My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.
This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.
This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count
1. Leader escalates issue to his team
2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution
3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem
4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan'
5. nothinghappens.jpg
From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.
Given that the way the company worked was the cause of the problem, sending the email company wide would have caused more confusion that solve the problem.
> My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.
And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".
I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who is singularly product focused.
Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs.
They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.
Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues.
An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'.
That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him.
1000% actually.
He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink).
Like a cars coming out of the factory with missing parts ... blame it on the guy on the line?
No. Something is deeply wrong.
I really like Gates - but it's beyond shocking how these cultures work and how myopic they are.
I worked for a Fortune 50 - and it's pretty amazing to watch how an army of actually smart people with 'one eye' can be so competent many ways, but blind in others.
I don't like to put Jobs on a pedestal but obviously this is something he understood (even then with gaping holes).
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience.
I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
I have struggle to understand how someone could come to that conclusion, maybe I missed something?
The email is a 'rant'.
It's a 'list of broken stuff'.
It's not:
1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken
2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome
3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address
4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.
5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.
It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.
It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.
This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.
A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..
Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)
Most of the thread is lower level staff specifically trying to address the raised issues. We have no idea what conversations this triggered among the exec team about the broader strategic issues Bill raised.
It's actually funny that you're thinking they are 'lower level staff' because that's how it seems by their reaction, but those are literally top Execs.
That's really how these orgs often work.
'Dear Leader Is Angry' will set the whole org into a tizzy.
I've seen this countless times - 'XXX said it', and the littlest thing will get moved.
Often - this is good, it means the org is responsive to the direction of the founder, but it's 'abused' all the time. I think leaders forget their responsibility and truly believe that 'their whims' are essential.
25% of the US are looking at the insane things POTUS is putting out and believing there's some kind of 5D chess magic, when it's actually -5D - aka extraordinary bad leadership. That's the 'power of power'.
'Self Awareness' is probably the #1 superpower of a leader, because nobody is going to keep them in check.
Becuase it was a typical MS user experience. MS was shipping their software on 25+ install floppies. Having an install fail on floppy 19 was a nightmare. Getting a fax modem that shipped with the PC to function could also be a problem MS would blame the vendor and the vendor blamed MS.
It’s not like his moviemaker experience was a rare occurrence.
As for Jobs, I bought a Mac Mini last summer. I wanted to use iMovie to clip the edges off of a movie file. I clipped the edges, but was unable to discover how to save the resulting file, and gave up. Microsoft's Movie Maker has a menu item to save a file.
I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
Yes - this is a mind boggling design conceit of Apple that goes back almost 50 years.
They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.
They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.
We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.
I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.
It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.
Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.
"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.
There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.
yeah it's like one shortcut and a trim bar in QuickTime so that's the right tool for the job. iMovie isn't much harder but is a palaver with its whole pre-rendering thing just to export what should be a trivial edit.
Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.
There's a menu item. I believe it's File > Share > then you choose how (save to disk, email, export to photos app etc).
File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.
The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.
But it didn’t. And Microsoft is worth $3.5 trillion. So maybe actually everyone should take a leaf out of the Microsoft book.
When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
That says more about the US software industry than anything else. You “win” by being hostile to consumers while you lawyer up and bribe the powers that be.
It’s the only OS available for most computers. Sort no one cares about Linux or a BSD. Normal people only know Linux and Mac and you can’t get MacOS with your non-Mac.
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
Indeed... Their core product seems to be being an unavoidable blackhole of money where they are taxing all of society by virtue of inserting themselves into our lives by having acquired or squashed other competitors
Really? You’ve got this guy Dave Fester on there saying he was going to own the website issues and was coordinating everything to do with how the products surfaced on the web. That seemed like pretty clear accountability and ownership to me. What do you want? Some more performative mea culpas?
I feel like if he said, I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.
But as I write this I realized that even that wouldn’t work...as they will create a committee and hire an consulting agency whose exec was in the same sorority as them. And the consulting agency will recommend teams to be laid off. And then the same exec will come in pitching the board to buy a startup which has a great team and apparently was invested by a VC who went to same class of Wharton of that exec.
I've been around these execs outside of professional settings. All they care about is their status (money) and getting blowjobs from their aides. I am not exaggerating. They do not give a damn about how software should work. The execs with humble beginnings often get sucked into the culture and eventually exhibit the same characteristics as the others within 5-10 years. As they say, dopamine is a hell of a drug.
