Flame from Bill Gates Re: Windows Usability | Hacker News Reader

Flame from Bill Gates Re: Windows Usability

antitrust.slated.org

195 pointssnikeris93 comments

Dear Bing,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, that doesn't mean that running Lion on a PC is out of the question: http://lifehacker.com/5823837/how-do-i-upgrade-my-hackintosh...

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

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

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

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

Right... but they wanted a Mac anyway. :)

I'm currently failing to install Lion, since it gets as far as the restart stage, and (from what I can gather) is attempting to create a recovery partition, fails, and thus doesn't install.

All workarounds I've seen so far seem to indicate that I need an external device of >13G which must be formatted in the process (making me exceptionally nervous about trying to repartition my current USB external backup disk)

So yeah, it's still not perfect.

Apologies for the tangent, but I had that and needed to drop into single user mode and do a fsck to fix some errors.

You realize this email discussion dates from 2003, right?

And you do realize his argument is base on how bing works in 2011, right?

That was the point I was making. Bill Gates' initial problem was finding the download on Microsoft's site. Eight years later, the same problem persists.

I'm not knocking Microsoft for the sake of knocking Microsoft. I really do wish they would make their site more usable. I used to call their link system NASCAR navigation - looking for information, you keep clicking promising links only to end up back at the page you started on. Now when I search MSDN, I just use the Google custom search [1].

[1] http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=001706605492879182808%3Ayr...

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

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

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

Usability is hard. This superficially simple example crosses many products / teams (being Microsoft, we are talking about 100s of people involved). A small startup has the same challenges because your engineers build features, not user experiences. It takes a great product manager to advocate effectively for the user.

It's not at all hard, it's a philosophical problem. They simply believe their concerns are more important than the users. It's not hard or complicated, they're just philosophicaly fools because they believe what they want matters. It doesn't, and they can't wrap their heads around that. It doesn't at all when customers suffer because all they get depends on customers getting what they need. It's a simple concept that they don't understand because they are deluded into thinking they are worth more, by virtue of their status and positions. A delusion that they spend most of their energy defending. You simply cannot serve two masters, and this is Capitalism at it's finest.

I don't think you can blame capitalism for this. Apple does this stuff right, and they make money.

[aside: I paid $15 for iMovie 11 the other day, and I think I entered my App store password to confirm purchase, iMovie dropped into my dock, done.]

Continuing, it's more likely that MS execs, managers, just have the wrong incentives. I have never worked at MS, but I'd imagine you get promoted for having people under you, for shipping software, for meeting deadlines. None of these things directly address user experience.

Is there even a high level user experience person at Microsoft, outside of say, XBox, which obviously does have some serious UX work in it?

edit: for q mark.

Surely the fundamental problem here is more that Microsoft have never had to learn how to keep users happy. They had their monopoly handed to them on a silver platter and their technology was only good enough that users didn't abandon them (not that they had a lot of other practical options).

Apple had to do this stuff right, because if they don't a Mac would be just like Windows with a different logo and nobody would bother. The necessity of having a better UX was baked into the company ten years ago. Microsoft seem to be doing better with Win7, but I'm not sure they've really learnt that lesson yet.

You hit what I think is a critical point but with some anti-Microsoft bias.

My view is that Microsoft itself simplified the PC experience quite well for a set of users during the 80s and early 90s. With DOS and Windows 3.11.

During this time, a lot of people who were not "computer experts" at that time were able get things done with the computer. Even if it was "painful" to do something (all those commands in the command prompt), people would do it beacuse they will achieve some result.

Then the Monopoly became evident, and around the time of Windows 95 Microsoft realized they did not need to make things simple to users, but instead users had to learn how to use their tools. This is what you get right; Microsoft did not need to do anything between Windows 95 and Windows XP to get money. People needed to use Microsoft products because other people used them and if you dared to use Qpro, Apple products or anything else, then your workflow was not compatible with the general workflow of everybody else.

This is were Apple (I guess, Steve Jobs) got it right. They looked all the "paper cuts" [c.f. Canonical] that people thought were "normal" (remember the "normal" BSOD?) and focused on doing products where people did not have to go through all those issues. More importantly, they learnt how to do that. How to detect those "paper cuts" and how to fix them.

In the 20 years that Microsoft monopoly served them, they lost the ability to do that. They lost the ability to know how to make things easier for the users; I suppose all that got mixed within the convoluted bureaucracy within the company. You actually can see some of that in the way Bill's mail is treated: The concerned people do not "get it", what is wrong with Bill's scenario; they just open a "ticket" to fix the Media player problem... and surely a download of Media Player appeared on Microsoft's front webpage next Monday. But they did not attack the underlying problem.

