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Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

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Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#121

Post by lostlogin »

wqtz wrote: post #100

I feel like if he said, I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed. At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.…

> I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.

I’d be ducking away from an issue that had just got someone fired.

Tangent: The irony in Microsoft making a product called ‘Teams’. It works about as well as their teamwork.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#122

Post by hylaride »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #75
knollimar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't know what it means to "own website issues"" made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?

From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.

For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals.

Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#124

Post by Dansvidania »

rolandog wrote: post #101
Dansvidania wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they pivoted a few times since then in terms of what their core product is, though :D

Indeed... Their core product seems to be being an unavoidable blackhole of money where they are taxing all of society by virtue of inserting themselves into our lives by having acquired or squashed other competitors

I agree, but I think their hold on the monopoly is starting to erode, what with the gaming on linux momentum and all.

What else is there that _needs_ windows?

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#125

Post by rc1 »

adrian_b wrote: post #105
rc1 wrote: post #13

Anyway to know this is real?

As it says at the end, this was evidence at the class action suit "Comes v. Microsoft Corp.", which was eventually settled by Microsoft by paying $180 million, after many years of litigation.

Thank you! I didn’t know what it was. The downvotes suggest I should have.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#127

Post by akoculu »

Just last week, I was trying to sign up to Microsoft.com and got stuck in the captcha step. They have famously dysfunctional captcha system, people can't sign up to Microsoft and complain a lot about it online, and yet, it's not fixed.

Microsoft always built dysfunctional software. They were never good at this. Hotmail was an unusable product, it was so painful to use it and Gmail took over the entire market in a year. Nobody ever said: "oh, I miss X about Hotmail"

Windows products were also same. They were so easy to break, you'd need to format the disk and re-install once a month, otherwise it'd keep breaking all the time.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#128

Post by js2 »

Tangent, but my favorite "Bill Gates does X" story is "Bill Gates Plays Petals Around the Rose":

https://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm

https://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-j.htm

HN has never found it very interesting though:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=petals+around+the+rose

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#129

Post by akoculu »

Flux159 wrote: post #39

Even today Microsoft can't get their shit together on a decent user experience. Tried to use Azure since I needed to code sign a binary on Github. My two previous accounts setup on Azure errored out with obscure errors and there was no way to fix them. I had to create a new account just to sign up for Azure Artifact Signing (which is now waiting for Microsoft to approve - no updates in a week). I don't know how anyon…

at least you managed to sign up to MS. Many people can't even get that done in MS websites.
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