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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."
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.
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Maybe, but then again he still had to work there and keep the company working effectively. If this stuff had leaked out to everyone in the company, who knows what it would have done for morale? Keeping this kind of stuff in the family is often the best thing to do for the family.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Wait... is it really possible that we should give Gates some credit for acting responsibly?
I agree with you on the writing style, but you never know, since this was an internal document, and people use different writing styles for different purposes. I'd also note that when knowleadgeable people do usability testing, they normally feign ignorance -- they test as if they were a user with limited knowledge.
I'm not upper management, but I've sent (and seen) similar emails when a prject went FUBAR.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Reading the letter, it really doesn't sound like anything Gates would say. He's not an end user. As you said, he certainly should know why rebooting would be necessary when updating part of the OS.
That being said, Gates has nothing to worry about in regard to his personal reputation. There is no need for him to "talk himself up". Outside of the slashdot community and certain parts of the tech industry, he is highly regarded as a successful businessman and as a philanthropist.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
BTW, folks, how about replace on slashdot that Bill's mug with Ballmer's physiognomy? :)
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.
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.
That's exactly what I said. Finding the product is the same on Windows and Linux, but at least Linux *has* the index and package manager right there, so it's no worse.
Sam ty sig.
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?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
Except for that whole Windows Update forcing you to reboot your computer bit, the download locking up his computer, the problems of garbage turning up in the Add/Remove Programs utility but not Moviemaker, the rant about Add/Remove being the only decent thing left with XP.So no, other than about half of the email, it has nothing to do with XP.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
How do you "know what you're looking for" without searching the web exactly?
It's worth noting that Microsoft would love nothing more than to bundle as many free utilities as they could, but their hands are tied thanks to those who whined to the DOJ.
Why is searching the web a problem? If I need to find an app in Linux that does whatever. Almost always searching: "Linux <whatever I want to do>" will give me at least 1 or 2 applications that do that. I could in fact replace Linux with KDE, Gnome or XFCE depending on which DE I'm using.
And to say the one shouldn't have to search for an application to run is absurd. No one is born knowing which applications do what in Windows, they learn either from searching or asking someone. Which is what they would do in Linux too.
My guess would be that your perspective is somehow twisted by a superior knowledge and/or appreciation for Windows.
For example:
except once, and I had used a beta driver, so you can't really blame Windows for that Actually, yes, you really could blame Windows that using this driver resulted in a crash. A more graceful solution doesn't really take all that much imagination.Likewise, you may not have ever had occasion to experience some of the particularly common nasties:
You may have never lost a motherboard - otherwise you would have experienced the painful fight-the-bluescreen vs reinstall decision.
You may not have used IE 4 (or 5, or 6) as suggested by Windows - otherwise the pop-ups and spyware would have created a mess you would have had to clean up by now.
You may not have automatic updates turned on - otherwise you would have been forced to do an undesired reboot at least once by now.
You may have disabled UAC, or never used Vista at all - otherwise you would have been prompted as many as four times to approve the same action.
You may not ever Alt+Tab in Vista - otherwise you would have seen 'Explorer is not responding' at least once by now...
The list goes on and on and on...
Chances are, either your skills are high enough that none of the above is painful, or you just plain don't mind it - taking the good with the bad.
Others are in a totally different boat, my friend, I assure you.
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.
...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
Ask 100 random computer users on the street and 98 of them will tell you Outlook is for email, Word is for typing, Excel is a spreadsheet, etc. etc. Maybe 10 of them will be able to tell you what their media player is called. I think some of you guys need to step out of your shells and realize just what counts as "mainstream" now days.
And if you had no idea what it was, would it be for creating programs or creating video and graphics?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I was inclined to think it was fake too until I read the FA. Follow the links. The content comes from public records and Bill was asked to comment on the situation, and he obliged. Unless, of course, a professional journalist for the Post-Intelligencer has enough balls to put his career on the line to fake everything he posted?
That's completely separate from the name making obvious the function, wouldn't you say?
But they don't know what those apps are for because of their name, they learned their function first, and then they learned their name. Ask somebody who doesn't know what Excel is what they think it does, and you won't get anything close to a spreadsheet.
A better example would be to ask 100 random people what Visio does, probably less than half could tell you.
http://www.mhall119.com
Almost always searching: "Linux " will give me at least 1 or 2 applications that do that. I could in fact replace Linux with KDE, Gnome or XFCE depending on which DE I'm using.
You do understand, of course, that KDE, Gnome, and XFCE are windows managers and not operating systems right?
He was trying to say, he can search for "Gnome " in a search engine just as easily. The difference being, if he finds something interesting, he can use a package manager to install it and get to work.
If he was using, say, Windows, he'd most likely download an install file, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, click 15 different buttons, have his personal information sent to some corporate server, get nagged to buy the upgraded version, download a crack, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, have a rootkit installed, have 10 different pieces of spyware installed, have his personal information sent to some criminals server, be bombarded with pornographic popups, throw his computer out the window, go outside for a cigarette with hands shaking in rage and smash his head off the nearest wall until the endorphins cause him to forget why he was so upset.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't think we should neglect to point out, also, that the Add/Remove Programs dialog in Windows can't really be used to Add programs... (well, it does give you a button to push if you're installing from a CD or a Floppy... as if anyone is installing programs from floppies). It certainly isn't a repository of programs for Windows that can be downloaded and installed quickly and easily, and it doesn't help you to install programs you've already downloaded. So calling it Add/Remove Programs is kind of a usability problem on its own.
I'm pretty sure that very, very few people have ever used Add/Remove Programs in Windows to add a program, since the people who would need that kind of assistance would have Autorun turned on anyway, so the install program would launch when they put the CD in, long before the Add/Remove Programs dialog finishes loading.
Hence, Add/Remove Programs in Windows is really just Remove Programs. And considering that 3rd party tools (e.g., Revo Uninstaller, etc.) do a better job of actually completely removing programs, it really doesn't even do that very well.
Which is precisely why so many people end up pirating software like that. Sadly, it's much quicker and more convenient to just download the first crippled software that does what you want, then find a key to un-cripple it than it is to actually keep looking for a free one. And you know there's no way in hell the average geek (or most other people for that matter) is going to pay $50 for some small program he might never use more than once.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
OK, every once in a while I see these kinds of posts. I really don't know what to say.
I've been using Linux for more then 10 years. I've installed it on pc's from 386's to modern multicore servers with 4x cpus. I've got an office full of workstations running Kubuntu that are used every day, some 24x7x365. In all these years, and the hundreds of pc's I've installed some version of Linux on, I have NEVER, EVER seen ANYTHING like what this and some other posts mention. I've seen the install crap out in the middle due to a bad cd burn. I've seen incompatible hardware. I've seen qwerks with some chipsets that required a custom boot parameter to work. But this wholesale failure I have never seen. Ever.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
- OpenOffice
- GIMP
- Movie Player (admittedly you have to install a couple of packages to full-format support, but then you play virtually anything. it's also easy to install VLC).
- Evolution
- K3B
- F-Spot
- CD-extractor
- CD creator
- Trnasmission
And so many others are *directly installable* under Applications-Add/Remove. Not so easy to miss.
So do you compare those with what? Paint and WordPad? The only Windows pre-installed software worth something is Media Player. And Internet Explorer (to download firefox).
PS. This is about Windows XP. I have no experience of Vista.
You don't have to do it, apt does it for you :-)
Seriously, why do you care?
apt-get install k3b, and it just works!