I agree with you that with Windows 7 Microsoft is doing better. But as you, I also think that they still have not "got" the talent they lost a long time ago of being able to make things easier.

I always thought that it would have been better (from the point of view of technology progress) if Microsoft had split in the 3 sub-companies when they were sued back in the day. That might have helped to streamline the bureaucratic processes within the company.

Philosophically, you can blame Capitalism, at least in the abstract. Every man for himself is why they have these problems, and that is the heart of Capitalism. Because they don't think of society and really only their own rewards, they are oblivious to the experience of their users. Yes, Capitalism is the very essence of the problem, at least our current version of it, which is why the groups with the greatest amount of capital are generally the worst at concern for customers.

When Windows was better than the competition, it was winning in the marketplace. Now Google and Apple are better than the competition, so they are winning in the marketplace.

Capitalism is working just fine.

Unlike Microsoft, by contrast, the DMV has no competition and cannot go bankrupt. That's where things start to get very bad.

It is working, its just far, far from what its users really need. Just like Windows. All about a better user experience and we as leaders are missing the point. Nobody is setting a useful standard, nobody with power is looking at it from the bottom up, which is what separates Apple from Ms when it comes to UI and UX. The president is just like Bill in this situation, essentially considered the leader but without any power to changed flawed ideology.

> When Windows was better than the competition, it was winning in the marketplace. Now Google and Apple are better than the competition, so they are winning in the marketplace.

hm??? this contains at least as much factual errors or imprecisions so gross it could mean anything that there are sentences. That plus the whole MS Windows vs Google comparison makes no sense at all.

Chrome is growing at the expense of IE, Android is crushing Windows Phone, Google Docs forced Windows Office to go online, Google Desktop search is better than Windows Desktop search, and Gmail has taken share from Hotmail and Outlook.

And now Chromebooks at $28/user/month are poised to take a ton of Redmond's other revenue:

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-could-lo...

So tell me again that the comparison makes "no sense at all"?

I know usability is hard, but this is just an install. It's not like he's actually up to making a movie, yet.

The user "stories" (are these even stories?) should be:

1 - Bill types "movie maker" or "moviemaker" into a search box (any search box) in the Microsoft website.

2 - A button / link that says "Download Microsoft Movie Maker!" appears on the first page (preferably the first link).

3 - Bill clicks the link.

4 - A dialogue box on Bill's computer say "Do you really want install Microsoft Movie Maker?"

5 - A dialogue box asks "Do you want to make shortcuts on the desktop / start menu?".

6 - A dialogue box asks "Do you want to launch Microsoft Movie Maker now?".

That's 6 steps. People should know what they have to do, if they are getting in the way of those steps.

Nope, actually, it should present you with a choice between a normal install and a customized install, so that people who don't want to make any fiddly little choices about links and start menu crap just have the thing install itself and then run the program, getting you down to about 4 steps.

That's four steps too many, and you've missed the step where the user chooses that Movie Maker is the specific app they want. It should be:

1 - Bill searches for "video editing" or similar

2 - Bill runs an app he selects from the result list

Everything else is pandering to technical details. Advanced options can be presented as a right-click menu on the result list.

Ubuntu is pretty close to that...

Maybe it is. Windows isn't, and I can't see it getting there.

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

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

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

This mail is from 3 years after Gates stepped down as CEO. I think you are trying to use this to reaffirm your personal beliefs about MSFT, rather than use this form your beliefs about the company. You seem to think that because MSFT made Gates a ton of money, the company should be perfect. The fact that you find it bizarre for a founder to be actively involved in his company's products and working to highlight areas needing improvement is, frankley, bizarre.

"This mail is from 3 years after Gates stepped down as CEO."

Questions: Was microsoft very different 3 years earlier?

Wasn't Gates still very involved with MSFT at that time?

Come on now.

> products that bring intense pain to it users

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

> as frustrated as anyone else about the problem

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

> is completely powerless to stop it

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

> is drowning in money coming from his mistakes

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

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

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

I do not think anyone is suggesting that he goes in and fixed it himself, but it is up to him to ensure there are processes in place to make sure this does not happen.

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

I hate it when people give Bill Gates and Microsoft credit for whole computer and IT advancements.

We are having this conversation because many many people worked hard on these technologies. Microsoft and Bill Gates are only one of them.

Of course, DOS and Windows accerelated wider adoption of personal computers, but even if they havent, someone other company would've done so.

>>but even if they havent, someone other company would've done so.

This is a hypothetical statement and there are n different ways our world could have diverged. Better not to speculate on how things could have moved forward.

In any case, it didn't look it was a natural progression of technology before Windows became popular as the preferred OS for a personal computer.

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

>> but even if they havent, someone other company would've done so.

