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Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft
s31523 writes "All of us have one time or another been completely frustrated by certain Windows usability issues, and in many cases our experiences have driven us over to Linux, or kept us there. For anyone that has ever been frustrated, you will be happy to know you aren't the only one. After reading this leaked Microsoft memo from Bill Gates back in 2003, you will surely have more insight into why Vista is a complete disaster due to Microsoft not learning anything from their experiences from XP."
Interestingly enough, Gates could have really improved his image during his tenure at Microsoft if he let emails like that "leak" out prior to stepping down. Instead, he gives keynotes about Microsoft and its "innovation."
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates -- from reading his writing or listening to him in the past, it really does not sound like his style. Also, "I reboot my computer ... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here.
Secondly, *if you can't do anything about this crap, then stop releasing it on time and FIX THE ISSUES* instead of releasing it to the world for millions of users to suffer under your monopoly. If your software sucks, fix the problems instead of using oppressive business practices to make *everybody* suffer.
Next, people complain about Linux usability? apt-get install mplayer k3b, etc? It is not harder, just different. In fact, having all of the software most people need in one place makes Linux easier for most people in many ways, specifically the way that possible-Bill rants about here.
Whenever I have listen to Gates talk or talked to him (many, many years ago now, in the late 90's) he seems more than aware of problems with his product, and I always get this vibe "I'm doing it because I can and it is really, really, really good for business and nobody is stopping me." If any of you were following the USDOJ against Microsoft way back before the Bush-era forgiveness, Microsoft was going to be split into three companies. When Bill was on the stand, he basically went "I don't remember" to every possibly incriminating statement, but was clearly aware of the bad ethics of what he was doing -- again, reading between the lines I always got the vibe of the triumphant geek saying "I'm not going to stop until you guys get your act together and make me stop."
He's not a stupid guy that way, and anybody that respects billionaires must ask themselves if they would do the same things with a company to maintain market share... Personally, I like to think I wouldn't, but that's why I am not a CEO.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
The funny thing is that on XP you still have to install Service Pack 2 to get MovieMaker. You can't just download it separately. Oh, well, you can order it on CD, too, I guess, but who wants to do that?
My blog
That's such a loaded and flamebait-ridden summary it's not even funny. Linux has plenty of usability issues, just like Windows - the quirks are just in different places.
Still, assuming the email is real of course, it's always nice to see the boss appreciate the problems from the regular user's perspective.
q: How do you make a billion dollars?
a: no matter who complains about how crappy the new version of your product is, force its purchase onto your captive audience anyhow. Yay!
stuff |
Is that some kind of cheesy Americanism? Sounds like oral sex.
The world is everything that is the case
That was my first thought when I read it, "Hoax". They don't provide any corroborating evidence at all that it's even close to legit. The style isn't at all like Gates, and the ignorance of certain aspects of the system makes it look like he was totally out of touch with what was going on in his own company.
I wonder if Twitter wrote this? Seems like his style.
Agreed. The only way this could have been Bill is if he was drunk and actively trying to sound like a patronizing jackass to his team.
Wow! I thought this was a joke until I read this part
When Seattle Pi recently asked Gates about the email, he replied, "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
I wish the managers where I work used our product from time to time, and maybe paid attention to how the software is written.
They seem to think that our main product is power point slides, which in the case of Mr (or is it Sir) Gates would probably be true.
Anyway good on him for paying attention to the job at hand.
Totally agree. Absolute fake.
more entertaining than the fake steve Jobs?
That is NOT Gate's writing style and there are several mistakes as well that point to someone other than gates wrote the letter.
"I go to microsoft.com they have a download center" HUH? Cince when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"? I have never seen it even down to the grunt level.
This "secret memo" is bunk. it is in no way Bill Gates' writing.
Except this was entered as evidence in the DoJ trial. It's real and on the books."All of us have one time or another been completely frustrated by certain Windows usability issues"
In fact, many have never encountered any Windows usability issues at all, never having tried it.
At the end of the piece, it says,
When Seattle Pi recently asked Gates about the email, he replied, "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mailMaybe the competent MS employees have long ago committed harakiri in shame, and whoever's left Just Don't Care...
The patronizing jackass part is accurate; what's missing him telling them to get it fixed by the end of the day. AFAIK, he doesn't do pointless whinges.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I didn't think it sounded much like him, either, but googling the subject turned up this (google cache version), which seems to make it more plausible ..
The way the email was written (a bunch of short paragraphs) makes me think it's a kind of running commentary of the process he was following to download the software to begin with. I occasionally make similar notes as well, which often don't resemble my writing style at all.
As for not knowing there's a download center, I think he's acting in the character of a typical user who just wants to download the software, not something many software developers tend to do these days whilst they shovel in useless gimmicks in websites that distract from the main purpose.
I'm kinda 50/50 on this one, on one hand the verbage is 5th grade level spout (high school level for us floridians). On the other hand, He could have just been so pissed of he just started brain dumping to the keyboard, but usually involves loss of spaces and punctuation. Maybe He just had a fight with melinda and was using MS as a punching bag. I changed my mind, i'm going 80/20 towards fake.
10 comments into the story and the server is slashdotted already
what is going on lately with these servers?
Coral link : http://gizmodo.com.nyud.net/5019516/classic-clips-bill-gates-chews-out-microsoft-over-xp
The originial article: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp
Here are the responses from within Microsoft: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf
The email is real. It's in the court documents from the Comes vs Microsoft case. You can find it in PX07199.pdf from http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000/
Two things may have happened here:
1) Gizmodo (or the Seattle Pi) is lying.
2) You see those three little dots? They mean "something was left out here". So
"There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail. That's my job."
Might have been:
""There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail critiquing my staff's work, but I don't write garbage like that piece of e-mail. That's my job." Or anything else that you can wedge between those two parts and still have it make some kind of sense.
Um, you realise he confirmed it personally as part of an interview, right? RTFA much?
"When Seattle Pi recently asked Gates about the email, he replied, "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail. That's my job." There was no mention as to whether or not Gates had time to take names."
Sam ty sig.
Ok, but it's what 5 years ago. Do you remember every single email you've ever sent?
And it's good that he does. If he founds Microsofts' site to have serious usability issues (as it does...) it's his job to point it out. He still works there, you know :)
The memo has some very valid points:
Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
This is spot on - WU is in need of a serious overhaul, IMHO. Linux distributions have solved this problem years ago, for example, and even a console-based install is way more painless than anything you can do on Windows to install software/updates.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night why should I reboot at that time?
Ditto. This is fault mainly of the Windows filesystem API, which forces you to reboot in order to sucessfuly replace shared libraries. But why the hell would you need to reboot just to install software? (Let alone rebooting every night...)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Yeah, amazingly it seems to be real and apparently comes from "the internal e-mails turned over in the antitrust suits against the company"
Here is the original article:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp
and here is the original (scanned) email thread from Gates:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf
Sure looks like a DoJ-entered piece of evidence.
Made you look. B-D.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
This is a rant about micrsoft.*com* - the website (and related update sites etc). It isn't about Microsoft itself, or its applications and operating systems. It's about the usability of the microsoft.com website and download services - which are probably largely outsourced to a few kids in India. It has nothing to do with "how bad Vista is" or lessons learned from XP.
I.O.U One Sig.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Since when two links (to the same blog btw) are taken as a valid citation ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
BTW, folks, how about replace on slashdot that Bill's mug with Ballmer's physiognomy? :)
IF this is real, it is about using some kind of internal system, and not the finished products that the rest of the world uses.
Here's why:
He talks about clicking on a Windows XP "folder" in Windows Update. That didn't exist until Microsoft Update (not Windows Update), and that wasn't around in 2003.
Also, it says in the Seattle PI article that they asked Gates if he ever got Movie Maker working and it says some bunk about including it in Windows Live. Movie Maker 1 came for free with Windows XP, and Movie Maker 2 came for free with Service Pack 2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Movie_Maker
It looks like a high school kid wrote it, or CEO (they're about the same). Bill Gates certainly should understand how microsoft.com works and how to navigate it.
He says that the file path to a profile is confusing; Hello! It's been around forever! The style is obviously written by someone who isn't technical at all and appears to get confused by technology. The writer is bashing multiple Microsoft products.
We'll find in a few hours that it's a fake letter and everyone who bought into it will have egg on their face.
Bill Gates isn't stupid enough to think that the plebians are going to get anything done for them, double sharp, just by phoning up someone at Microsoft. They're gonna go to Microsoft's website and try to get it. If you want to know if your stuff works, the only real way to tell is to try to get it working as much as possible from the perspective of your average customer. What he supposedly did (assuming it's true) is the intelligent, correct method of doing things of trying to make sure things work. The fact that apparently this kind of missive from the closest thing to On High in Microsoft-land affected nothing whatsoever speaks volumes about the level of inertia present there. Things are done wrong, because that's how they do things.
I'm inclined to believe it's true for a couple reasons. One being that, if you actually read it all the way through you'd see at the end that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked Gates about the memo, and he didn't deny that he wrote it, and in fact said he wrote more than just that one. The other one being that, as mentioned elsewhere, this was "leaked" as evidence in a court proceeding aparrently.
Let me make sure I have this right.. A respectable news outlet conducts an interview with Bill Gates, asks him if it's genuine, and he explains that it's his job to make criticism of this nature. So, are we supposed to believe you - irrespective of your "100%" certainty that's based on nothing but speculation - or Bill Gates himself?
