Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker
techemails.com
techemails.com
His position and influence still has enough weight to make a poor interaction with him a career limiting event.
I think that's what OP was referring to, he's still the guy that founded Microsoft. He's as figurative and influential as any boss I'd ever hope to meet.
> I don't know what it means to "own website issues"
I think he was wary of what it actually meant to the product. For instance, imagine we have a problem with the authentication on an internal component, and then, someone from quality control states “don’t worry, I’ll own the authentication issues”. What does that even mean? Is QA going to solve the issue? How? Are you going to oversee the way other team(s) solve the issue?
That’s how I interpreted it.
Owning an issue means you're the one that answers those questions.
AND, I can vouch for the pain and suffering that "Marketing" can place on tech teams and end product fails.... heck MS , to this day, cloud "EXPERTS" can not explain their pricing model, or just chose not to.
First they tried tiles. Then they tried to remove it. Then they tried to add websearch.
Mine now so bad that if I hit windows key and start typing it picks up from about the 4th character types and ofc Then searches for the wrong thing. Literally unusable for the most basic of task for an OS - launching programs
If it wasn’t for a couple of windows only usage cases I’d have dumped this so fast
The list of banned companies is starting to get prohibitively long.
I had a bunch of SD cards so I thought a download would be fine. Except it wasn't a download. It was "download our windows/Mac os exclusive software that refuses to run in a VM and use that to flash an SD card".
I went back and read through the site. Nowhere did it say "requires xyz". And since it was sold as a subscription I could not get a refund. Next season I will sell my plotter and buy a brand that respects it's customers.
> This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
(But it was GB of stuff.)
> Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.
(But it was more than 10 minutes multiple times.)
> Then it told me to reboot my machine.
(Probably six reboots after 5 software updates.)
I installed Linux, now that Proton means all my games work anyway.
With a stable disto, everything just works and keeps up to date without bothering the user.
Why anyone uses Windows today is a mystery to me. My guess is force of habit and lock-inn effects.
There isn't a dumpster rotten enough for ME, Vista, or 8.
Vista was pretty good after SP2, so was Windows 8.1. In fact I find 8.1 (with StartIsBack installed) much better than the adware mess that's Windows 10.
In any case the issues got much worse with 10 and now even worse with 11. The os itself is not good but it is what it is. Now the invasive trash happening lately is truly bad and should be enough to move people away. Seems there is not much of an effect so they will keep pushing.
To Microsoft's credit, they have made some improvements in some areas but the same old DNA is on display when you use e.g. Teams.
Microsoft is just plain bad at Product.
Trying to sign in to email? Let me take 10 seconds redirecting you across 5 different domains
While it is amazing that windows did actually continue to go backwards in usability with Vista, Tiles, in-OS advertising, etc, windows was never great at usability in the sense of Bill's complaints here.
Microsoft at this point already had a decade-long track record of dumping alphaware on the market from Windows Me, Windows 1.x/2.x, Office packages, backoffice, Outlook, half-baked features, smorgasborg of apis on apis on apis, security and viruses everywhere (didn't start with the internet, folks).
They are an entrenched monopoly, and all that matters is the money coming in and the monopoly keeping its power. Bill is PERFECTLY aware of Microsoft's monopoly power, it was his goal since the MSDOS days.
So this entire post by BillG is just a big disingenuous lie. Bill is trying to whitewash his hands of building a terrible monopolistic handicap he has foisted on computing and the world now that he'd gone into semi-retirement as him being some white knight savior of endusers everywhere.
It is total bullshit. He knows very well why all this doesn't work and the company is functioning exactly as he designed it. He never gave a shit about quality except in the bare minimum.
So yeah, let's yuck up the one time the hundred billionaire was bored and played end user and got a little taste of his own medicine. But lets not pretend this was any real impediment, he could pay some person to do whatever he needed thousands of times over in the time it took for him to write the emails.
The point of the post is "look, I know we make shit software at Microsoft, but cmon people, THIS shitty? We need to look like we are trying a little".
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-balla...