For sure. This is consistent with how I would expect the TikTok generation to communicate. I would also add that not only does he know nothing about software development, but he knows even less about the basics of using his own computer.
Even today Microsoft can't get their shit together on a decent user experience. Tried to use Azure since I needed to code sign a binary on Github. My two previous accounts setup on Azure errored out with obscure errors and there was no way to fix them. I had to create a new account just to sign up for Azure Artifact Signing (which is now waiting for Microsoft to approve - no updates in a week). I don't know how anyone figures any of this out without reading pages of documentation. I honestly believe that no one actually cares about their products or user experience at Microsoft.
I often wonder how CEOs and executives fail to notice how obviously broken their products are. This e-mail thread is quite illuminating. Most "work" in there is figuring out who will be blamed for it and why it shouldn't be your team.
MovieMaker was discontinued in 2017 and replaced by ClipChamp. MS acquired ClipChamp and it was integrated into windows in 2022. So basically closed, will not fix.
Based on how long corporate email chains go (without clearly accountable people), you're 50/50 on waiting for the feature to get fixed versus the feature becoming deprecated in a few years.
I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.
The logical outcome of an escalation like this is that there is no single threaded leader for this user experience, the org charts are wrong, and one or more sr. leaders are culpable. But no one wants to hear that.
This is a good and bit surprising one. I have a hard time believing the CEO of Palantir has this many generational points I agree with, Zuck too, but I do.
Musk has ingratiated himself with parts of the political spectrum, or at least had since he later alienated them. I have no idea what his current standing is.
So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.
I read through it and had a few things I've flagged in my head - the ego fluffing, repeated usage of "Millennial" to the point of redundancy, and the framing of things in terms of "big picture", but can you elaborate on "deep brainwashing techniques"? I'm genuinely interested. This entire email thread feels a bit surreal to me
The judicious use of the royal we, is where he triggered my spidey senses. Mark seems to deflect it in his response, also using the royal we. But yeah, the ego fluffing, the fixation on terms, and the dialectic generalizations, this all adds up to some controlled attention-gathering ...
> For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days.
(Nick Clegg)
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.
Once they started passing the blame, almost immediately, I would expect the first thing to be a new email from Gates saying “Bob, you’re doing this, Frank, you’re doing that, no excuses, get it done.”
In 2002 after spending my first 30 minutes on windows XP (previously 98, 95 and 3.11 user) I realized that Microsoft will never improve their UX. Every new os will be different, but not better. So I left then and there and never looked back, after some distro tourism I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and use it even now.
I feel, many times, the way Bill did in that email. Seems most people don’t mind or care.
I wondered how anyone successfully filed for unemployment a few years ago when I had to. But many seem to do it successfully.
I tell my wife that I pay too much attention to the details and have a low tolerance for poor work. I wish I didn’t notice though as it seems like a nice life!
Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)
Don't underestimate working for the medium size business nobody has heard of but prints money doing something semi boring. They won't change the world but it's often a reliable paycheck without all the BS
This happens when you have people at the top of the chain who don't use the product and people at the bottom who are afraid to speak up, or use it so much they can't see the problems.
I suspect plenty spoke up. But once filtered through 35 layers of management “this is terrible and our users will hate us” becomes “best thing we’ve ever done, users love us”.
Microsoft can no longer engineer a software product, it simply cannot build anything innovative. It can certainly buy other companies and use what they have built. But even then they will over time ruin the product.
> I decided to download Moviemake and buy the Digital Plus pack r so I went to Microsoft.com
That "r" from "Moviemaker" pushed to the end of "and buy the Digital Plus pack" displays the universally shared experience of writing something, then deciding to come back to add something else and fucking up the first sentence.
I will give Bill this, he does know how to play a typical user. Yeah, MS has some shenanigans (putting it mildly) in its birth and climb, but it was obvious from that that he was a relatively competent nerd, programmer etc., and that he was trying to paint the thought process of someone trying to put together family videos not "hurr, where this go, what this do?" like a Neanderthal.
Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.
The reason why Apple won is Steve Jobs cared about quality and was an asshole about it and the inertia from that after his death has not entirely decayed yet.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.