This billg guy is a known troll that bashes Windows at every opportunity. Remember him showing off Windows 95 and publicly making it bluescreen in front of an audience?
Don't you feel silly now after that pointless rant that it turns out to be real and part of the released court documents from the Comes vs Microsoft case?
Mr BG has never been technically minded, he's just a businessman. Albeit an exeptionally good businessman (otherwise he wouldn't have so much money). I do however find it quite comical that even when he complains he gets ignored, that says a lot.
You cannot delete in-use files, yeah. There's no notion of an open but deleted file on Windows, unlike the Real OSes. But you can rename or move them.
So why won't you move the open files away to some random temp dir and then mark them for deletion on reboot?
You still reboot for kernel updates (like on all other OSes) or to deal with memory leaks / misbehaving services (faulty userland), but nothing of that is needed to install an ordinary program like MovieMaker.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates -- from reading his writing or listening to him in the past, it really does not sound like his style. Also, "I reboot my computer ... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here.
What he is probably alluding to is the fact that every other operating system under the sun (Linux, Sun, SPARC, Mac OSX, BSD) can replace 95% of the OS without rebooting. Only windows requires you to reboot to do something stupid like replace a DLL. I can overwrite any .SO in my OS without rebooting - this is something the UNix world figured out a long time ago (deref the file pointer, write the new file. People using the old pointer can continue to do so, newly started apps use the new pointer. Once install of software is complete, restart software impacted).
The only thing that should require a reboot is replacing the kernel itself or a low-level IO driver.
In my world saying, "... like that piece of email" does not equate "Yes I worth that, did you like it?"
even IF that was bill gate's real response. It was edited and can be out of context.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The file he links to is rather older than that blog article, featuring on this website discussing the case Comes vs. Microsoft. It was one of several thousand files submitted as evidence by the plaintiffs, specifically in this batch (file PX07199). This was a case back in 2007. Seeing as the version from 2007 has an evidence stamp, and the blog version doesn't, I suspect they're both copies of some original pdf found on the internet and therefore the veracity is still unclear.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
He's not referring to the company, he's referring to "Microsoft.com" which is the internal name of the team that manages the web site. If you look at the original document, you'll see that web department is referenced as "Microsoft.com" on multiple occasions.
For God's sake...if I want to setup a printer, it should be the system's job to install ALL software needed to get it working. What is so difficult in that?
...Windows usability issues, and in many cases our experiences have driven many us over to Linux, or kept us there...Let me remind the author of that line that we Linux users have still not made a dent on the desktop market. I can say, we are economically insignificant. This is despite perceived flaws in Windows. And by the way, Bill Gates was not frustrated over Windows in particular...he appears to have been frustrated by confusing names and un-necessary questions on the Windows website.
Hundreds of football coaches at the high school, college, and professional level across the U.S. were caught ripping apart their players for their uninspired and incompetent play, using colorful language such as "This team sucks, we're not going to beat anybody at this rate" and "you call that a tackle?" Some even threw clipboards and kicked over water coolers to express their disgust.
Of course, most put on a very different face on their team's chances when speaking to the booster clubs, University Presidents, and people like that. What hypocrisy!
Nonsense. This is one of many internal emails released during the recent court case. Unless you're suggested MS deliberately work up fake emails to show their products in a bad light just in case a lawyer comes calling with a disclosure warrant, which (to be clear) would be a serious criminal offence. It might help if you read yesterday's article on this, linked from BoingBoing, which has the corroborating detail you're so sure doesn't exist.
Karma sure does suck. And Bill Gates has a ton of bad karma. What does he EXPECT? He laid the foundations for the crap he's dealing with in that message.
"Next, people complain about Linux usability? apt-get install mplayer k3b, etc?"
Even better: Lx (at least Ubuntu) will tell you what to do.
My 6yo wanted to play the racing penguin game, and my wife remembered it was called "supertux" so she typed that in the terminal I always leave open on the desktop.
It told her "try 'sudo apt-get install supertux'", which she did. He was playing the game about 60 seconds later.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
My bad, the blog version also has the stamp. They're the same file. So that's what it's from. Comes vs. Microsoft was a class-action antitrust suit about different products entirely ("Windows, MS-DOS, Office, Excel, Word, Works Suite or Home Essentials 97 or 98 products") so it seems unlikely that the Gates memo about Movie Maker was ever actually assessed for its veracity, but it was accepted as evidence.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That is NOT Gate's writing style and there are several mistakes as well that point to someone other than gates wrote the letter.
It does appear to be confirmed.
"I go to microsoft.com they have a download center" HUH? Cince when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"? I have never seen it even down to the grunt level.
When that executive is talking to someone else in the company. Otherwise it's damned confusing.
What we have here is the boss complaining about the design of their own product. How is this news?
Is it only news because the slashdot kiddies find any reason to laugh at MS? Or is is news because no other company CEO ever complains about any products their company produces?
I have a dirty secret to admit. I have received an email from the big boss in the past complaining about features implemented by a product we produce. I feel dirty, obviously I'm in the minority. If I submit it to Slashdot, do you think it will make the front page?
People as stupid as you shouldn't be allowed to have computers. The "blog" you refer to is the Seattle Times, a major mainstream media outlet, at a rough guess about a million times more reliable than anything on Slashdot.
when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"?
When they have a fully developed theory of mind. Try putting yourself in his shoes, putting himself in the shoes of a typical joe user.
Oh, it's nothing...it's just that she kept forwarding them to me, and doing it again, and again, and again, and I didn't have the heart to come down on her like a sack of wet cement like I do to most people when they send me chain letters. The "smart" people that she works with sent her all that crap, as well as a ton of urban legends, email worms, and other nice things that I get to clean off of her computer every year. I finally had a heart-to-heart with her on one Christmas, and she understood, she just wanted me to share in the "fun". Sorry, but a doctor of philosophy should know better. I know, I shouldn't bitch about these things but it just bothers me.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Gates is just berating his top brass for sucking by pretending to be the end user. Hasn't anyone here ever had their boss rip their code apart, feigning ignorance in order to effectively critique?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Fake!
Here's a PDF of the original, together with the replies, as submitted to the trial.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf
Here, Knock yourself out
The specific exhibit (7199) is found near here
And if you doubt me (after all, who is this xtracto guy), the page is linked from groklaw. Maybe they are more thrustworthy than myself?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Fake or not? This looks like a good rant e-mail. You put yourself in the users place and try to do a user task - just like downloading Moviemaker. Then you write about your experience like you are the user, with all the users frustrations and emotions.
I tried unsuccessfully for about 2 minute to convince myself that it was real. FAKE
I've often wondered, over the last decade, what I'm doing wrong--because I never have trouble with Windows. I've been in the tech field a long time, as a front-line technician, as a Unix sysadmin, as a software developer, and I just don't have trouble with Windows. Even Windows ME never crashed on me (except once, and I had used a beta driver, so you can't really blame Windows for that), and I was running some pretty esoteric hardware at that time.
My conclusion is that I live in a strange parallel universe. I've had much more trouble with the stability of OS X and poor-quality Macintosh hardware than I've ever had with PC hardware (home-built and off-the-shelf) and software. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it shouldn't be the case...perhaps I'm the exception that proves the rule.
(Seriously...I've never been able to retire a Macintosh gracefully. Every single Mac I've ever owned has died a grinding painful death.)
What am I doing wrong? I want to hate Windows too!
You must be from a different part of Florida. This is community college level composition!
Or anything else that you can wedge between those two parts and still have it make some kind of sense.
This could go in Mad Magazine - they do a feature like this regularly. Here are some more choices (pick one from each)
There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail
[after I've smoked 5 joints | praising Satan | from my Mac Book | blasting the idiots who work for me | bidding on a small island nation | trying to destroy slashdot ]
but
[only an idiot would think I wrote something | I've never been stoned enough to write anything | the PI reporter must have been really blasted to make up dreck | only my evil twin writes | Steve Jobs was in my office and sent out a bunch of stuff]
like that piece of e-mail.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My mother (and mother-in-law) do the same thing. It's sort of like dressing up for a family dinner once in a while, just grin and bear it.
Easy there, there's no need to attack my English because I interpret the incomplete statement differently to you. Fake or not, it was used as empiric evidence in a trial, which really suggests I'm not the only one who thinks that, yes, it really could be real.
Sam ty sig.
Have a link to a source on that?
What the fuck is are whinges?
Reading this reminds me of how AWESOME using Synaptic and apt-get really can be. In a single place you can find updates, new packages, and alternatives to the packages you already have. It resolves dependencies and deletes unused stuff.
Compared to Mr Gates's experience, this really is a marvelous thing.
I haven't done the Googling to determine who should get this praise, but thank you anyway, whomever you are!
he didn't even read the article. It clearly includes critisim of add/remove program, long install times etc.
I think it was around 2003 too, that I realized that the Microsoft website's search engine was just absolutely horrible. To this day, if I want to find anything on there fast, I just use google with the "site:microsoft.com" as part of my search. Funny also how most of all those problems Bill detailed in 2003 are still a problem today in XP. Perhaps they are no longer specific to movie maker, but for the most part that entire experience seems awefuly familiar. :-(
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
People tend not to stick to their usual style when they're angry, and after the installation nightmare described in the memo, anyone would be pissed.
