Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker

techemails.com

125 pointssshroot46 comments

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

If you ever feel downcast about your skills, remember someone had the temerity to say this to Bill Gates.

I think Bill was being sarcastic

I think just paraphrased the response he got.

> 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.

This made me laugh out loud

It's tragic his leadership was so ineffective.

I’m quite shocked Bill Gates’ email was so nice. Can you imagine if it had been Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs? Maybe that explains how it got that way.

I'm much more shocked about how poorly-written Bill's email is. He sounds like he's almost illiterate. Any random post here on HN is far better written and more understandable. How did this guy get where he is now?

Anyway, his account sounds like a typical Windows user experience, especially from that time. I guess that shows the power of having a monopoly: users are forced to put up with it, no matter how awful it is.

No one reads long emails. I similarly noticed that people don't miss things in my email when I format them like texts or discord messages. He wasn't writing up technical requirements for Moviemaker, he was just sharing his experiences. I also suspect that most people that are as busy as him mainly use their phone to access email. I know 90% of the time I've heard back from, who I consider, busy people, there was a "sent from my iphone" signature in the email footer.

Not sure the phone part was really true in 2003.

Maybe he was using his iPAQ, though

This is pretty par for the course and the quality of writing largely makes sense, especially if you’re sending to an internal team of people you work with somewhat regularly.

He just sent a pretty complex and in-depth walk thru of a terrible experience in probably about 15 or minutes or less (not including the time it took to actually go through this process).

You didn't understand what he was trying to communicate?

There were a few places where the text didn't even parse, probably because of missing words.

Normally, when I see writing that bad (like on a discussion forum like this one), I just dismiss the author and skip the comment. A mistake here or there is understandable, but this was too much.

Well, then today you (I hope) learned that by doing that you may be skipping on the likes of Bill Gates, who is very much a person who can provide really interesting insights in many topics.

For me, what's important is the message not the format, syntax or any errors it contains.

We're humans and we're.not.9erfect.

> There were a few places where the text didn't even parse,

I suspect that to be some artifact of the way the email has been stored/archived over the years.

Sorta looks like the email was line wrapped to 100 chars, then line wrapped again to 95, and whatever words fell off a line were deleted.

Some of the typos and spurious spaces make me wonder if this was originally a printed/scanned/bitmap document (since it comes from court filings) and then was later OCR’d back again for publishing online.

But that said, it’s no more poorly written than some of my emails would be if I’m tapping them out in a state of frustration, as he seems to be!

I felt like the original email had some embedded screenshots, that are now missing. Switching from the website issue to the file system doesn’t make too much sense as written, but if you had a screenshot of the file explorer in—between the text makes some sense.

I have this heuristic I use to determine whether someone is worth listening to, or whether I should ignore them. Look, it rejects Bill Gates! I’m very smart.

Look, everyone uses heuristics to assess the world. Turns out yours is somewhat broken. Might want to update it.

I'm much more shocked about how poorly-thought midoridensha's comment is. He sounds like he's almost illiterate. Any random discussion here on HN is far better written and more considerate. How did this guy get where he is now?

That's what you sound like. They are discussing technical user experience, not engaging in some Oxford debate. His articulation is good enough for the message to pass through.

I think Bill was a lot more aggressive in early Microsoft days. By this point (email dated 2003), Bill had already stepped down as CEO 3 years prior (2000).

Is there an example of similar feedback but form Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs, to compare?

Linus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw

Linus is cocky and arrogant, I mean rightfully so but still....

I would like to see a follow up... "Bill Gates tries to install Windows 11 with a local account".

Step 1) Install Windows 10

Step 2) Wait for it to automatically upgrade when you least expect it.

Ah. A stochastic approach.

It approaches 100% asymptotically, until one day it happens

Windows 10 converges to Windows 11 almost surely.

The only way I made that work is physically disconnecting the router from the power plug

A little irrelevant, but I smirked while reading this from one of the last email excerpts

> But, if you want nothing revolutionary and want to band-aid (which is fine and understandable) then I agree with your plan to give it to Dave.

