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).
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] nhebb|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Michiel|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] tripzilch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Hov|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sriramk|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] fraserharris|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] equalarrow|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lurker14|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nxn|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acabal|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] res0nat0r|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] sorbus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __rkaup__|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmonkeyz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watmough|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vedantk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shenglong|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluesmoon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtkd|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] keyle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indrax|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snikeris|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriramk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kia|14 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227045
[+] [-] jpdoctor|14 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] geon|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iradik|14 years ago|reply
http://nullisnull.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-work-with-me.h...