As far as Gates referring to the microsoft.com web site team as "they" is concerned: I work for a large company (100,000+ employees) and nobody uses "we" vs. "they" consistently. "We" can mean "our team", "our division", "the company" -- but at the same time "they" can refer to any subset of those people as well: "our servers are really slow today... I wish the admins would figure it out already. They need to get their act together."
This Gates guy is obviously some geeky Linux troll. It's time wasters like this that deprived people of Vista for years by sending nonsense ranty emails to developers.
It could be argued that he was referring to the group that supports the website. I don't think that's a part of the company that Gates is directly involved with, so he would likely refer to that group as "they".
This is not actually a "leaked" email, but an email that was entered as evidence in the Iowa antitrust trial (Comes v Microsoft) and can be found here.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
This really illustrates the difference between how Gates ran his company and how Jobs runs his. Gates only did high level management at this point in time, you notice while the jabs in the memo are a bit snarky, he never yells at someone and none of the big problems ever got fixed (I know I still have those wierd named files in my Add/Remove in XP).
Jobs would have gone down to where the engineers and leads are for those portions of the product and ripped into them till they started crying, not written a snarky little memo with no obvious product fix coming out of it.
Just goes to show a the key to a good product is a single firm guiding hand, none of this design by committee, every group for themselves crap that MS does.
Oh, and they have also been known to try to generate income from those "free utilities" via indirect mechanisms (like IE directing you to MSN search in various situations, etc.), based on their control of your user experience.
When he's talking about one part of the company to another? Like if I were talking to someone in accounting, and said, "Over in R&D, they are developing a new product."
I don't see why not.
Bill says to himself...."Fuck it. I'm retiring."
From TFA:
So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
Given that he's talking about test packages, he was probably on a development or testing site, and sending feedback as part of a QA cycle.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Otherwise they would be in trouble for getting money for an upgrade they never issued.
That's why it was release to corporates November (three?) months before it was released to retail. Although NOBODY *would* install Vista in their business, they still made it available, so they hadn't failed their obligation to SA suckers^Wcustomers
Did anyone ever stop to think that maybe this was another user's experience that Bill decided to forward? Or maybe he was trying to think of this situation from a non-technical user's perspective. A lot of average joes probably wonder why they have to download hundreds of MBs in updates after getting a new system and then wait 20-30+ minutes for it to install.
then this is the one of the best lines ever!
Real. Life. Dilbert.
> you will surely have more insight into why Vista
> is a complete disaster due to Microsoft not
> learning anything from their experiences from XP.
The ONLY thing that this email shows is that, as a CEO, Bill Gates had some strong technical opinions about individual products being planned/offered by his company.
It doesn't mean that Microsoft hasn't "learned" from its XP mistakes -- the e-mail isn't related to XP or Vista. For that matter, it isn't related to anything other than MovieMaker, and the comments by a senior member of technical staff (in this case, the CEO) pointing out serious deficiencies about a product. (Perhaps the submitter doesn't work in the industry, but I can say with confidence that this kind of thing occasionally happens in pretty much all of the high-tech companies at which I've worked.)
See here.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...that the guy was pissed off, and trying to point out usability issues the average Joe would have. I'm sure he knows how to get his operating system and websites (well maybe not websites, MS sites are largely a mess in my experience) to do what he wants, but the vast majority of Windows users aren't experts and would get fed up very quickly at running the gamut of crap in the Windows Update process (and rightly so) or trying to trick an MS website into turning up the information they want (my approach is to use Google instead of the MS site search tool). In fact I would say his email, while perhaps poorly written (as most pissed-off emails are), is quite insightful in that sense. He picked out the things that would piss of Granny Web Surfer instead of suffering through it because he understood the complex things going on in the background. When WinUpdate basically forced him to restart, he didn't think "Well I guess this is reasonable, the new DLLs have to load on startup and the new applications are dependent on them," as most of us would, he thought "Who wants to restart in the middle of the update process!? This is a load of crap!"
Thinking like a common user makes user-friendly programs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yeah. Here are some curious quotes:
These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear. So what has Bill Gates been using for the past twenty years? A Mac? Does he have Linux on his home PC? I have trouble imagining that Bill Gates would be confused by a Windows directory structure that has been in place for decades. Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff. So Bill Gates has made a conscious decision not to use Automatic Updates and he is now asking "why do I have to update"? I personally have had the opposite problem: you turn automatic updates off and somehow it switches itself back on, or updates anyway. (That annoys me because of the mandatory reboot) I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again. Whose grandmother wrote this? The letter is littered with Microsoft bashing, and comments that sound like they were written by someone who barely knows anything about computers, and who seems to dislike everything Microsoft has ever done.This email points out the most obvious problem with Microsoft's culture - their response to user problems. If a user is having a problem (that isn't an obvious bug), it must be the user's fault. Apple seems to take the opposite view - if a user is having a problem (and isn't being obviously stupid), then it's the computer's fault.
I can't decide if this post is interesting, funny, insightful, or flamebait.
I read it as a third person - "Joe Sixpack evaluation" of a user experience. It's a form of reality check. I use that method at times at work to point out not everyone knows what the lingo is for our field, especially if we are looking to attract new people.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
MS would love to bundle as many free utilities as they could to make their competition die off and then start charging for these utilities (or have people like yourself saying that these are why the OS is more expensive [even though they are "free". Go figure]). Or they'll (once they've killed the competition (a la Netscape) drop any support for the free utility (IE6) until some competition comes up again.
Bill doesn't get that sending an email isn't going to fix the problem. He's sending email to people that don't know how to build these things and expecting they're suddenly going to figure it out. He needed to find people on the teams who have expressed similar frustrations and replace the team management with those people. "Hey, I heard you think this sucks. Got any better ideas? Yeah? Here's your new job." The trick is to find these people before Bill expresses his opinion - else everyone will agree that things suck. As THE Bill Gates, he could have made this happen, but instead he just decided to send an email....
Windows Movie Maker 2.6 description at microsoft.com:
Movie Maker 2.6 is for Windows Vista users whose computer cannot run the Vista version of Movie Maker.
Pointed in the comments to TFA.
My goodness....
If that's real, it is hilarious. I sums up what's wrong with Windows/MS very nicely.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
No, it's real.
Read some of the replies further up, you twitâ"like the ones linking to the PDFs from the evidence submitted for one of various MS antitrust trials that include this email in them.
Shame on you for not actually paying any attention at all, and just posting out your ass...wait, this is Ars Technica, isn't it?
It's Slashdot?
Oh. Well, then, your response is more understandable, but no less stupid.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
However, I must agree this thing's a fake. A lot of the syntax makes no sense for an internal memo ("they" instead of "we" is a good example.) And, of course, no insistence that these things be fixed, or at least a demand for a reply. No "George, come see me today, I want to discuss this" or something similar.
Also - yum and emerge :)
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Most GNU/Linux distributions solved this problem years ago and they did it much better than Windows ever will.
GNU/Linux distribution menus are arranged by function and task. The KDE menu, for example, has "Science and Math", "Office", "Internet" and other things any computer user would recognize. The sub menus have a name and description, KWord is a Word Processor, so is OO.org Writer.
You can compare that to the hodge podge of Vendor solutions and permutate those through the mindless changes M$ made to their defaults over several versions of Windoze. What you see is menus arranged by Vendor. The user is supposed to just know what Adobe, Correl, Novel and others can do for them. Programs that do the same thing never end up in the same place where the user might - gasp - compare them or find them easily. The only thing worse is DRM. When you combine that with all of the different default locations for finding programs or saving files, you end up what Bill Gates described.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Every System Engineer at the software company I work at starts nearly EVERY sentence with So... It's annoying as hell, but really cool in SE circles, I imagine, since they all do it.
That is NOT Gate's handwriting style and there are several mistakes as well that point to someone other than gates wrote the letter. As the light from the torch flickers in the wind you notice a chair carelessly thrown in a dark corner of the room.
It is clearly the work of our old nemesis: Steve Ballmer aka Professor James Moriarty!She made the willows dance
Interestingly enough, Gates could have really improved his image during his tenure at Microsoft if he let emails like that "leak" out prior to stepping down. Instead, he gives keynotes about Microsoft and its "innovation."
I don't see how improving his image is gonna make him money.In fact, looking at pictures of him, I don't see that he cares about his image one iota.
You can't take the sky from me...
What's a Firefox?
What's a Lightwave?
What's a Nero?
What's an Outlook Express?
What's a Visual Studio?
What's an AutoCAD? I've taken a liking to Puppy Linux on older PCs. Puppy's start menu has a generic name after each app's name, such as "Geany text editor" or "GIMP image editor". Sometimes a bit of RAS syndrome makes a system easier for users to learn.
Every story about "x" is an opportunity for the BashDotters to appear. Very few things in this world are unbashable.
I read this over on zdnet in a Mary Jo Foley column yesterday. I think the really telling (and sad) part to the story is the nature of the responses to his e-mail, i.e., finger-pointing and defensiveness. Down the thread somebody takes ownership of assigning ownership to fixing it. That suggests that major groups use billg's withering critiques to score turf points and this is more important than fixing the immediate problem. It also suggests that there's an inability for major groups to team in ad hoc ways. Why wasn't there a customer usability czar to knock heads and make sure that people can get the product/service? Was it, because it was free, no one paid attention to the distribution? This stands on its head why it was made a free product, which was to get an installed base and support the Windows OS product. We have to assume that billg would give this more effort than jane doe and jane would have thought about getting a Mac the next time a friend shows her iMovie.
