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Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

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Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#161

Post by ususuhshs »

LennyWhiteJr wrote: post #85
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #26

My 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

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Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#162

Post by brianwawok »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #153
bestouff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fav is this : > Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found…

Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.

The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#163

Post by anal_reactor »

bestouff wrote: post #140
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #26

My 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…

My fav is this : > Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found…

I don't think I'll ever learn what the folder structure on Linux actually means

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#164

Post by dpark »

bluegatty wrote: post #143
dpark wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader. It is absolutely a user rant, but it's entirely appropriate for a leader to call out "this is not okay; this is a garbage experience". > who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy. That was the intent. "Fix this." This was an email to a bunch of execs who are capable of driving the actual fixes. If Gates needs to hand hold…

completely disagree 1) sending the org into a reactive frenzy on the minor issue when the structural issue is the problem - is bad. He's also pointing them at the symptom and not the cause. 2) 'taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome. Gates failed to…

> sending the org into a reactive frenzy

I don’t see an actual “reactive frenzy” here. I see that Gates started a conversation with the execs he believes are responsible for fixing this mess.

And again, these are execs being paid millions. They do not need to be coddled. You are acting as if Gates sent this to a bunch of junior engineers.

> ‘taking responsibility' is not 'vacuous corporate speak' - that's a terribly cynical view. It's literally the case - the leader takes respnosbility because they failed to set the conditions for the good outcome.

It’s absolutely vacuous to say 'I take responsibility for this' when you are telling a group of people they need to fix their shit.

Any CVP/EVP who fails at a job and then hears someone above them take responsibility for the failure knows they are about to be out of a job.

> The email implies that some underling is to blame which is bad framing.

If by underling you mean “highly paid executives” then sure. At some point people have to take responsibility for their jobs. This wasn’t a failure of some individual engineers. It was a collective failure of a group of executives to deliver a good experience.

> "hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught.." - that's literally his job

It’s literally not. That’s not what CEOs of large corporations do and Gates wasn’t even CEO at this time. He was in an advisory role. His job was literally to give feedback.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#166

Post by torginus »

bestouff wrote: post #140
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #26

My 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…

My fav is this : > Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found…

> I miss the days of simple executables.

One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.

Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.

Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,

Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.

These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#168

Post by whstl »

Twirrim wrote: post #120
georgemcbay wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My 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. And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gate…

There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies. In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyon…

Yeah. In context the answers make a lot of sense: it’s a dysfunctional company where ownership is non-existent and getting shit done is hard.

This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#169

Post by computerfriend »

anal_reactor wrote: post #163
bestouff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fav is this : > Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found…

I don't think I'll ever learn what the folder structure on Linux actually means

man hier (https://man.archlinux.org/man/hier.7.en).

Re: Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

#170

Post by tyffanypastecf »

basisword wrote: post #111
WalterBright wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a menu item. I believe it's File > Share > then you choose how (save to disk, email, export to photos app etc). File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it. The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Phot…

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