I often wonder how CEOs and executives fail to notice how obviously broken their products are. This e-mail thread is quite illuminating. Most "work" in there is figuring out who will be blamed for it and why it shouldn't be your team.
Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
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Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#22Read it. Stopped halfway through thinking "Damn, this Mike Beckerman is a piece of work. Doesn't understand English grammar let alone software development." Looked him up... >Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok. Not surprising at all.
I've been around these execs outside of professional settings. All they care about is their status (money) and getting blowjobs from their aides. I am not exaggerating. They do not give a damn about how software should work. The execs with humble beginnings often get sucked into the culture and eventually exhibit the same characteristics as the others within 5-10 years. As they say, dopamine is a hell of a drug.
Every good business is one MBA away from enshittification.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#232023 post, recounting an incident from 2003.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#24[dead]
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#25Read it. Stopped halfway through thinking "Damn, this Mike Beckerman is a piece of work. Doesn't understand English grammar let alone software development." Looked him up... >Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok. Not surprising at all.
That must be a different Michael Beckerman. This one was an executive at Microsoft in 2002...
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#26My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.
This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#27Read the whole thing and all I saw was zero accountability, zero ownership and zero consequences.
That’s how great products die or become a nightmare. Every team keeps on passing the ball to other team and nothing gets fixed or done or improved.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#28The reason why Apple won is Steve Jobs cared about quality and was an asshole about it and the inertia from that after his death has not entirely decayed yet.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#29Just as an aside, that Amir Majidimehr taking part of the conversation is Amir of audiosciencereview.com fame :)
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#30> So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated
Based on my interactions with Microsoft support, it makes me feel a little better that I get the same treatment as the CEO.