It was from 2003 so there's a chance that the underlying dysfunctions were addressed in some way. We know that the Longhorn development debacle opened some eyes and kicked some asses.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
That is NOT Gate's writing style and there are several mistakes as well that point to someone other than gates wrote the letter.
"I go to microsoft.com they have a download center" HUH? Cince when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"?
I read this mail as Bill Gates "pretending" to be Joe Random User. He wants to try out how a random Windows user would experience downloading/installing Movie Maker. So what he is telling the guy he is writing to is "I act like a random, non-professional user. I want to get Movie Maker. So I go to www.microsoft.com, since I know that they have a download page."If you read the email like this, all the other criticism about the writing style ("Bill Gates should know why you have to reboot the computer") make sense - a normal user WOULD ask "why do I have to reboot my computer now, I reboot it every night!"
Are you sure you know Gates' writing style? Because published articles, speeches, even books are edited, proofread, maybe even ghostwritten. This is an email, banged out in a hurry when he was mad. Comparing it to what you consider the real Gates style is like comparing a picture on cover of Oprah's magazine to an actual photo of her.
Shouldn't that be in the dictionary definition of irony?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
So, just for grins, I went to download movie maker. Went to the main paged, searched for 'movie maker', and there STILL is no download link. I HAVE to use Windows Update to get it.
Nice to know Microsoft ignores Bill just as much as they ignore the rest of our feedback.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
iTunes. This one should play tunes.
Yeah...but what's an iPod? A green vegetable? A body snatcher? Some kind of bed?(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Yeah, looks 100% fake to me....or not. Man, the MS apologists are out in full force today!
It says in that email that Bill Gates is "buying" Microsoft products for himself. That right there tells me this email is a hoax.
- Plenty of Windows updates replace parts of the kernel.
- A lot of things that require a reboot on Windows involve patches to shared libraries. If you have different programs on your system using different versions of libc or libstdc++, that could cause problems.
- Plenty of Windows updates replace parts of services that are "always" running, such as the display server, window manager, or file system browser. Because Windows for workstations normally operates at the equivalent of runlevel 5, one cannot normally stop these without restarting the computer.
Windows Vista adds a new Restart Manager, which can turn off some services without turning off everything.I have to say, when I'm frustrated with how a download works, I rarely have such a detailed memory of exactly what I did and how and why it failed-- it's more "I went to your dumb site, and it didn't work! You're all idiots!" (Of course, Gates would have been probably taking notes from the start).
I'm also impressed that he doesn't have a flunky do all the uploads and patches on his machine for him, but does it himself. This is the right way for the management to do it, but I'm impressed that he actually does.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
My software division is part of a large conglomerate, so the CEO would not be on top the specialized sotware. Yet I've heard the promise now and then that the division leader would try to use all software, but nothing ever came from it.
On the other hand, our former CEO took a decade out to play in politics and run for state governer. But came back to industry, runs a new dsoftware, and does "booth babe" duty at trade shows. I'm impressed.
I don't care what they've found to prove this, it must be either a setup or a prank. There is no absolutely no way Bill Gates could possibly be surprised that he'd have to reboot after installing updates.
You know how it goes: Expansion brings complexity and complexity brings decay. That's the case with windows. It was originally an OS, and it ended up mixing applications with the OS (e.g. IE), essentially destroying usability of both.
Cince != Since
"I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"
Why would you reboot at all? Of course, with your head in your ass you don't get to see what else is out there.
I'd have expected him to have Oddjob take care of the design team ...
Their site is a mess, always has been, Not sure what this has to do with VISTA or XP though. No one has ever complained to me that VISTA has interface/usability issues. That START BAR is pretty dang simple. Now they have complained that it is a small memory hog below 1gb but that may not be the same thing or it might. You tell me.
However, I do think people (users, not us of course) are scared of Windows. Spin control has been less than zero at MSFT. Whereas those MAc commercials are pretty cool.
/LabMonkey09
"The next thing you know" the document is real and available to the public as court evidence. The audacity of those court systems to actually make stuff up!
I came here to send an email and chew bubble gum... and I'm all out of bubble gum.
It's 2008. Nothing has changed. Good job, Bill. Show 'em who's boss!!
Because, after all, major print media has never, ever been wrong...
That's a real interesting read.
You can definitely see that the problem is that microsoft.com and Windows update are handled by 2 teams, and each program is handled by an individual team, so in the end it gets hard to say who should do what and how.
it's a problem with having too much distance between what a team offers to the public, and the public access, and the lack of the teams control.
- I'd have thought one solution would be to just set up microsoft.com as a sharepoint/wikipedia site, give the teams responsible for the software complete ownership of the part they use, and leave windows update out of it. they then themselves have control to display the content however they like. The problems might still show up, but you wouldn't have to talk to 5 different departments just to fix what is basically a download-link problem.
It's what happens when you don't trust the teams to do what's right, and think you have to have other departments thinking for them, in the end it complicates things.
Which is similar to what Microsoft did with Vista, they complicated things because the user isn't trusted to use the machine. Basic design philosophies matter alot, they help create some wonderful things for instance I'd name CoreAVC as a brilliant solution which comes from a good basic design philosophy, but in the case of Vista, the basic design philosophy of not trusting the user was a bad one, and was probably bred because that's how Microsoft works today, departments thinking for other departments because of trust issues.
That's why I'm thinking that the new OS will be different, It'll be based on server 2008, and with anything that the people at microsoft think "this is something that I'll use for myself" they tend to do a good job, as soon as they start thinking "this is something I'm programming for someone other than me" - that's where you get problems because you trust yourself, but not others.
---
just an opinion btw, probably a dumb one, but it's all mine.
any chance and editor will update the summary and include this link? I'm tired of skimming through half the discussion of whether this is real or fake or not.
So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do. Are we sure this is coming from Bill FREAKING Gates? I'm pretty sure one doesn't need guidance when downloading something whether they want to just open or save something.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
... and mod GP down. This is not flamebait, but GP is.
You quote the GP sayingdepending on which DE I'm using.
and then ask if he knows that they are DEs and not a kernel...
Not only that, but you use the term "window managers", which is just ironic, as only one of the 3 is a window manager.
Why do people like you get permission to even use a computer?
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
This isn't a story about Linux, it isn't a story about Apple, it's a story about Microsoft. If it were a story about Pintos catching fire and burning people alive, people like you would be saying "so what? People get burned alive in Chevy pickup trucks, too!"
If it was a story about Charles Manson you'd say "so what? Jeffery Dalmer killed them AND ATE THEM!"
Ford and Chevy sucking doesn't excuse Crysler's sucking. Lets stay on topic, shall we?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
> Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6
> minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use
> it for anything else during this time.
> What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes?
> That is crazy. This is after the download was
> finished.
Shit. I've always wondered that about Windows, and was slightly comforted by the thought that someone KNEW what it was doing, and that it was important.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates -- from reading his writing or listening to him in the past, it really does not sound like his style. Also, "I reboot my computer ... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here.
Bill gates certainly knows what a dll is, how one installs, and has indeed probably written several in his career. What he is doing in that email is trying to USE his company's own product and coming up with issues that need to be addressed.You'd be surprised how often this *doesn't* happen, management not using their own products, not understand what it's like to be a consumer (bosses are generally clued in enough to do so, but middle management doesn't care). These are issues that SHOULD have been picked up before the product got to him - they have usability teams and QA after all. Bill is asking, "what the fuck are these people doing?"
Bill (or whoever it actually is) seems to be really trying to use the product as a user, rather than as a programmer. A user generally knows what they want to do at any time, but not how they do it, and they go with what seems most obvious to them at the time. In this example, Bill is a user who says "I want to install moviemaker" and tries the obvious routes to do so. And comes up with a frustrating experience.
There is no value in saying things like "pah, just apt-get install on Linux" - that sidesteps the issue entirely. The windows usability experience, for that matter ANY OS user experience, should handhold the user through doing something they don't know how to do. A Linux user who is just a user, like your grandma or secretary or 95% of the population, won't know about apt-get, and won't know how to get moviemaker on windows. I'm sure Bill wouldn't have a problem looking for a zip file online, extracting it himself and so forth, but he's looking from the point of view of those who can't, his customer base.
I think the shift to usability is very important, it's identifying who actually uses the software, ie technically inexperienced people with little knowledge or interest in their OS as a whole. They're not doing it as well as Apple is, but at least they recognise the problem, and that's a start.
Whatever they are, I want one that can comic-book tile a bunch of windows.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah. Here are some curious quotes:
These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear. So what has Bill Gates been using for the past twenty years? A Mac? Does he have Linux on his home PC? I have trouble imagining that Bill Gates would be confused by a Windows directory structure that has been in place for decades. If by "decades" you mean "since Windows 2000" then you're 100% rightBut am I missing something because why does this have anything to do with Vista?
I don't use Vista, I don't even plan to upgrade to it and I use mostly Linux with a bit of XP. But I do frequently bite chunks out of Windows people who criticise Linux with arguments based on FUD and speculation, not fact.
So, in the same way, don't turn every criticism of Microsoft into one about Vista just for the sake of it. I can't criticise Vista because I don't use it and, yes, it's a pain having to wait for the sometimes slow MS web site to deliver updates and then expect you to reboot an XP machine when it probably doesn't need it - I can state that from experience.
