If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products.<p>It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to <i>never allow them to ship it in the first place</i>.
This made me think a bit about Bill Gates and Microsoft and Everything. People really hate on Bill Gates because of Microsoft and their products, but after seeing this email you get to see that he's as angry as any other user, and even more because he knows all of this will fall back to him. His email portrays not only anger, but some kind of impotence. It's impressive how big companies lose touch with what they're doing. Most software I use lately comes from small companies, they have this dedication and attention to detail that only comes from when you're directly involved with your product. Business is a weird world.
I've seen this before, but it's worth a read again. Gates said when this first came out that writing emails like this was pretty much his job. He's not the only one--from the stories you read, it sounds like half of Steve Jobs' job is to be a good critic. Of course, Apple doesn't release much until <i>after</i> Steve Jobs criticizes it.
The fact that Gates regularly attempted to eat Microsoft's dog food (alas he couldn't get the can open in this case) is encouraging; but ultimately it doesn't seem to have helped much.
Seriously though, is all of this fixed in Windows 7, or are people just hyping that up because it sucks alot less than any previous Windows iterations?<p>I don't think I've _ever_ seen a process that convoluted, and I've been using Linux OSes since _before_ the advent of dependency-resolvers like yum and apt (i.e, the bad old days of "RPM hell").
I tried to download it - their new simple solution is to include it as part of Windows Live.<p>So I want a simple movie editor to clip 5secs off the beginning of a home movie - BUT to do this I have to sign up for an MS specific hotmail account, create a windows passport (I thought they had abandoned that?) get Windows messenger, windows photo viewer and be included in a whole bunch of MS specific social websites.<p>So I found a torrent of Movie maker 2.6 for XP - it works perfectly on Win7.
This is a great reminder (to me) that software UI should be designed around how many pieces of information it needs from the user, not how many things it needs to do.
I think by far the most telling part of this was this quote:<p>"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"<p>No wonder he has no idea how horrible Windows is. He resets it every day.
Although amusing, this is an example of poor management IMO.<p>It comes across as the sort of email you would write while criticizing/mocking a competitors product that you were powerless to change.<p>There's no demand for improvement, or accountability for making that happen. No wondering if this small experience is indicative of other problems. He's just "disappointed".
After recently working with Microsoft on a project for 8 months all I can say is the way their product team offices are set up is quite bad. The user experience designers and visual designers are sitting hallways down from the developers and program managers. This is not how it should be. All stakeholders in the application design process should be near each other. Open work spaces do wonders for communication and collaboration, which in turn affects product design.
Ok, this is kind of old shoe, but let's discuss the Windows usability a bit.<p>I have to endure some amount of XP and 7 on a regular basis, so I have some understanding on how to work with them (well, mostly how to set up or correct things).<p>Those that say that Windows 7 is so much better.. well, in some sense. I admittedly has better optics. And it crashes less.<p>Administrative tasks got more tiresome though, compared to XP you have to wade through more windows to get to a specific configuration point. That gets very irksome if you want to perform some configuration for a dozen PC's. (Enough to make it very repetitive, too little that automation would make much sense, especially considering the abysmal automation tools Windows comes with <i>cough</i>shell<i>cough</i>). Other critical points are software management systems (lack of) and general disability in the usability sector.<p>Granted, learning to cope with a Linux system is somewhat more challenging, but once you are into it, it's really much less bother to do things, no matter the scale.<p>Microsoft still has a long way to go just to reach the current status. Maybe they will manage, as they seem to be very apt at keeping the stranglehold on the market.<p>And I will keep avoiding them as much as I can.
I remember reading this when it first came out, at a time when I was still on Windows. I remember thinking, "Finally! Microsoft products are bound to improve after a letter like that from Gates."<p>Two years later, nothing about XP had changed, and I moved to OS X, just in time to avoid Vista...<p>So, while the letter is, itself, excellent, I'm not sure how much it did to help out Windows in the long run. (Maybe Windows 7 represents a change.)
My biggest takeway from this email is to write short paragraph s when writing a long email. Seems pretty simple but I had never thought about this. Write 2-3 lines per paragraph.
Guys, has uncle Bill mellowed with age! In the past meeting with him about MS products meant keeping a f<i></i>* score:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html</a><p>Now, he's just "quite disappointed".
The first time I read it I was in disbelief. I actually checked if the mail was fake or true, turns out it's true.<p>The second time I read it I actually laughed.
Most of the time you don't need some authority person's opinion to realize that something is a total mess. Your own experience is enough. That is what this email is all about - users will create their own opinion very quickly.<p>The another example is Java development. Everyone who run Maven2 build process (say to build clojure-contrib) will be amazed by a tons of a strange and useless messages, repeated downloads of what seems the same files (but, different minor version numbers) to unknown location. That process will took something like 10 minutes on 3G connection, while you have absolutely no idea what's going on (OK, I can figure out that it is a process of a recursive downloading and building dependencies, and because people don't care about migration to the latest stable versions, it will download half of internet.)<p>This alone tells me what is really happening in a Java world better than all Sun's brainwashing altogether. ^_^<p>btw, <i>sudo apt-get install maven2</i> downloaded another 70Mb of shit (in case JDK is already installed). 70Mb for a apt+make replacement? Compressed Linux kernel sources are less in size.