Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker (2003)

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

I love that quote. Shows a common problem: devs, architects and managers designing platforms but never asking users how they want to use it. At least the end results indicate that.

Edit: a link with actual text of the email, not screenshots divided in Tweets..

https://web.archive.org/web/20210616012008/https://blog.seat...

Then, when someone dares to talk about "personas" or designing UIs to have actual users in mind, developers will rage that it's just bullshit, people playing with crayons instead of doing real work etc etc

I really doubt the issue is devs. If they don't want to tank their velocity they have to open an issue to fix such problems, which will stay open and never looked at.

I'm a dev. I have asked my product and design colleagues to use personas at my last two roles... and they don't. If I had more traction, I'd get the ads and marketing teams involved too so the models in the ads matched the personas we were designing around.

hashtag not all devs

hashtag n=1

Obviously it's not all devs, but there is a kind of dev that is exactly like that. Look at the comments on the KDE article [1] that was on the frontpage yesterday. Yes, Linux power-users are for sure a skewed and biased subset of devs BUT they do exist.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390655

Not much has changed since then. I just checked if MS has a download page. They do and it's https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/default.aspx

It's 1/3 surface ad, 1/3 category selection, 1/3 office 365 ad. The categories have a :hover effect, but you can't click the icon - only the text.

What are the top downloads offered?

    01 Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.7.7 Update
    02 Office Deployment Tool
    03 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB5002138) 64-Bit Edition
    04 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB4484211) 64-Bit Edition
    05 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB5002160) 64-Bit Edition

Given that the updates are close to enforced in the new versions, WTF is that page? The downloading part of that email applies just as well today as it did then.

And "Top download categories > Browsers" redirects you to IE download page which informs it is retired and you should go to Edge download page (which does not have anything to download, just a slideshow about Edge) :)

His tone, and that line, were very inspirational to me when I wrote this comment 6 years ago.

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

From spending too many hours a day using Microsoft products, I always thought Bill Gates was the enemy who made stuff was (personally) intent on making me go insane.

It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.

It was a bit of both. For example, while he wanted his stuff to run well on his systems, he preferred that the competitors products run significantly worse - or that they don't run at all.

Restarting daily and seemingly thinking that was reasonable.

Protip: restarting twice a day - once at start of day and once over lunch reduced the number of crashes and lost work by about 75%.

Also might have been holding it wrong.

Is this a windows v Mac thing? I can’t remember the last time I restarted (other than a software update). I can’t remember the last crash.

This was common when people were still running Win98SE. It wasn't needed on WinNT, Win2K, WinXP...

WinXP for me was a voluntary daily restart with the occasional involuntary restart + every 6-9 month reimage from blank to maintain a functional system.

Windows 10 is (relatively speaking) a dream, except for sleep and USB devices being a bit stupid sometimes. SSD's and way shorter boot time also makes the inevitable reboot to troubleshoot way less painful than the XP days.

You have to have worked at a large corporation to understand how every employee recognises a problem, agrees what the solution would be, but a combination of the dilution of responsibility, people moving around all the time, humongous frictions to making any change (endless meetings and committees, policies against moving any finger in the wrong way, processes requiring endless paperwork), and managers focusing on the priority the boss cares about at the expense of anything else, makes that not only a solution is not adopted but the company will keep sailing in the wrong direction until it the problem blows out.

At Microsoft I think the most spectacular example was Windows 8, where I understand everyone internally acknowledged it was a shit product, I heard the guy introducing windows 8 (and who ran the project) had been told he would be fired before he got on stage, but they still went ahead.

> It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.

Except that the results of his management don't say that at all. As far as I can tell nothing happened after this incident. A lot of Microsoft products still have terrible user experiences. Notable outliers are (kind of) the Office apps, especially for macOS (side note: impressive job of keeping backwards compatibility while also modernizing the UX!). Except for Teams, of course.

> Notable outliers are (kind of) the Office apps

We must be living in different realms. My work windows experience was entirely Windows + Outlook + Excel + Word. 2000-2010's was horrible - daily crashes, lost work even with auto save, odd formatting artifacts that would vanish with ye olde power off / power on debugging step.