But please keep on topic and if you're going to criticise something, then do so from a position of fact, not speculation or just because you're having a bad day at the office.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
If Vista is a disaster... than what is Teh Lunix? Last time I checked, Vista had a market share FOSSies could only dream of.
But hey, at least Red Hat had the balls the drop Teh Lunix on Teh Desktop, realizing it was a waste of time and money. And when your company is based on software you can't charge money for... wasting money can really endanger your company. Not that all these VC-funded fly-by-nights like Ubunghole are concerned with an "old economy" concept like "making money"- in the "new economy", your success is directly related to your burn rate (and generous hot cash injections from IBM, of course).
It's amazing how the "ZOMG MIKKKR0$$$L0TH IS A TEH MUNOPULYZ!11!!!" thing ended over eight years ago... but despite that Teh Lunix has STILL not seen any gains in market share. The only gains Lunix ever made came from stealing customers away from Unix. Now that strategy doesn't work... and Unix is actually gaining back some share... and Lunix continues to fail at being a desktop OS.
But hey... if repeating the exact same recycled FUD you guys spewed about Windows XP being a disaster, going to destroy Microsoft, forcing people to start using Lunix, etc etc etc, makes you happy, that's cool. It's not like you guys can actually make a successful OS which can succeed in the marketplace. Maybe "Teh Community" should focus more on getting Teh Lunix to work, rather than making yet another text editor... or trying to spew FUD about Vista.
...like 'Vista is a complete disaster'? A complete disaster? Are you fucking kidding me? Hundreds of thousand of PCs are running Vista right now. How is that a complete disaster? Anyone who says Vista is a complete disaster has NEVER used Vista.
This memo just makes him sound like one of those office horror stories. You know the kind: doesn't take interest in things, but flips out over randomly when they do take interest and then starts making knee-jerk decisions/vetoes. The kind that makes their employees keep information from them because they don't know which minor detail is going to get them chewed out today.
Not that he doesn't have a valid point, but there might be technical/security/business reasons or time and resource limitations that caused this problem. Yeah, Windows Update is scary, but it's probably designed to convince people to keep their computers up-to-date in the interest of security. WMM download and installation is difficult, but maybe that's because it's been treated like an afterthought and not given the priority it deserves. Who knows.
Point is, you need to identify *why* things went wrong and correct them from there. This is the type of email that would scare a subordinate into coming up with a kludgy or short-sighted fix because he doesn't want to incur any further wrath.
Or maybe I'm just getting burnt out and bitter.
I don't know whether it's genuine or not, but I believe it. I write a memo more or less like this to my programming staff every month when I test our products from the viewpoint of an end user. Software development doesn't always go in the direction I would prefer, but I don't micro-manage the developers. The best I can do is drag their attention up from the details once in a while and see the products the way our customers might. Naturally I tend to exaggerate the potential ignorance or frustration level a typical customer might feel for effect.
That is painless in Mandriva 2008.1
as mentioned earlier... The email is real. It's in the court documents from the Comes vs Microsoft case. You can find it in PX07199.pdf from http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000/
I am glad someone @M$ noticed...
jeezus... in my mandriva to install a "movie maker" i just do: urpmi cinelerra like 20 seconds later is ready to use...
These are official emails that surfaced during antitrust cases. They're real.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
You're going to trust the source of the potentially fake e-mail as to whether it's fake or not? If they made up the e-mail then maybe they made up the conversation too!
Of course it's not fake, as has been revealed elsewhere. But your "evidence" isn't.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is my favorite part: "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."
Keep up the good work!
When it comes down to it, I am completely sure that Microsoft is where it is in terms of its financial success only because of Bill Gates. Unfortunately, ever since he stepped down, I believe that Mr. Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers has no idea what he's doing. Since Microsoft is so high and mighty, it will take a loooooong time for him to sink that ship, but it will never be what it was under Captain (now Admiral) Gates. And the usability of Windows is following the trend of a negative exponential curve. If you think Vista sux, wait 'till you see 7. And the next version, I think they'll call it Windows Excalibur, that one will be so unusable that computer stores will have big dumpsters outside the front entrance, and people will purchase computers and simply drop them into that dumpster upon leaving the store, without ever opening the box. Or they'll just get a Mac, which by then will run Mac OS 12.7 Pelican. (OS 12 will go by bird names.) Maybe this usability disaster explains why Gates gave Jobs a hug sum of money to develop OS X.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
... Bill Gates.
To use a military axiom: The commander is responsible for everything the command does or fails to do.
He is the most powerful person in the company. They are producing crap because of his policies and directions. If he wanted to stop producing crap, the place to have started was with the policies and directions he gave his company. Everything else flowed from that.
It's from the major Seattle paper, by the reporter who is conducting a series of interviews with Gates this week, and links to PDFs of the memos which were released during discovery one of the times someone sued Microsoft. If that's not enough provenance for you, nothing is.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Mr. Gates' frustration is understandable. I had a similar experience only recently at MicroSoft.com trying to download and install something for a friend. I had become so accustomed to a package-managed system that I had nearly forgotten about that nightmare. Maybe Mr. Gates is stepping down from MS so he can install Linux with impunity.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
Bill designed Microsoft to become a monopoly where people had to depend on them. Crappy software, useless tech support... it's all his fault.
Perhaps instead of worrying about Google capturing their market they should focus instead on improving their products.
A close friend just called me this morning because his Windows XP didn't boot anymore. Not even in safe mode.
Now there's a question I would like to ask. If Bill REALLY sent those mails on a daily basis - as stated in the article, then why the heck didn't they do something about it?
Microsoft is so f***ed up that not even the boss can fix it.
This is not so good info for Bill, but he should googled it....
Really, it's nice to see that director does this kind small "tests" about how world greatest company, what he leads works...
Ok which one of you is pretending to be billg today? The email looks more like a rant someone would post on Slashdot rather than someone sending an email to top Windows architects. A bunch of complaining and no suggestions, and it's written with far too much underlying contempt.
-R
When you do everything it's hard to do anything well.
In the Gates era. Microsoft was competitive (perhaps a bit overcompetitive), agile, and focused. In the post-Gates era, it is not longer focused. The Vista ready labeling debacle was the final indignity in a project plagued by inconsistent and incoherent priorities. At one time, you could sum up Microsoft this way: it provided the core software businesses neede to operate their desktop computers. Now what business are they in?
Gates is griping about essentially is this: Microsoft products look like their built by a giant, complacent bureaucracy where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. This is the kind of thing Apple is good at, because it's run by a raving egomaniac product genius who damned well knows what the right and left hand are supposed to be doing, and which they'd better being doing if they don't want to catch hell. Apple gets the opposite sort of criticism; why doesn't product X do task Y as well? Why wasn't the original iPhone a platform like a PDA?
But Microsoft will never achieve the kind of product focus Apple has without shedding some businesses. I said this years ago, when Microsoft dodged the break-up bullet: they'd be better off in the long run being broken up, than trying to run a business that was all things to all people without illegal anti-competitive practices.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just knowing the Big Mr. G got a taste of what we're all been through with Windows Update and microsoft.com has made my day. I'm sure I will still be smiling after my divorce hearing this afternoon.
BTW. Why are you guys mentioning Linux? Linux has nothing to do with this article. Might as well mention some other unrelated crap.
.
There's no way that's a real memo. Nice try though...well, not really.
Exactly. The thing that caught my eye is that the memo was from 2003. Are problems like that a thing of the past today?
This may be proof that providing a good user experience is way harder than it looks (not that I think it looks easy). Here you've got a powerful executive, highly respected within the company, roasting a bunch of bright people (yes, I mean it, the ones I've known have had plenty of brains and drive), and not getting the result he wanted.
>no single person at Microsoft who has the final say on how all of there stuff interacts together.
That may be the key insight. Apple has Jobs. Who has that job at Microsoft? Who could possibly have the bandwidth to handle it?
I thought Windows' alleged strength was that you had support from the maker. (Nobody has seriously lauded Windows usability since .. um, actually I don't think it has ever happened, but if you count the not-serious people, there was a lot of talk in 1995.) This person should have called for help as soon as they started seeing the scary stuff. Let the priests deal with the demon.
If he wanted smoothness, he should have been running Debian. Sure, there'd be no one to call unless you made previous arrangements with a third-party support company, but at least apt-get is smooth. But this guy is running one of those "there's somebody to run to for help" systems, so use it!
Just call tech support.
Of course, doing that, would have just resulted in another flame from this user. But that's a subject for another day. ;-)
He's writing from the outside looking in...as if he doesn't know who is doing the stupid stuff he points to...and yet Microsoft pioneered a lot of it...like the detailed scans of the system before it will install anything or even update...
There's an underlying Microsoft philosophy in all of that that 'you're fortunate to even have the opportunity to get out cool software so do everything we say and we might let you have it. IBM's philosophy was always more like 'we are so grateful that you want to try our stuff ...thank you...and how can we make it easier for you...and just pay us on the honor system if you like it.'
We're only recovering from that bundle - er, blunder - with Firefox. But we're still 75% behind.
To quote Max Barry, Windows treats you like an idiot. You can actually install software by inserting the disk, closing your eyes, and hitting enter-enter-enter-enter-enter. Linux (gentoo in particular, but other distros can have this issue too) rarely DARES to assume it knows what you want (i.e. reading up on horizontal screen refresh rates before getting anything resembling graphics on the monitor). Both approaches can be handy at different times. Being treated like an idiot is great until you want to do something smart. Being treated like a genius is great until you want something to JUST WORK.