> These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

Almost forgot what paths on Windows look like lol

It’s a lot to type and there are spaces.

I am glad they switched to C:\Users\billg\Pictures

Missed opportunity to call it C:\Home\billg\Pictures (going for slash instead of backslash is too ambitious).

They wanted to make sure every third party product could handle long paths and spaces in paths, otherwise it would have been C:\Users.

The replies say it all.

I feel like exactly none of the people in the replies were able to understand the problem outside of the boundaries of their strictly delineated parcels of Microsoft they "own" :D

Oh they understood it, alright. That was just them jockeying to see who was going to have to deal with it.

Would have been even better if he had called their general tech support line for assistance

I have recently bought a new PC, without a DVD drive, naturally. And tried to re-install my copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

This copy is a "pre order" DVD set I got off of eBay simply because it was a good price, but it's bound to my "Microsoft Account", the same account used in my Windows 11 install.

I spent a good part of an hour trying to get this to install. The Microsoft store (also slow as **) didn't let me do it; it doesn't know of this edition nor my license. I eventually discovered that there is a web page somewhere deep on Microsoft.com, which has a download button, which (after three time-outs) opens a secret link into Microsoft Store which ONLY THEN lets me reinstall the product from the Microsoft Store.

So I must admit I read that with great joy. Yeah Bill ... Karma!

Somewhat unrelated: The icing on the cake, naturally, is that even a full digital install of the DVD edition of MS Flight Sim "requires" the DVD #1 to be in the drive. But since people don't HAVE physical DVD drives in 2020 and upwards, I use an ISO image. You can in fact make an ISO image with just a few tiny files from DVD #1 without the huge data files, that's sufficient.

You'd think "oh yeah, copy protection" but there is NOTHING about this DVD image that is akin to any copy protection. It just wants these files as part of a drive (or mounted image), which I'm sure they could even detect the difference, as I'm even mounting it with built-in Windows Explorer functionality these days, without special software). I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers.

Somewhat more unrelated: Microsoft still owes me 20 bucks. I once bought a PC with a Windows XP to Vista upgrade coupon. The web site let me select Vista 64 bit, so I gave that a try. Alas, the XP shipped with the PC was 32 bit, so they simply never carried out the order. I called their customer support, where I was nearly chastised in very broken, hard to understand language for selecting the 64 bit version from the drop-down menu. They never carried out the order, and didn't refund my twenty bucks for S&H. Thank God for alternative software distribution methods back then that rhyme with "Pi rate day".

Totally unrelated (really going of on a tangent of story telling now):

Another company that still owes me roughly 20 bucks is Dell. I once ordered a server from them, and discovered that they had a catalog error. Adding the biggest, meanest CPU would not add money to the bill, but subtract several thousand dollars from the total. So using that trick, for some giggles, I configured a server to be around 20 bucks total and ordered it. I pre-paid the total amount. I didn't expect to get the server, of course, but I expected them to contact me and refund my money. Never heard from them.

> Why they would...

It's just tech debt, no particular reason

> I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers.

This was very common back in the day. It’s a form of DRM: it prevents you from playing the game on two computers at once.

It used to be common to make your life easier (even if you weren’t sharing the disc) by downloading an unofficial ‘no-cd’ patch, which was a patched game executable that omitted the ‘disc present’ check.

You're absolutely right!

Man, I used to download so many no-cd patches back in the days, but lumped it all in with "real" copy protection in my mind.

+2 for the trip down memory lane. -1 because now I need to drink before noon to forget about the horrors of fiddling with CD-ROM based games and their silly schemes. So yeah, +1 :)

This has the same energy as the opening of Joe Armstrong's (RIP, Joe) talk, The Mess We're In: https://youtu.be/lKXe3HUG2l4

soooo he's got a copy of windows that he never updates, and he's surprised when the latest versions of official microsoft software doesn't run on it?

I mean - I'm not saying that's a good experience, or that it's one I am or would be happy about, but... it's not super reassuring to learn that Bill Gates is about as windows-literate as my own mother. :\

Glad to see nothing has changed, how pathetic

Sounds a lot like downloading stuff from HP, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com