> the results of his management

Maybe he was just a terrible manager, maybe the corporation was just dysfunctional (those two might be the same thing).

He may not be malicious, but has conditioned himself to accept bizarre troubleshooting steps as part of nominal Windows day-to-day usage. He said "I restart every day" as if this were a normal condition.

I recently started using Windows heavily and am shocked at how much software cannot survive multiple launches without restarting, USB devices just deciding they won't connect until you restart, etc. And don't get me started on Windows unable to put a computer to sleep without every program shitting the bed or just totally inconsistent behavior. I know I'm still getting used to the platform but I feel like Windows users are so traumatized by learning this system that they think other systems are equally belligerent and mentally taxing.

Just wait till you get to deal with developers and sysadmins of Windows boxes, who's first and usually only troubleshooting step is to reboot the system.

> He said "I restart every day" as if this were a normal condition.

To be fair, I think that 20 years ago most people shut down their computers when they weren't using them for more than a couple of hours, and most definitely at night. (Also, I believe that he meant that he "starts up" his computer every day, rather than "rebooting"/"restarting")

When this mail first came to light all I could think was "I wish my CEO was spending his Friday nights trying to use and understand our product, and providing critical feedback and ass-kickings as appropriate". Instead of driving our product (mobile Comms) to be better our senior management were using BlackBerries. Little says "walk away" to potential customers better than receiving mails that end with "Sent from my (competing device)"

It is absolutely mind blowing that windows update was thought to be the platform where you should download apps.

I guess it shouldn't really surprise me given that they are still making the same mistake 20 years later.

The store is complete crap from my point of view.

I think that kind of thing is the result of when you let developers do things that they think are clever instead of having designers thinking of UX and making those decisions.

Alternatively, you could have pirated it: Download a zip file, extract it, and run the installer inside.

Note that this is from Windows XP era, which nowadays people look with nostalgic glasses as "golden age" of Windows.

Oh yes, I remember it as the operating system with a toy style, that struggled to redraw windows under load or even move the mouse cursor. It was a huge difference compared to Mac OS X.

Yes, I remeber when a busy system would show a hour-glass mouse cursor to tell you it's busy, instead of just freezing and not reacting to any clicks. I also remember the title bar "this program is not responding". All gone now.

It's still better than Linux where keys gets "stuck" repeating and the mouse freezes too.

oh that’s the famous out-of-memory issue that nobody seems to care about and the stock reply is “buy more RAM”

To be fair linux at that time tended to hard freeze (as in cursor wouldn't move at all in X) if you ran out your disk quota

This just shows how bad the current shit-show has become if we prefer the shit-show from 20 years ago.

The current state is world's better than where it was, well, at least Win10 is. Win11 is still a mystery to me. Unsupported hardware etc.

I like how the use of nostalgic implied that it was better now.. Hahaha.

I really don't understand this. I guess it's just nostalgia?

When I ran Windows XP it was commonplace to just nuke your entire OS and re-install it every 6 to 9 months because it would just become unworkable otherwise.

Then you have the Windows XP update which you had to run 5 times, each with a reboot before you had all updates.

The fact you required a paid anti-virus to keep your system somewhat safe.

Toolbars. Fucking toolbars everywhere.

And let's not forget to rate the forgotten child: Windows XP 64bit.

Yeah no for me Windows 10 is so much better than any Windows before. It's the first one I would rate as acceptable.

Imagine his look if he tried other parts of Windows. They're absolute experts at making user hostile solutions. Either their UX people hate UX or their programmers (/programming managers) completely ignore them or do the opposite of what they say out of spite.

It really feels like they hate users.

This is pure comedy. Someone needs to put it into BG voice with AI, and make a clip, they'll get a lot of views.

Why? Does BG have a particularly interesting or comedic voice? How many people actually know what the guy sounds like.

I think it should be done in Gilbert Gottfried's voice.