What does surprise me is that the Head Software Architect( or whatever Gates' title is/was) was just finding this stuff out in 2003. His little venture into installing Microsoft software lead him to realize how bad most of Microsoft software really is and he was just learning this in 2003?
This one task, installing MS MovieMaker lead him through much of Microsoft's software stack. He was bashing the Microsoft.com web site developers, Microsoft system update developers, Microsoft OS developers, and Microsoft application developers. Who was running the ship? Oh, that's right, they have OEM's locked in, they have governments locked in, they have fortune 100, 500, 1000, 100000+ locked into Microsoft Windows and Microsoft software. They don't need to be better, faster, cheaper.
IMO, this is a prime example of the fact that they only exist because of how Steve Balmer runs the company and holds a sword over every partners head should they even think of marketing another OS and software stack. Gates has been out playing with his tablets and surface computers and not watching what the company was doing. He didn't know why Windows needed to reboot after running Microsoft Update? MS Reboot Mania was a problem in the 90s and in 2003 he didn't understand this. da! No wonder Apple is looking so good to so many these days. Linux would be an option but with Apple, Windows IT people just plug them in and they mostly just work. Linux requires more initial work and then 'just work'.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Apparently the mod took the sarcasm of Z34107's first line and labeled it trolling.
It should be modded at least +1 Underrated IMO, it's a good point.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Compared to Mr Gates's experience, this really is a marvelous thing.
Only for people who already know how to use synaptic and apt-get.Imagine we take some normal users into a usability lab. Some get Linux boxes, some Windows boxes. All are asked to install the software needed to edit a home movie. And then to do a little editing.
My bet is that the Windows people will be done sooner, even if you control for previous experience using Windows. Linux is a better user experience for us technical experts that make up the ardent Linux base, but despite Gates's rant, I don't think we've even reached the Windows level of general-audience usability yet.
My question is this: So what? Sorry you had issues, but...
Liar or not, I have ~15 people I can line up that will talk about their complete satisfaction with Ubuntu, all of whom I suggested it to after headaches (adware/spyware, worms top of the list) Windows XP. MOST of them did installs on their own, and some of these are people that can barely pull photos off their digital cameras.
I've worked in customer service a lot back in the day and know that pissed off customers are far more vocal than happy ones. However that doesn't mean there are not any customers out there that are perfectly happy with the product.
That's how it works with everything. I can swear up and down about how awesome Honda cars are, but know plenty of people that won't ever buy one, for whatever reason.
Like I said, sorry you seem to have issues, but there are PLENTY of people for whom Linux "just works".
No sig for you!!
Is that particular paper known for "stretching" the truth?
If it is false, we'll probably hear all about it later anyway.
Your test is far, far wider than the topic at hand, and therefore is at least slightly biased towards your conclusion.
No claims were originally made towards the viability of editing software available on the platforms. While, interestingly enough, this makes up the greatest portion of the test you described.
The more specific test that I am referring to would be more along the lines of "use the manufacturer's tools to locate and install movie editing software". This cuts out the differences and looks specifically at whether or not Microsoft or the OSS hordes have been more effective in looking at this particular angle of the experience.
I never said that Linux beats Windows in every way - only that I'm grateful for the work that was done in this area.
He did not confirm it, he just didn't deny it. There's a difference.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
No one can "force" you to buy anything; let alone a non-necessity like a piece of software.
If the system is that bad, Bill's customers aren't exploited, they are captives of one thing: LAZINESS.
in user friendliness. You have someone at the top who has actual power to make sofware more userfriendly. In Linux if you have suggest some usability ideas, the author has the right to tell you screw you. this is my software and you don't pay me. check out http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/
You missed the point. What kills me is he could have downloaded Ubuntu (or *your* favorite) in that time and be done with it.
It's like he's SO close to really understanding the problem and still missing it. Windows is cumbersome and unwieldy. It's distrust of it's customers forces usability into second place which is really pretty amazing considering it's customers are the only reason as a commercial operation it exists in the first place.
Quack, quack.
Isn't it rather interesting that Nero, a CD/DVD burning program, is named like emperor Nero, who burned christians?
Alfred E. Neuman != mad-libs.
That is NOT Gate's writing style and there are several mistakes as well that point to someone other than gates wrote the letter.
"I go to microsoft.com they have a download center" HUH? Cince when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"? I have never seen it even down to the grunt level.
This "secret memo" is bunk. it is in no way Bill Gates' writing.
Except this was entered as evidence in the DoJ trial. It's real and on the books. I think he was confused by the lack of expletives. They were probably removed so it could be put on the web site. "Who the fuck designed this piece of shit and why haven't I fired the little cunt", probably would make most parental web filters go tilt.I'm not clear whether he just copies a user complaint that somehow ended up with him or whether this is "genuine Bill". If it's the latter, one has to wonder whether he uses his own product.
He's wondering that Windows needs to reboot after an update? That's something every user is used to by now.
He is wondering that he has to jump through hoops about WGA and other things he doesn't care about just to download something? That's something you're used to, too.
He is wondering that he first of all has to do a lengthy update before he can download something? If you don't patch your machine often (and, btw, why doesn't he? As the head honcho at MS he should have heard about the security issues), you're used to that too.
He isn't used to the "Open" or "Save" dialog? He doesn't use IE, it seems.
And so on. One has to wonder, did he know what's going on in his company? Did he at least use the end product at all? Or was he more a figurehead, kept in the dark by his cronies so they can do to his "vision" what they deem profitable?
This mail sheds a rather interesting light on Bill and MS...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
you are coming to a sad realization... charity or mogul?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There are OSes out there which allow you to change the kernel while it is running.
That's one possible explanation.
Another is that he intentionally "played" a non-techie customer to show the recipents of the memo what problems they caused for an average user.
And finally, maybe he was actually that detached from the technical side of Windows by 2003. I've seen it in certain managers at the company I work for: while they have a scientific degree, they don't seem to understand the technology better than some MBA type.
Overall, I'm not sure either if the article is a hoax.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yeah, south Florida. The Mexicans raise the curve dramatically.
What version of windows comes with more than just bare necessities? Perhaps Vista comes with something that was bundled with XP service packs before, or was released as additional freeware by MS.
In Windows 2000, how did you burn CDs? Or, in Windows XP, could you burn an image? What media player played XVID, DIVX movies? What about a media player that has good management of playlists, not the crippleware that WMP is? You still had to go and download/install a WHOLE BUNCH of programs to get Windows to work for you. WinAMP, Nero... What about Paint? It's crippleware. And photo editing solutions? Windows doesn't come with more than just bare necessities.
Linux even comes with OpenOffice... Which is a lot more than WordPad.
People were complaining about networking issues with Linux. Yes, it has them, especially wireless, and when using ndiswrapper. however, you had to install telco's DSL software to connect, and it wasn't always that straightforward. The only thing that worked straightforward was cable, and it worked in both Windows and Linux.
It's like he's writing a 5th grade book report or something.
Microsoft products look like their built by a giant, complacent bureaucracy where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
(now why would that be?)
They should have stuck with making the best compilers in the business, or at least stuck to their goal of upgrading DOS until it was functionally capable of replacing their high end Xenix product... when they started selling vaporware (they were advertising Windows in 1983, even before the Mac was out, and didn't really have a usable product until Moore's Law saved them in the '90s) they switched from being a company that's all about making great software into one that's all about selling great-looking software.
I said this years ago, when Microsoft dodged the break-up bullet: they'd be better off in the long run being broken up, than trying to run a business that was all things to all people
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
You can think that all you want and your case it is probably true. It is indeed comforting to have a child-like mentality where rich=good and poor=bad, merit=success and idiocy=failure.
Our president is terrible both morally and not smart and is earning $400,000 now and millions after alone on speaking tours. Bill Gates was a multi-millionare before he started Microsoft which a lot of people conveniently forget or just don't know. I'm not saying Gates is dumb but his success alone does not guarantee he is smart.
From looking at neapolitan's posts he is a smart guy being a Harvard doctor and might could have been a CEO if he wanted. They might not become multibillionares but certainly make more than just being a rank and file engineer. You definitely need to have malleable morals to be ultimately successful CEO.
Fake as fake could be
uh, no. your job is to provide a vision for your employees and to provide the tools and training required to get the job done right the first time.
using email to b* about bad decisions after the fact isn't your job. it might be all you are capable of, but that's because you don't understand your job.
in fact, the necessity of said emails shows, unequivicably, you didn't do your real job of providing vision and overseeing the management of your resources.
thank goodness for monopolies and politicians on the take.
If they're identical and one doesn't have an evidence stamp (and is valid) but the other does, but they still match as far as ansii letters go - I think you can verify their "veracity"!
Any attempt to do otherwise is an attempt to prove a 'technical' difference that will let you get away from the law while everyone else just knows you're fucking lying.
PS: Interesting captcha - BONUSES!
The 'regular' executives dream - unless he's not worth a couple billion already...
She has sudo privileges on her own box. It has Hardy Heron on it. I don't let her touch mine.
(You should all be smirking now)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I don't think the text is actually a leaked memo from Bill Gates. Do you really think the richest man in the world is going to spend an hour screwing around like that and then write up a long, polite e-mail about it?