> Better not to speculate on how things could have moved forward.

It is impossible not to speculate. The GGP is just speculating in the opposite direction as the GP. We simply must back our speculation with reasons. Personally, I like the GP's reasoning.

> I hate it when people give Bill Gates and Microsoft credit for whole computer and IT advancements.

Or maybe the original poster was saying this because he was typing his response on a Windows computer.

It's easy to make claims about branches of history that never occurred. It seems like an absurd scenario where computers weren't widely adopted, but it's not really so absurd if you think about it.

Clicked you up but:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs.

There may be some sort of selection bias here: Mac users are much more sensitive to polish than Windows (or Linux) devs - they have chosen a Mac over a Dell and paid more for it. I am happy with console apps, as long as they do what I need them to, and my Atom-based Acer netbook supplies about 99% of my computing needs.

> Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good.

Don't you feel like you're ignoring some very important variables by saying that? For example: Cocoa vs Windows Forms, Cocoa vs WPF, etc?

No, because I'm actually saying the reverse of what you think I'm saying. I believe Cocoa tends to operate below the level of typical Windows APIs -- low enough to have complete control over the UX but high enough to make things that ought to be easy, easy.

Windows tends to be friendly for lousy developers (typical systems integrators, of whom I have a great deal of experience). At a very low level it doesn't make much of a difference -- good coders will deal with the hand they are given.

I think you can make a case for selection bias in that Mac development (the old Mac OS toolbox now called "Carbon" and Cocoa today) is too difficult for hacks which filters out a lot of the crap that people who can cobble together junk using Visual Basic or whatever. (There used to be a website devoted to really awful Mac apps, most of which were built using Realbasic, but lousy Realbasic apps are cross-platform :-) )

With the exception of Keynote, Numbers and Pages have not behaved well for me when given large documents. Numbers in particular struggled with datasets that Excel would handle very easily. I would rather use Google docs than bother with Pages / Numbers.

I'm certainly no advocate of Numbers. Pages I use for pretty demanding stuff and I've had no problems. Word has problems editing a simple letter, but it certainly may scale to very large documents better than Pages -- but if you're doing that kind of thing, I'd recommend Framemaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"within the industry"

Ah yes. The industry.

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

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

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

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

Compiler != IDE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Gates very much was CEO when the registry and the filesystem were "crapped up" and made "unusable".

The Xbox is a piece of shite from a hardware standpoint. It comes with an insanely huge power brick that could be a medium-power game console in its own right given its size and weight; the hard disk clip doesn't work and of course there's Mr. RROD.

Why did it win? The same reason why anything from Microsoft wins: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

"intense pain to its users" "completely powerless" "flailing about" "drowning in money coming from his mistakes" "slow-motion train wreck"

You my friend, have a way with words. Comments like this make me sad that a "lol" response is not an option.

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

You're focusing on the negative and forgetting the positive. Yes, Windows can be counter-intuitive, but it has enabled millions of people in the world to be more productive. This is why most of the planet is using Windows.

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

A lot of companies would love to be able to live for that long (and by the way, it's more like 30+ years).

Yes, you will be right at some point in the future, Microsoft will fall. It doesn't seem to be in the near future, though, considering their recent blow out quarters.

I'm a Mac user myself, but come on, let's be fair here.

>Yes, Windows can be counter-intuitive, but it has enabled millions of people in the world to be more productive. This is why most of the planet is using Windows.

Personal computers have enabled people to be productive, not Windows. And, the reason most people use Windows is largely for reasons other than the merits of the software.

This is an easy one tho.

Just look at the thread on this email and you'll get the sense of the typical org finger pointing downward spiral.

But look at how Jobs handles something similar: "When you're the janitor, reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."

I'll leave it at that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No inter-group fighting, or conflicting priorities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hadn't noticed that those [scribd] things were links! I thought it just meant that the link was to a PDF.

Not for me: http://i.imgur.com/Cw8Rx.jpg

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

Are you actually getting some message about 'phorm', or are you just getting redirected to slated.org like I am?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a now legendary email thread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, it doesn't.

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

Threaded mail clients FTW.

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

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

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

If the recipient has, say, a powerful, thread-capable mail client, they can open the mbox, read it, filter it, search it, expand it, and collapse it in ways that aren't possible with the horribly lossy Microsoft Outlook format.

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

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

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

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

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

Previous discussion:

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

My favorite part from Bill:

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

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

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

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

Bill should have put his vps in line:

http://nullisnull.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-work-with-me.h...

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

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

Poor Dave...

My dear Bill, how have you been this century?

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

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

Something like XPLite but created by Microsoft!

Mr. Throwaway, your most obedient.

What the hell are you talking about?

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

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

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