linux dist does the same thing.

> Anyway, parent was saying that Windows is shit because it forces frequent updates. Ubuntu, which as you say it's the closest to a user friendly Linux dist does the same thing.

Windows will kill all your apps and reboot your machine in the middle of the night on a regular basis, unless you do some serious digging in the registry. (And they may have closed off even that by now.)

Is that "the same thing" as Ubuntu?

One thing that's different is that you'll be never forced to update on linux and you will never be forced to reboot, even on Ubuntu.

Not really. Linux Mint is more popular and is far more usable and stable in my experience. And it does not force updates.

In most cases this is exactly kernel updates that Ubuntu ask reboot for. You can just go check contents of this file to see what packages requested upgrade:

   /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs

You reboot your server every week? Whatever for?

Don't some updates set a "reboot required" flag?

Yes. My point is doing this all the time is, generally, a waste of time. I recommend turning off automatic updates, do it on a schedule. Weekly is too frequent. I have some servers I update yearly. That may be too long. At a previous startup, we had boxes that hadn't seen an update in 3+ years.

This is the real WTF of this subthread.

To make sure the process works?

Try out Ubuntu Livepatch. It can update the kernel without reboots, which is likely the cause of the message.

I installed Manjaro xfce recently and have been extremely impressed by how easy so many things are. I had been using gnome before that, Mac before that, and yet earlier Microsoft had not added telemetry so I used windows

Take a peek at KDE sometime; it's my favorite (and IMO most usable) DE of the pack.

Xfce is at the "light but jank" end of the pool. Try changing your password via Settings: you can't. Thunar, its file manager, is extremely basic. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, is even better than Windows's Explorer (you have split directory views, way more options, terminal integration, etc.), which always amazed me. How is this free GUI product made by a handful of volunteers exceed the thing this megacorporation has offered for decades?! Meanwhile, Gnome's file manager mimics Xfce's in basicness, and on top of that you can't use Dropbox or any other tray apps cuz kek B o l d D e s i g n(TM)(R).

I remember trying a linux desktop (same time frame I mentioned in my original comment, I had a department issued.. HP(?) and was sick of dealing with windows bullshit.

As a Novell shop I figured I'd give their desktop distro (effectively a customised SuSE from memory) a run a couple of times, and it used KDE. I seem to recall it was nicer than Gnome I'd used under RH a few years prior as a student, but felt much heavier on resource usage?

If by Kde you mean plasma, I found plasma is too modular: every part of every window is it’s own window that can be opened independently, making search and navigation very strange.

I like manjaros package management GUI, file manager (for the tree view), and generally good defaults for things (drop down terminal without needing to install guake)

Plasma definitely looks nicer and has better animations.

What about the Deepin desktop? I haven't tried it but many magazine sites say it's now the most polished. I'm fairly happy with i3, until I need to plug in additional screens...

Deepin's, elementaryOS's, and Pop!_OS's DEs look nice, but I've never tried 'em.

I generally avoid "niche", satellite distros/software because, well, you can't expect them to work as well as the their major competitors. Cinnamon IS a major DE and a stylistic competitor to KDE and Xfce, and it's quite nice too (but not offered as a Manjaro flavor, sadly).

>I'm fairly happy with i3, until I need to plug in additional screens...

I've never been brave or OPEN-MINDED enough to try those kinds of DEs... I welcome reinforcement of my biases; w-...what happens when you plug an additional screen in? :v

> what happens when you plug an additional screen in?

Absolutely nothing. I have to tyoe xrandr commands to make anything happen. I3 is strictly just a window manager. Unfortunately projects like Gnome solve these problems in a completely monolithic fashion, with no module or component that I use that just solves this problem.

I agree with your assessment, and as a daily Windows user I believe I can answer your question: because the alternatives are still somehow worse.

We clearly have different ideas of “worse”.

Perhaps with you, but looking at the market share he is mostly right.

To be fair, the market share being dominated by Windows has a lot to do with history and strategic deals Microsoft made with the OEM's. Vast majority of devices ship with Windows.

