Sometimes I can't help but wonder if Gates saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship to preserve his legacy.
If he did, it's surprising he didn't go years before this.
Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
61–70 of 91 posts
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#62Why is this surprising? Bill Gates doesn't need to fanboi Microsoft internally; it's his company. He needs to be as critical as possible so the outside world gets a good product. It's his company that looks bad when things like this happen, so of course he is going to "rant" about it. It's his job.
Not surprising at all. You reap what you sow.
This is a company built upon bullying, intimidation, skirting the law, and violating ethical practices in order to shove its monopoly down anyone and everyone's throat. Anything except technical excellence.
So the rest of us suffer until the market finds its way around the lawyers and corrects itself (as it usually does).
This memo is simply a representation of all the B.S. that must have been going on for years between sowing the seeds of arrogance and reaping the harvest of crap.
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#63My favorite lines: "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. But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the p…
I also liked that one. But it also reminded me that I often use synaptic on Debian when I am looking for applications on my system which is rather similar to the "add/remove software" on Windows. The only place where I can do a sane search (including searching summaries what the applications actually do) and get an additional good categorization of the software. Funny how the package manager on both sytems seems to have better information about your applications than for example the typical startup menu (which is usually a mess after a few months - also on both systems).
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#64"""Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?""" Haha % uname -a Darwin Galactica.local 9.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.3.0: Fri May 23 00:49:16 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.5.18~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 % uptime 19:08 up 23 days, 6 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.87 1.02 1.07
-sh-3.00$ uptime
08:36:21 up 254 days, 10:28, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yesterday I spent some time online looking for a new laptop. I would like 14'', thin-and-light, and long battery life. I needed no more than five minutes to know all the offer from Apple. Other companies like Sony or Asus are extremely annoying with dozens of "lines" of very similar products with confusing names. I didn't look at HP, but I remember it was weird, because they kept the Compaq brand so it was even worse…
Lenovo's T series is probably the best one in that class. Linux is well supported. Not sure that it is a better buy than a Macbook though.
Fujitsu has some good, relatively inexpensive ultralights. I use whatever their 13.3 screen model is. Anything bigger is tough to use in an airplane/cram in a bag.
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#66It is kind of suprising how much disconnected he is with the flagship product of his company. He should have been able to be a lot more specific and detalied about what was going on, and not complain in generic terms "downloaded more stuff, this popup here, that thing there". It seems that back then he was not involved at all with the development of windows. It feels like comming from somebody that just started using…
I'm not so sure the level of detail is an indication that he's disconnected with his own company's products. The vibe I got was that he was trying to describe to the people who build this stuff what it's actually like to be an end user. I think the whole point is that they're the ones who are disconnected and completely out of touch. I seriously doubt that Bill Gates _needs_ to download and buy Movie Maker from microsoft.com like a customer would.
Even if he is the one who is totally disconnected I thought all of his points were excellent and a perfectly accurate illustration of how Windows has gone wrong. What I'm left wondering is what's been going on there the past several years. If these critiques by Gates are something new it's a real shame for Microsoft that he didn't start sooner. If his statement that it's his job to do this every day is accurate then I'd say they have even bigger problems.
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#67Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I've got no interest in counting them all up, but I thought Apple would have more products than Microsoft.
Well, think about... Windows Vista. Ultimate, Home Premium, Home Basic, Business, Enterprise, Lite. Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office Professional, Microsoft Office Standard, Office Small Business, Office Ultimate, Office Enterprise, Office Professional Plus. Microsoft Mouse, Microsoft Intellimouse, Microsoft intellimouse Explorer, Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Bluetooth, Microsoft Intellimouse Presenter. Windows…
Apple products you're forgetting include: iMac, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, all the iPods (four types, I'm not gonna list 'em all), the iPhone, various keyboards, Apple TV, Time Capsule, Quicktime, iLife, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut, Mac OS X Server (if we're going to count every permutation of the OS separately), Logic Express, GarageBand, Shake, WebObjects, and probably a bunch more.
It's true that Microsoft has more products in each category, but Apple (as a hardware/software/consumer electronics) company covers more categories.
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#69Its good that these sort of issues are exposed, even if by Bill. The scary thing is that MS QA does not pick this stuff up. As more of this stuff gets exposed this will hopefully make MS work harder. And as Apple is becoming a REAL contender, hopefully MS will pull their head out of their ass.
MS's QA is oriented towards making sure that individual pieces function, not that the right thing happens. Their aim is 100% automated unit testing... but nobody ever tests that doing something is intuitive. The UX folks do, but that doesn't mean they get their way.
MS having unusable products is like Exxon not selling fuel. Very quickly users will abandon windows in favor of Apple if it gets too bad.
Re: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same thought when I read this. I used to turn off my computer every night, until I switched from Windows (98) to Linux. In grad school, my roommate and I had uptime contests with our Linux boxes, which he won with something like 6 months of uptime. The most common causes of lost uptime were electrical power outages and moving apartments. Now, like you, I mainly run OS X, but it's on a laptop, which wreaks h…
I'm always amazed by this. Why would you keep your computer running if you're not using it? just for comparing lengths?
I let my computers sleep. But that still counts as uptime ;)