201–210 of 299 posts
The fact he did is probably responsible for a lot of issues with Windows installing and problems. Normalizing a reboot as a common thing.
I also suspect the fact he keeps re-iterating that the download was fast is because the teams have been using slow internet as an excuse for code speed problems.
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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.
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But it didn’t. And Microsoft is worth $3.5 trillion. So maybe actually everyone should take a leaf out of the Microsoft book. When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
That says more about the US software industry than anything else. You “win” by being hostile to consumers while you lawyer up and bribe the powers that be.
Microsoft's moat continues to be in the number of enterprise contracts that have already been signed.
It's easy for someone to get access to Copilot Copilot because their large company already has an Azure billing agreement set up somewhere.
Read 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.
But it didn’t. And Microsoft is worth $3.5 trillion. So maybe actually everyone should take a leaf out of the Microsoft book. When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
The book is simply: acquire monopoly, wield power ruthlessly to keep it. Everything else is orthogonal.
The 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.
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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, comp…
When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
Culture flows from the top. Bill doesn’t take responsibility in his email, so he’s teaching everyone downstream to pass the buck like he does.
His role was pretty much the biggest shareholder having direct access to some of the company's top executives.
In 2002 after spending my first 30 minutes on windows XP (previously 98, 95 and 3.11 user) I realized that Microsoft will never improve their UX. Every new os will be different, but not better. So I left then and there and never looked back, after some distro tourism I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and use it even now.
I abandoned Windows almost entirely for macOS and server Linux before 11 was forced onto everyone.
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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…
I think the point here might be that what created this mess in the first place is the structure of the organisation, not the execs that are temporarily embodying it. It's actually quite clear from the follow-ups, there is nobody who can claim responsibility even for the website, never mind any vision or philosophy spanning multiple media and products.
Maybe Gates simply wasn't in the position of doing anything else at that time, or maybe his rant was a clever way to expose this exact problem. But it's pretty obvious that "will someone fix the website" doesn't sound like someone analysing and addressing the root cause of the issue. (However, it's also perfectly possible that this email is just a small part of a bigger conversation at different levels- inform the responsible and patch the immediate issue while more high level analysis and planning takes place elsewhere, informally).
Coaching as in: reminding people that this matters and encouraging them to care outside the strict lines of their task/scope.
Testing as in: who's capable of hearing it, taking it to heart, and driving the necessary change. And who's not.
Not evident in this thread but interesting how it impacted BillG's overall perspective on the people on the field and the impact of it on their careers with him.