I'm sure MSFT used this as a learning lesson and things got better since then, right?.......
Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
81–90 of 298 posts
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#82The 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.
You don't have to be an asshole to get better quality work. But it's a great way to chase off talented staff that don't need to work with assholes.
It’s also a great way to retain talent that care about working with like minded people.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#83They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :) It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues. An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'. That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him. 1000% actually. He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink). Like a cars co…
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience. I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
Becuase it was a typical MS user experience. MS was shipping their software on 25+ install floppies. Having an install fail on floppy 19 was a nightmare. Getting a fax modem that shipped with the PC to function could also be a problem MS would blame the vendor and the vendor blamed MS.
It’s not like his moviemaker experience was a rare occurrence.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#84They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :) It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues. An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'. That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him. 1000% actually. He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink). Like a cars co…
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience. I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#85My 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 the…
This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count
1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#86They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :) It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues. An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'. That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him. 1000% actually. He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink). Like a cars co…
As for Jobs, I bought a Mac Mini last summer. I wanted to use iMovie to clip the edges off of a movie file. I clipped the edges, but was unable to discover how to save the resulting file, and gave up. Microsoft's Movie Maker has a menu item to save a file. I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
Jobs has been dead for a long time.
And it shows.
He had bad ideas too but was much better at holding the line on good UI (unless the bad idea was his). We haven’t had that in a long time.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#87They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :) It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues. An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'. That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him. 1000% actually. He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink). Like a cars co…
As for Jobs, I bought a Mac Mini last summer. I wanted to use iMovie to clip the edges off of a movie file. I clipped the edges, but was unable to discover how to save the resulting file, and gave up. Microsoft's Movie Maker has a menu item to save a file. I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#88They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :) It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues. An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'. That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him. 1000% actually. He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink). Like a cars co…
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience. I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
I have struggle to understand how someone could come to that conclusion, maybe I missed something?
The email is a 'rant'.
It's a 'list of broken stuff'.
It's not:
1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken
2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome
3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address
4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.
5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.
It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.
It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.
This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.
A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#89I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.
The logical outcome of an escalation like this is that there is no single threaded leader for this user experience, the org charts are wrong, and one or more sr. leaders are culpable. But no one wants to hear that.
Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
#90This is a good and bit surprising one. I have a hard time believing the CEO of Palantir has this many generational points I agree with, Zuck too, but I do. https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...
> For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days.
(Nick Clegg)
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.