It's funny in 2004 he mentioned that filesystem and registry are a mess. In Windows 11 they are an absolute mess. Thousands upon thousands of files/directories scattered all around the system.

Have you ever used Windows Vista?

It is still a mess nowadays, but it has been polished - deduplication for WinSxS, search bar for Registry.

One of the more annoying things with Windows for me is when when Windows Update fails stating that KBxyz failed to install. It is a nightmare to find the right version of the updater from Microsoft's website. In my case, the particular update didn't have a standalone updater. Instructions like the ones provided at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-download-and-install-wind... are a life saver, but how does an end user work their way through this?

Linux and macOS handle updates more gracefully.

And you wonder why the Mac really started to make inroads at about this time.

Thanks for sharing.

Has the situation improved? I don't know. Fortunately I only touch windows at work in order to launch VirtualBox

Has it improved in 20 years? Yeah.

Feels like windows has regressed since Windows 7. Usability wise its gotten way worse. I guess the top was windows 2000, XP, Vista(after some time) windows 7.

Microsoft actually shipped a windows version(win8) which had a touch first interface this got installed on millions(billions?) of desktop computers and nobody liked it. It's insane to think about.

> Feels like windows has regressed since Windows 7.

Ah, but fortunately Microsoft has realized this so there’s a way to access the control panel from the previous version. Every time you click “advanced” you get transported 1 window releases back in time, like a Russian doll. When in doubt, open minesweeper.

Windows 2000 was perfect. Super fast, minimal UI, rarely crashed.

Somewhat, yes. They at least have an embryo of a working store now for example. So for the things that microsoft package that do work through the store, that's at least quite functional.

> So for the things that microsoft package that do work through the store, that's at least quite functional.

However, they are shown among third-party apps, a lot of which are scams or low-quality. For all the flaws that Microsoft.com has, I wouldn't expect to find scams or malware on their downloads page.

I miss the days when Bill Gates was considered to be an absolute savage.

Title is missing "(2003)".

And in 2022 literally still a status quo ...

Link to the HTML page: https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Looking forward to read by 2040 how absolutely insane we were to share screenshots of text in a 2x2 layout with continuation in "replies" and login pop-ups on characters-constricted platforms.

I can tell you the same thing today.

Yes, but you also don't use smartphones so your opinions may not be mainstream quite yet

True that.

The character restricted platform is the main reason why people upload screenshots instead of text.

Posting URLs is also not the best idea because users need to leave the site/app to read it which not many people will do and some sites (fb) activeley push down these things in your feed.

It's like a Linus rant.

Not angry enough. I wonder what Steve Jobs would say.

You probably mean it in a negative sense. I am of the opinion that the downfall in usability and consistency of Windows 10+ is because there is no CEO at the top ranting about their experience and asking "what the hell went wrong for this to happen." I bet this is the same thing that is happening at Apple right now, with consistency starting to go downhill post Jobs.

The difference between mediocre and outstanding software is a Product Manager at the top that demands a certain level of quality in the final product, and doesn't accept any excuses, though they're willing to accept that a flawed process is what creates a flawed product.

I feel I have been repeating this idea in one way or another on this forum because it's still fringe and almost unheard of in the open-source world, if it were not for Torvalds and his uncompromising stance towards not breaking the user-space, ever, lest you face his wrath. There are not enough BDFL in software worth their name.

> You probably mean it in a negative sense.

No, I meant it in an entertaining sense.

Yeah, it seems idiotic. I guess I just don't quite "get" Twitter.

Don’t forget about the three(!) independent spinners while the site is loading.

Definitely ironic to read a usability rant 20 years later in this way.

Really. Atrocious loading times with spinners in three places, a pop-up advertising the Twitter app,a pop-up asking me to log in via Google, a pop-up regarding cookies, all fighting each other, and then I can maybe see the actual tweet at some point. Musk isn't killing this fast enough.

I swear one of these days I'm finally going to install Firefox nightly and jump through all those hoops so I can install any extension I want on mobile, and not just the 5 curated ones from Mozilla, so I can have the redirector to send me to a nitter instance instead.

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