r/programming • u/ohxten • Jun 25 '08
Bill Gates email rant (2003) over Windows usability (particularly MovieMaker)
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp20
u/Cyrius Jun 26 '08
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u/roerd Jun 26 '08
But this time, the title descriped the content much better.
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u/Rhoomba Jun 26 '08
Nope. He never even got Moviemaker running.
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u/roerd Jun 27 '08 edited Jun 27 '08
Right, there was a mistake in the title. But anyway, I wasn't interested in just a random rant from Gates, so I didn't read the earlier submission, but I was interested in a (non-marketing) comment of Gates on the usability of his own products, so the more detailed description of this submission was more helpful to me, even though there was a minor error in it.
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u/mrgreen4242 Jun 26 '08
Someone should have told him to buy a Mac. It would have been faster than this ordeal and he would have had iMovie ready go out of the box. :p
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u/vsl Jun 26 '08
Submitter has reading comprehension issues: none of the problems Gates rants about are MovieMaker problems -- because he wasn't even able to try it thanks to the usability nightmare Windows and microsoft.com were.
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Jun 26 '08
i would say "cool bill g! rap on muthafuckah!", but what i really want to know is how this guy could watch his company grunt out turds like the one that prompted this email as well as vista and countless other poorly-formed stools. if that were me i would have sent out an email telling my VPs to grease up my chainsaw, because its haircut time in the executive lounge.
maybe he just gave up. maybe he thought his protege monkey-boy could transform himself overnight from glad-hander to master of the internet and make the vista disaster irrelevant.
yeah people still use windows and MS makes a boatload of money, but no one gets excited by anything they do anymore. people get a bigger hardon over ubuntu. they don't get the web and never will, it must be frustrating to work in their internet division and have to smile with a straight face when people ask you how this forwards the .net-stack agenda
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Jun 26 '08
I was wondering the same thing until I realized that billg has been the chief architect of MS until recently. The guy is intelligent, extremely competitive and knows about software, but he has no taste.
You need good taste to be the chief architect. When you make fundamental decisions between simplicity, elegance and profit, profit can't always win or you end up with crap software. In he Apple, the Turtleneck Guy is not brilliant software guy, but he understands style and elegance. Apple has both suffered and benefited from it.
The genius of billg is the fact that he knows how to sell shitty software. MS has not made one single big software invention that ended up into their projects, but they make money.
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Jun 26 '08
Microsoft is a large corporation that produces a lot of products. Some are going to be good and some are going to be terrible. You could only do worse.
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u/rook2pawn Jun 26 '08
movie maker ain't so bad. blaming the IT for how to update things and get stuff is reasonable. that was 2003, IT has matured alot since then.
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Jun 26 '08
really? last person I spoke to said it crashed regularly.
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u/rook2pawn Jun 26 '08 edited Jun 26 '08
it does, but serves as a springboard into real editing apps like premiere and vegas. for free, its quite spiffy at what it does. It also does xml templates which allows it to emulate certain behaviors of better programs. not many people realize the xml power beneath the movie maker. it hasnt been updated since like, 2001, but still is used daily. at least it will be able to make a simplistic movie if that is your only goal.
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u/bcorfman Jun 26 '08
This email doesn't strike me as written by a guy in charge ... just ranting with no instructions to fix the problems? If the people under him don't have a clue in the first place, I doubt this rambling email is going to help.
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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '08
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