Yes. When I was working at Apple, I was developing some animation stuff for Keynote. I came in to work one day, and my build was broken completely. Turned out that Roger Rosner had demonstrated this animation feature to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs hated it, and before then end of the evening the code had been stripped from the Keynote build.
“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.”
That does not sound like something Bill Gates would say…
The email reads as if parts of it were dictated, and subsequent parts of it were taken from realtime notes, i.e. a third party is noting, episodic, everything Gates did during that attempt to install MoveMaker .. and then it was refactored into a "From Bill" mail at a later point ..
Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.
Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"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."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.
As it says at the end, this was evidence at the class action suit "Comes v. Microsoft Corp.", which was eventually settled by Microsoft by paying $180 million, after many years of litigation.
This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.
1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg
made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?
And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".
I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who is singularly product focused.
They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.
Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues.
An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'.
That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him.
1000% actually.
He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, not even realizing even the implications of what he was seeing (because it would require total rethink).
Like a cars coming out of the factory with missing parts ... blame it on the guy on the line?
No. Something is deeply wrong.
I really like Gates - but it's beyond shocking how these cultures work and how myopic they are.
I worked for a Fortune 50 - and it's pretty amazing to watch how an army of actually smart people with 'one eye' can be so competent many ways, but blind in others.
I don't like to put Jobs on a pedestal but obviously this is something he understood (even then with gaping holes).
I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.
The email is a 'rant'.
It's a 'list of broken stuff'.
It's not:
1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken
2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome
3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address
4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.
5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.
It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.
It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.
He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.
'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.
This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.
A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)
It's actually funny that you're thinking they are 'lower level staff' because that's how it seems by their reaction, but those are literally top Execs.
That's really how these orgs often work.
'Dear Leader Is Angry' will set the whole org into a tizzy.
I've seen this countless times - 'XXX said it', and the littlest thing will get moved.
Often - this is good, it means the org is responsive to the direction of the founder, but it's 'abused' all the time. I think leaders forget their responsibility and truly believe that 'their whims' are essential.
25% of the US are looking at the insane things POTUS is putting out and believing there's some kind of 5D chess magic, when it's actually -5D - aka extraordinary bad leadership. That's the 'power of power'.
'Self Awareness' is probably the #1 superpower of a leader, because nobody is going to keep them in check.
I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.
They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.
We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.
I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.
It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.
Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.
"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.
There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.
And it shows.
He had bad ideas too but was much better at holding the line on good UI (unless the bad idea was his). We haven’t had that in a long time.
File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.
The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.
That’s how great products die or become a nightmare. Every team keeps on passing the ball to other team and nothing gets fixed or done or improved.
When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.
But as I write this I realized that even that wouldn’t work...as they will create a committee and hire an consulting agency whose exec was in the same sorority as them. And the consulting agency will recommend teams to be laid off. And then the same exec will come in pitching the board to buy a startup which has a great team and apparently was invested by a VC who went to same class of Wharton of that exec.
Stopped halfway through thinking "Damn, this Mike Beckerman is a piece of work. Doesn't understand English grammar let alone software development."
Looked him up...
>Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok.
Not surprising at all.
It’s insane how much runway a monopoly can buy you.
And it get worse from there. This is funny as hell. Billg eating his own shit.
Windows philosophy: don't get sued by AT&T
https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...
So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.
Zuck has no one.
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.
Once they started passing the blame, almost immediately, I would expect the first thing to be a new email from Gates saying “Bob, you’re doing this, Frank, you’re doing that, no excuses, get it done.”
Nope. Nothing like that.
I wondered how anyone successfully filed for unemployment a few years ago when I had to. But many seem to do it successfully.
I tell my wife that I pay too much attention to the details and have a low tolerance for poor work. I wish I didn’t notice though as it seems like a nice life!
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)
Microsoft can no longer engineer a software product, it simply cannot build anything innovative. It can certainly buy other companies and use what they have built. But even then they will over time ruin the product.
That "r" from "Moviemaker" pushed to the end of "and buy the Digital Plus pack" displays the universally shared experience of writing something, then deciding to come back to add something else and fucking up the first sentence.
I've been there too, Bill.
Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.
That does not sound like something Bill Gates would say…
Because he doesn’t talk like this in public? I promise you no big executives talk the same in public as they do internally.
----
Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"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."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.