Software Inventor
Slashdot linked to the wrong source. I saw this on reddit yesterday which linked to a better source here and a PDF of the actual document from which it was taken here. The seattlepi author states that this is from leaked documents in the anti-trust lawsuits where the company was forced to turn over (and make public) internal documents. The listed text in the blogs is just one of the emails in the PDF document.
Now being slashdot the moderation is totally biased. It is clear everyone that "claimed" this to be fake simply didn't do their homework (like carefully RTFA or in this case the blog spam) and instead went for the cheap MS flamebait karma.
The failure in logic is also horrible. Bill Gates doesn't sound like the kind of guy that would write this therefore it is false! /sarcasm. Why would Bill Gates release such an email to the public while he was trying to market a product? Do companies go around expressing their own dissatisfaction in their own dog food? Sure if you want to piss off your shareholders and give your competitors a marketing edge to drive you into the ground. If Microsoft purposely released an email like this, it would just give companies like Apple legitimate marketing material to use against Microsoft. That is suicide. Microsoft would probably have never released this email if they had the choice. It is just that they were lucky enough it wasn't dug up until 4 years later. (Which makes sense. It probably would never have been dug up because slashdot has proven that people don't RTFA.)
But never mind, continue along with your MS bashing. There's no way Gates has an ounce of integrity or usefulness to the software world.
Here's the actual document I found by Googling "Comes v Microsoft", and following a link on the top of the Groklaw page for the case. The Groklaw page has an incomplete set of exhibits, but if you follow the link at the top of the page you can get everything.
From the email:
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. I can't decide..."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."
- Bill Gates
Is this Linux/Ubuntu/Fedora/RH's fault? It sounds like this is something on the TODO for those software packages. Making sure software works out of the box is something the author needs to do.
On the flip side, I personally find the "installers" on Windows really terrible if not inadequate where they just a step above "xcopy" but so far below being real package validation. The best that happens on Windows is that it includes so many extra tools that all needs are covered. I'm not sure why anyone would want to copy what Windows does since it leads to a lot of problems if not abuse.
/home is a bit more brief than C:\Documents and Settings, but who cares when you're using a mouse.
I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.Uh, what's not clear about that. True,
What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.6 seconds. Even billg's time isn't worth so much he can't wait 6 seconds. Plus, this is a ridiculous thing to complain about if you only have one instance of it happening. It could just be the network, and there's little anyone can do about that. If he's concerned, he needs to do some larger scale usability testing to see if there's really a fixable problem.
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.Uh, Bill... were you connected to some sort of internal Microsoft Autoupdates server? Shut your trap, man!
ARP, usable? I DREAD going in there because the control panel always takes soooo long to open, and if you choose Windows Components, you may as well go to lunch. And then I have to find what I'm looking for in a HUGE list with no search function (not that anything search-related by Microsoft every works anyway. Have you ever tried to search for files with a particular word in them?)
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 patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information. Okay, I have to agree with him about hotfixes in the list (though there's a checkbox for that now), but look at the last sentence. Shouldn't it be: Some of the patches just say things like Q810655 instead of saying "see Q329048 for more information".And what's his beef with the file system. NTFS works great. It's fast and stable and journaled. I like it as much as ext3.
Yes, I'm nitpicking on typos, but clear communications is a must if you want to get something done. The email is nothing more than an thoughtless rant that he probably never read before sending. While acceptable on slashdot, such writings show a horrible lack of leadership when it's a manager sending something to subordinates.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but like democracy, is the worst there is, except for all the rest. M$ needs people who take a lead in making it better, not yet another user bitching, especially at the top. What Microsoft HAS accomplished just seems that much more amazing when they have to deal with crap like that. I hope Mr. Gates was thoroughly embarrassed when that e-mail was leaked.
That email alone destroys any credibility Microsoft ever had or ever will have.
If the CEO of the company can't use the goddamn thing, then nobody can.
I've said it here and elsewhere for years, and I'll say it again.
Windows is CRAP!
Linux is ALSO CRAP!
BUT Linux is FREE CRAP!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I have my doubts that this is written by Bill Gates. The main give away is this memo was supposedly written on 1-15-2003, and the memo makes mention of having to download Media Player 9; which wasn't even realeased unit 1-23-2003.
.... Original Message ....
From: Will Poole
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 1:27 PM
To; Amir Majidimehr; Chris Jones (WINDOWS)
Co-" Dave Fester; Rick Thompson
Subject: FW: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame
Guess we should start working on a list of things that need to be fixed withe
web sites. W1J, and with windows,and identify owners. Billâ(TM)s frustration is not
unreasonable.
He guesses? That right there is the problem with MS upper management, they're clueless. Not only is BillG's frustration reasonable, it's a usability disaster. If a tech savvy person the likes of Bill Gates can't for the life of himself download and install an app smoothly, how the heck is grandma or your average cubicle dude supposed to do it? This reminds me of a recent post on MSDN's Windows Mobile Team Blog. They were asking what people thought of Zune functionality integrated into WinMo's media handling capabilities. They were asking this over a year after the iPhone's phenominal success, get a fucking clue already!
I agree that this doesn't really sound like Gates so I suspect it is a forgery. That said however, what Gates has NEEDED to do for the past several decades is EXACTLY THIS but he hasn't been doing it enough if at all. Mac usability is what it is BECAUSE Steve Jobs spends a huge amount of his time browbeating his staff over just such sorts of details (though since he doesn't wait years between doing it he's usually nitpicking over more trivial things by this point). Usability has to be forced into a product by someone who has the power to keep it from shipping until the developers get it right. The designers are too close to the problem and don't see it from a users point of view who doesn't understand the internal workings. If Gates had spent more time doing this and Balmer less time intimidating employees into rushing things out, Vista could have been a popular product that people would clamor to install instead of avoiding it like the plague.
TFA is hilarious, or would be if it really was from Gates and not just someone venting via a forgery...
It means relatively nothing that is was submitted as an exhibit in the case, especially since it is digital evidence. How it got there and the authenticity thereof are not reflected solely in web-links, that you have to dig through the entire transcripts to find and even then it can be hard to discern.
But hey, I guess your "research" makes you "trustworthy".
Irony: Captcha: Idealism.
I repeat!!!
There is a Mac fanboi with mod points!!!
So please say nice things about Steve Jobs and Apple until he's used them all up.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"No, we are not wasting time fixing security holes in Safari! If the dumbasses already think that OS X is secure then who am I to tell them otherwise?"
I wonder if 'billg' has ever had to go through Windows Activation...
I wonder if I can email him to get some kind of credit for the YEAR(S) OF MY LIFE I've spent on the phone over the past decade reactivating various Windows boxes... (At 10 minutes a call it adds up.)
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
Emails like this from executives, product managers, engineering managers are not all that uncommon - it doesn't mean they are going to quit using product x - its probably more a plea for whatever group owns the product being complained about to wake up and fix whats wrong.
Honestly if people don't write emails like this (whether customers or internal people) things sometimes go un-noticed.
If anything, it sounds more like it was written by his Office Admin (secretary). I work for a decently-sized Seattle based company and we frequently receive internal emails "from" our CIO when they actually originate from his OA.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would imagine your assistant could be considered a legal representative (in a business context), so even as evidence in a DoJ case, while it says it's "from" him, it may not necessarily have been written by him.
As my reply to myself above says, they are absolutely identical after all, so it's not like this is a .pdf file randomly circulating on the internet, both are certainly from the same scanned-in hardcopy. The origin of the original document is what's curious - I can only assume that the plaintiffs wrangled it out of MS.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"of CAD without having to use an unsupported intermediary (wine)."
If you haven't heard of VariCAD...
http://www.varicad.com/en/home/
It's not AutoCAD, but if you have a machine shop, or are adept with generic CAD tools...
Check out their demonstration...
http://www.varicad.com/en/home/products/demo-videos/
Another is CAD Schroer...
http://www.cad-schroer.com/
BOTH of these have Linux and Window's clients. Both are powerful, and both are out of my price range for full products, but CAD Schroer offers a free-use personal license.
If you've got Apple Computers, but need parametric capabilities and don't want to pay TONS of money you can check out Punch! ViaCAD:
http://www.punchcad.com/products/viacadpro.htm
They have a non-pro version (ViaCAD 2D/3D 6), for about $99, and also have decent range of architectural/residential CAD apps, too, with .exe and Universal Binaries. The 3D solids tools for ad-hoc and precision work are giddiness-inducing, at least for me.
And, if you need 3D Digital Prototyping...:
http://www.punchcad.com/index.htm
http://www.punchcad.com/index_pro.htm
http://www.punchcad.com/products/shark.htm
http://www.punchcad.com/products/sharkfx.htm
Now, if the Linux/Open Source community would seriously hit up ViaCAD and also IMSI:
http://www.turbocad.com/
http://www.imsisoft.com/Products/3DModelingCategory/tabid/470/Default.aspx
and IMPLORE them with real solid conversion opportunities, they *might* feel inclined to explore porting options, ESPECIALLY if business-minded programmers can induce them to look at QT/Trolltech and other technologies that might help them port or even rebuild their apps. But, for that to happen, we probably need to see a SIGNIFICANT curtailment or reduction of seats held by some major incumbents.
And, we need to get MORE
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
So every time my store manager tells me that toys is a mess and that the store is a miserable failure automatically makes it true? Our secret shopper report stated that we were the best store in the region, but according to our store manager we sucked at everything. It's my manager's job to tell me the faults of the store. It's Bill's job to say that there can be a better way to do something. Nothing to comment or see here.