I tried a lot of different OS and I still prefer Windows.

Looking at declining market share of Mac, you are not correct.

Also, I don't see a lot of Linux on other people's Pc

...and Macs being expensive and Linux Desktop being an incoherent mess. Literally couldn't even beat Windows by giving the latter away.

I think that's being very unfair. Linux is not the same "incoherent mess" it was 10-20 years ago. There are some OEM's that ship with linux pre-installed, some of them are:

  - Dell
  - System76
  - Purism

> Literally couldn't even beat Windows by giving the latter away.

Beat in what sense?

That's merely your opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect reality. Especially when you don't support it with any facts. Fact is that the linux story and experience has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. That's why there are now OEM's that provide linux as an alternative to Windows, and there are some OEM's that target linux exclusively.

My daily driver is a Dell Latitude E7450 and everything worked out of the box with Manjaro linux. Driver/hardware support in linux these days is quite good.

> Fact is that the linux story and experience has improved dramatically over the past 10 years.

Yes, and it still sucks in a lot of the same ways it always has, and a few new ones (bloat, more incomprehensibly tangled base system than ever before...). Just yesterday I watched PCManFM, when told to copy a directory from an SMB share, copy the folder but none of its contents. This kind of basic functionality being completely overlooked is common, because there are about 100 implementations of anything and about 250 different distros combining those things in differently broken ways.

Oh, I hear you say, you shouldn't use those obscure distros, but a more polished one like Ubuntu. Only it was Ubuntu 19.04 with the latest updates.

This is without even getting into absolutely retarded design decisions like .desktop files.

I think it'd be cool if you provided any verifiable evidence/support at all to validate and support your silly assertions. I pointed out 3 well known OEM's that ship hardware with linux pre-installed, 2 of them target linux exclusively. This wouldn't be the case if there wasn't a market for it and if the experience was as bad as you make it out to be. You provided no rebuttal at all for this point and merely glazed over it.

Ubuntu doesn't even come with PCManFM, it comes with nautilus as the file manager. Are you quite sure you used Ubuntu? Here's a video showing you how to mount an SMB share, it is quiet straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPnVzyMBlAI

No operating system is fool proof. For vast number of users that don't have specific OS specific software requirements, Linux is a very viable alternative.

Here's someone's mom trying out and using linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGbZfR6Vec

I got many beginners to swap over to linux and they have been loving it. My mom and my grandmother both use linux.

Technically it was Lubuntu, but gvfs is still the backing component that handles SMB for PCManFM just as it does for Nautilus.

> Here's a video showing you how to mount an SMB share, it is quiet straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPnVzyMBlAI

This is so exactly the problem with the Linux Desktop evangelists. Someone says they have a problem with Linux, a bad experience, and your childish ego can't handle the concept of your fetishized OS not being perfect so you immediately assume the person talking is an idiot.

> No operating system is fool proof. For vast number of users that don't have specific OS specific software requirements, Linux is a very viable alternative.

Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying this for 20 motherfucking years and yet Linux still has pitiful desktop market share. What will it take for this community to wake up and realize that maybe people aren't retarded and have very legitimate reasons for not choosing your OS? Even people who like the idea of an Open Source Desktop OS?

> Here's someone's mom trying out and using linux

Could you try being less intentionally insulting maybe? This is such typical Linux Desktop evangelist garbage. It's an attempt at shame, but it backfires because what you're really saying is that Linux makes a great web kiosk and as long as you don't want to do anything interesting with it it will work fine.

Ultimately you don't have to listen to me. Look around you, your waifu Desktop OS is not being adopted by the masses, or even the non-masses. You've been telling the same comfort story to yourselves for 20 years about big bad Microsoft's exclusivity deals and Office lock in and all sorts of other nonsense while completely ignoring what people who might actually care what OS they use have been screaming at you about all the ways you've been doing it wrong.

This is why Linux will never be the majority Desktop OS of choice: because the community is full of people like you!