But regardless, I suspect Linux would not come out on top here, not with average users.
Which is fine; it's by geeks and for geeks. Although I definitely appreciate the work done with things like apt-get, people shouldn't feel too superior over Windows, not in relation to this memo from Bill Gates, anyhow.
This is absolutely true. I have used the rename trick for many years to avoid reboots without knowing the actual reason for why it works. Where is my "informative" mod points when I need them?
BTW, it is possible to clobber a file opened for exclusive access by another program if you do it using an UNC path (ask me how I know this)
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
I all ways thought business people/CEO jobs were to come up with the ideas/make decision on ideas and then motive others to except their decision and get them to work on it or get them to change their approach to doing things for the betterment of the company. He does not seem to motive much change in his memo so I am left withâ¦wowâ¦not muchâ¦here other then a help desk complaint note. I do understand that he is a great thinker and came up with good ideas to help his company. But he does not seem like a good motivator, and does not provide ideas on how to improve the product. Its more of I donâ(TM)t like thisâ¦why do it this wayâ¦extra. How would you like it changed, someone might ask? Or leave it the same because no one else knows what to change it too. Any ways, my two cents.
"I wonder if this thing can edit these video clips... OK, let's try this 'Applications' thing - *click* 'Multimedia'? Looks like it only plays them... oh wait, 'Add or remove programs' *click* Oh! There we go..."
Now imagine that on Windows XP SP3. Or for long-lasting comedy, a fresh install of XP SP0.
I'm still not convinced. That ellipsis is in a pretty convenient position.
But with the default widths of the Firefox tabs, all I can see of the headline is "Bill Gates Chews Out M...". Since when did /. decide to comment on Bill and Melinda's amateur hour?
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates --
Ya, no way this was written by BG, the author is pathetic, dumb and rambling. Gates has better things to do with his time. This is a red herring.Can I mod down the story itself? Flamebait
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I have been using the windows Vista final since the day it was released and also have it on an older notebook that doesn't officially support it. Neither machine even has a dual core processor. Vista is faster and more stable than XP was on both. I am not a Microsoft fanboy, I am just stating my experience with Vista. Saying it is a complete disaster is factually wrong. A complete disaster would mean that every single person that uses it, has serious problems, which is not true. Sure some people have had problems with it, but then again some people said XP was a disaster soon after it was released too.
being technical and business usual
such a cool guy
he let things get done by his man
not just by his hand
that's why he gets big
while he's on top
if i could have met him personally
just wondering if he still can write asm or code something now after some yrs at the mgmt level
or read some internet-guage like WTF..hehe
Makes, not really, but Debian does modify so I say that qualifies as their own because it's unique to them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel , and GNU has their own stab at it but Debian is the only one that ships as far as I am aware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
Any and all content posted above may be ignored, considered irrelevant, or otherwise dismissed.
In 2002, I wrote a paper on Nero for my Roman history class. His persecution of christians was given greater impetus in mid 60s Various forms of torture, such spectacles as gladiators, lions, and even human torches to light his garden parties are regarded by historians as facts and are not even disputed. What is disputed, though, is that Nero was responsible for the fire in order to make room for his own ambitions. The conclusion is that it is highly unlikely.
If you are interested in investigating this further, go to a local library and find a book on Nero - I used several books in my research. I don't have that paper any longer, neither do I have the references. For now, even try googling "nero christians human torches" and you'll see various results.
Obviously there would have to be some fuel other than the human body, which by itself doesn't combust spontaneously.
Well, I certainly feel silly for him.
"I could have written MovieMaker in Excel macros over the weekend!" (okay, the last one is a stretch. ;)
Hmmnn.. OK. I accept this challenge.
Mind you, I will need a LONG weekend.
Might I be allowed to use BASIC?
And no Pinoqachole-corrupted geeks.
iPods are goggles.
I don't therefore I'm not.
M$ is as dead as toaster ovens!
Billie is gone gone gone .. blah blah balh ... good ridense! Should never have been borne I'd say.
And Stevie B.? .. just a door nail! Never should have breathed Seattle's poluted air ... or even the air of Mars for that matter.
What a waste these two!
Toodles
Google: moviemaker +site:microsoft.com
Dear Bill, I found it for you. http://www.google.com/search?q=movie+maker+download+windows+xp&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Regards, Your Customer
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
We'll miss you Billy G.
Dedication:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBkxRM9AWJk
Tom
YOU ARE SUBVERTING THE TOPIC.
Of course your assertion is correct. Have I not said that already? If not, let me be clear:
IN TOTAL, Windows is more usable than Linux.
Ten-four good buddy?
IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE, Synaptic and apt-get are superior to anything that Microsoft has ever offered towards that purpose.
Roger?
Why are users always bitching that their computers are "slow" and so forth? Because Windows lets any application install anything it wants, anywhere it wants, screw with the registry however it wants, load whatever memory-hogging additional "features" it wants, and within short order, the user -- not knowing how to clean up -- ends up with a machine bogged down with ungodly amounts of crapware.
Linux distros, on the other hand, do not have this problem and never will.
Users bitch because they're clueless. Otherwise they would have fixed it themselves. Linux is not immune to this.
The installation process on any Linux distro will let the software do all these things too. Package installation tends to be done under root privileges. Packages can put files all over the file system, screw with /etc and add themselves to autostart[1] all they want. They just don't tend to because the current package maintainers aren't evil.
Imagine a day when Linux is popular enough to be targeted by adware makers. "Ubuntu users: FREE screensaver! Just install this package."[2] The user will follow any instructions they are presented to get the thing installed, including typing their password into the gksu prompt. If you have the user's co-operation, you can sneak memory-hogging features onto a Linux system as easily as a Windows system.
If Linux becomes popular enough for companies like Apple to start making software for it, they might insist on adding their own update daemon to the user's autostart, rather than using the distro's built-in package manager. Not because they have to--Windows has Task Scheduler which nobody uses--but because they want to retain control. They might not like the idea of relying on other people's code. Or they might want the ability to do things like push their own web browser as an automatic update to all current users of their music player.
So, whilst currently Linux packages tend not to load your system with crap like Windows installers are known to do, I wouldn't say that Linux will never have this problem. The current community is not conducive towards it. But there's no technical defence against a clueless user.
-----
[1] System-wide via /etc/xdg/autostart or per-user via the gnome equivalent of ~/.kde/autostart.
[2] Simplification. Ubuntu users could be told how to install packages like Windows users can be told how to install programs.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker. So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.
What it means to have to click on that folder is that you have not provided adequate leadership on programming, the primary function of your software company. Because you have established no rules to make installation convenient for your paying customers, as the filesystem hierarchy standard does for Linux users for free, your programmers just toss their junk together in whatever way is most convenient for them. After all this time, to have failed to create an analogous Windows filesystem hierarchy standard, is atrocious, negligent incompetence.
College should teach programmers how to write efficient algorithms. You should teach them how to integrate those algorithms into a larger project, with your own model of advanced object-oriented programming, which you should have developed but have not. Then, every one of your programmers would know the same convention for the entire path of any downloaded install binary. It appears from your complaints in this article that you have not even defined a directory naming standard. I wasn't planning to be so hard on you for the many failures of your products to increase my convenience or to perform their advertised functions, but after your literally monumental public displays of incompetence, you have the audacity to whine that all the good programmers are foreign.
You are not a good programmer. You have failed to demonstrate the expertise to define standards that would ensure that useful information is made available by your various product teams to the other teams, for your buzzword "interoperability" to be meaningful within your own brand. You are therefore not qualified to speak at a junior college computer science faculty barbecue about good programming, or to anybody else about any other aspect of technical aptitude, because you have demonstrated a complete lack of any. The spectacle of you speaking to Congress as a technology expert is an embarrassment to the nation. I do not believe a corporation is entitled to the individual right to Free Speech which is incorrectly asserted as defense of corporate donations to politics. I do believe that the irrational exuberance of the dot-com boom that led to unprecedented price-to-earning ratios, which necessitated the eventual correction of the dot-com bust, was a direct result of that inappropriate tolerance of corporate interference in government. Politicians who should have been neutral were instead at the very best, shading the truth to say favorable things about their information technology donors whenever the subject was raised, and investors foolish enough to believe that anything they said about that industry was said as representative of the people concluded that then-current stock prices were likely to be justified by near-future earnings, and were taken to the cleaners.
You, of course, are not a big enough fish to be single-handedly responsible for all, or even for very much of that, but you are the most willing public mouthpiece of the information technology industry's thirst for cheaper foreign laborers. I want you to shut the hell up about all immigration laws, for one thing because your software demonstrates your abject lack of qualification to make any of the statements that you have previously made, to Congress no less, about the lack of talented programmers. You don't know a good programmer from Shinola, and nobody in the Congress would help you pretend that you are, excep
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IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE, Synaptic and apt-get are superior to anything that Microsoft has ever offered towards that purpose. Roger?
In the specific case of sysadmins installing patches or installing new software they know the name of, yes. I also love my package manager, and all the good people who do the packaging.
But "THIS SPECIFIC CASE", the case where Bill Gates is taking a look at the typical consumer experience of a normal end user finding and purchasing software and applying necessary system updates for the software, then no, Linux is not obviously superior, and I suspect it's inferior.