The vast majority of people don't "choose" Windows any more than they "choose" the particular brand of tyres that comes on their car.

Yes, and? When it comes to "what OS should I use on my computer", is it your assertion that I should use your definition instead of my own?

If so, you're probably a Linux Desktop evangelist.

Ah, when someone questions your assertion, jump to what you perceive as an insult against them.

(a) no, I'm not saying everyone should use the same thing, or that my "definition" of worse is more valid than yours. But consider this context: The original linked email is about a list of glaring usability failures in Windows, experienced by someone who should at the very least be very familiar with the product. I commented and asked if it's really any different now, with some of my own perceptions and experiences, to which you replied and confirmed that it's not better, but that you somehow believe the alternatives are worse. This follows on as:

(b) no, I'm not a Linux Desktop evangelist. I mean, I'd definitely use it before I use fucking Windows, but I also don't recommend it to people. Servers? Absolutely. Desktops? I honestly don't have recent enough personal experience with it to recommend it.

So, somehow you've managed to agree with the premise that Windows is a dumpster fire of usability bullshit, but then also suggested every alternative is worse, and made a baseless claim about both what I believe, and my likelihood of pushing others to adopt the same viewpoint.

Great job.

> and made a baseless claim about both what I believe, and my likelihood of pushing others to adopt the same viewpoint.

I did not. I said that if you believed your definition of "worse" was a better metric for me to choose my operating system than mine, then you were probably a Linux Desktop evangelist. A claim I make in full confidence because I've been having to put up with Linux Desktop evangelism for 20 motherfucking years now.

Thanks for the hourly reminder to praise GNU

It seems they haven’t really learned.

Granted, some aspects are better. You can get to the .NET download in about 10 seconds [1]. But, why can’t they make Visual C++ easy? What does it have to look like this?: [2]. Or this?: [3]. Why can’t they just have this?: [4]. Why does it need to be buried in a blog post, or a help article?

And then there’s the new Microsoft Terminal, which was only available in the Microsoft Store until people complained [5].

[1] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core

[2] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/jagbal/2017/09/04/where-...

[3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-...

[4] https://microsoft.com/download/visual-c

[5] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1386#issuecomme...

The Twitter screengrab is only showing part of the PDF. Be sure to click the link in the tweet for the full email chain.

451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons: Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

Archived copy without geo-restrictions:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120227011332/https://blog.seat...

I'm still able to download the PDF. (USA here)

The 451 is probably GDPR-related.

I am from Russia (sadly no GDPR here) and I get 451.

The lazy way of conforming to the GDPR

Recently I installed specific parts of MSVC, since I'm using SFML and for now they only deliver binaries for 2017. After all I might not have needed to use 2017 or a particular SDK, since there seem to be ABI compatibility now, but I discovered that too late.

So I used this vs intaller, and I discovered that the vs dev prompt did not set appropriate folder to use cl.exe and lib.exe because it might only do it for the latest SDK or toolset thing. I still managed to do what I wanted, but this is another one of those details.

I still enjoy using C++ though, but it seems way better than the old days, I think... Although I have to admit MSVC sometimes crash and restart on machines that don't have enough RAM (6GB). I wonder how Clion compares to MSVC... I hope clion will be cheaper in the future.

How is 6GB not enough for MSVC? Are you compiling a web browser or something?

Windows + background services probably takes 1-2 GB. devenv.exe probably takes up another gig (more if you use extensions).

I just use VSCode for the actual editing then build with cmake.exe from command line. VSCode's autocomplete and everything just work. Been a good experience.

Huh, that's the first time I've encountered a 451 (Unavailable For Legal Reasons) in the wild.

I signed up for the xbox game pass for pc (beta) today. After downloading the app I found that signing in to said app was completely broken. After some googling I found a workaround, if I sign in to a completely different app (xbox companion) that would also sign me in to the xbox game pass app.

Then I tried to download a game (The Outer Wilds). The download just sat at 0 bytes. I tried several things so I'm not positive what actually fixed it, but I think what did it is I located the folder it created for game downloads, which I did not even have permission to view, and forced an ownership change of the folder to my user.

Granted this is a beta but... not looking good for usability so far.

The sad thing is the xbox game pass has been working for PC for ages now and a year ago the process was simpler.

Software engineers should never be allowed anywhere near UX decisions on their own.At work, I'm often in a position,where I need to chose between 'easier for the end user(internal)' and 'easier for the business/manager/developer/whatever'. I try my best to advocate for users most of the time,even if it complicates some things on the implementation side of things. Most technical people,if allowed,would make things far more difficult than they need to be. Not sure what went wrong at MS, however they keep making it more and mote difficult with no apparent good reason. Even the documentation websites are so confusing,even Oracle starts looking good in comparison... I remember a discussion with my colleague,a BA, who argued that people should just fill in a few of those extra fields. Yes,I said, it's easy for you to say this,because you'll just pull a report on these fields,while the users will be doing this hundreds of times a week...

It really says something about the underlying issue that caused that, how the relevant managers devolve into I told you sos and ownership fights rather than getting in a room and leaving with a cohesive plan that their individual teams will execute on.

Last line... at the end:

I reboot every night.

That's actually not the last line!

It's only the last in the screen shot posted to twitter. The PDF contains more of the email, and it gets worse (if you can believe that).

The rest (it really gets worse)!

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

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

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.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

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?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback."

Still try to read the pdf (links are here on HN) as there are the reactions of the managers and it seems most... don't feel they have anything to do with all that.

I think he meant that he reboots his computer every night.

I wish he would do this again. Windows 10 is evolving into a major shitshow.

funny as I'm reading this I'm installing a bunch of dev apps using chocolatey. "choco install visualstudiocode -y" and it's done. I'm kind of surprised MS doesn't have an official way to do this, but it's better than MSDN dev downloads was back in the day. Or (shudder) the big binder of MSDN CDs.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/what-is-nuget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuGet

you can Register-PackageSource and then Install-Package which is basically what Chocolatey is.

In fact, to install chocolatey on your computer you can run "Install-Package -Name Chocolatey"

"Set-PackageSource -Name chocolatey -ProviderName chocolatey" makes Install-Package more useful, at which point you dont need chocolatey installed, as youve already added it as a repo that Install-Package can access. "Install-PackageProvider Chocolatey" also works. I find it all a little confusing which is which but oh well.

I suppose its up to you which is more pleasant to type "choco install xx -y" or "Install-Package -Name xx"

It's such an anachronism that Windows still needs to reboot to update itself

I use Ubuntu at work and have to update once every other week (at the most, sometimes every week for a stretch) to install updates.

While my Windows 10 at home hasn't been rebooted more than once a month (at the most, sometimes not for months at a stretch) over the last few years.

I'm sure a lot of people have their own counterexamples to either case.

I will say the Macs at work and home are the least hassle update-wise, but I don't use them heavily so I don't know how representative that is.

(shrug emoji), I guess ?

I’m on the latest MacBook and it has to reboot to update itself. So... what are you trying to say here?

Are former employees allowed to share emails like this?

The memo comes from court documents as part of the plaintiff's exhibit.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2543429/microsoft-sett...

I think this email thread went public at the time of the court case.

2004

Yet more relevant than ever

It's actually 2003:

  Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM

Windows always mostly cared about capturing the user with lock-in, not about usability.

The way Bill Gates writes in that e-mail doesn't seem as elegant as his published writings. And he calls it the "Add or remove programs place", what a non-techie way to describe it.

What "techie way" of describing the place in Windows that is labeled "Add or remove programs" would you accept?

appwiz.cpl ;)

Yes, I imagine an email doesn't undergo the same editorial scrutiny that a published work does. Also, I'm sure Bill is just as "techie" as the rest of us, despite how he refers to the Control Panel.

He wasn’t wrong about it being all crapped up.

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