Bill actually mentioned this in in another interview (can't find that now, I think it was around the time of his retirement from MSFT - it could have been at an internal event).
He basically said something like - I don't know why people think that the email is something weird or unique. This is my job and I do it all the time.
My personal take - I actually blame Bill for this. The real cause of the situation is how things had been allowed to drift to this stage over several years and Windows versions. I'd put the responsibility on Bill, as CSA and ex-CEO, to have stopped this, rather than send flame mail one late night. Also, if you see the follow-up email threads, none of the VPs or GMs were empowered to make end to end changes either
Usability is hard. This superficially simple example crosses many products / teams (being Microsoft, we are talking about 100s of people involved). A small startup has the same challenges because your engineers build features, not user experiences. It takes a great product manager to advocate effectively for the user.
Nope, actually, it should present you with a choice between a normal install and a customized install, so that people who don't want to make any fiddly little choices about links and start menu crap just have the thing install itself and then run the program, getting you down to about 4 steps.
It's not at all hard, it's a philosophical problem. They simply believe their concerns are more important than the users. It's not hard or complicated, they're just philosophicaly fools because they believe what they want matters. It doesn't, and they can't wrap their heads around that. It doesn't at all when customers suffer because all they get depends on customers getting what they need. It's a simple concept that they don't understand because they are deluded into thinking they are worth more, by virtue of their status and positions. A delusion that they spend most of their energy defending. You simply cannot serve two masters, and this is Capitalism at it's finest.
I don't think you can blame capitalism for this. Apple does this stuff right, and they make money.
[aside: I paid $15 for iMovie 11 the other day, and I think I entered my App store password to confirm purchase, iMovie dropped into my dock, done.]
Continuing, it's more likely that MS execs, managers, just have the wrong incentives. I have never worked at MS, but I'd imagine you get promoted for having people under you, for shipping software, for meeting deadlines. None of these things directly address user experience.
Is there even a high level user experience person at Microsoft, outside of say, XBox, which obviously does have some serious UX work in it?
Surely the fundamental problem here is more that Microsoft have never had to learn how to keep users happy. They had their monopoly handed to them on a silver platter and their technology was only good enough that users didn't abandon them (not that they had a lot of other practical options).
Apple had to do this stuff right, because if they don't a Mac would be just like Windows with a different logo and nobody would bother. The necessity of having a better UX was baked into the company ten years ago. Microsoft seem to be doing better with Win7, but I'm not sure they've really learnt that lesson yet.
You hit what I think is a critical point but with some anti-Microsoft bias.
My view is that Microsoft itself simplified the PC experience quite well for a set of users during the 80s and early 90s. With DOS and Windows 3.11.
During this time, a lot of people who were not "computer experts" at that time were able get things done with the computer. Even if it was "painful" to do something (all those commands in the command prompt), people would do it beacuse they will achieve some result.
Then the Monopoly became evident, and around the time of Windows 95 Microsoft realized they did not need to make things simple to users, but instead users had to learn how to use their tools. This is what you get right; Microsoft did not need to do anything between Windows 95 and Windows XP to get money. People needed to use Microsoft products because other people used them and if you dared to use Qpro, Apple products or anything else, then your workflow was not compatible with the general workflow of everybody else.
This is were Apple (I guess, Steve Jobs) got it right. They looked all the "paper cuts" [c.f. Canonical] that people thought were "normal" (remember the "normal" BSOD?) and focused on doing products where people did not have to go through all those issues. More importantly, they learnt how to do that. How to detect those "paper cuts" and how to fix them.
In the 20 years that Microsoft monopoly served them, they lost the ability to do that. They lost the ability to know how to make things easier for the users; I suppose all that got mixed within the convoluted bureaucracy within the company. You actually can see some of that in the way Bill's mail is treated: The concerned people do not "get it", what is wrong with Bill's scenario; they just open a "ticket" to fix the Media player problem... and surely a download of Media Player appeared on Microsoft's front webpage next Monday. But they did not attack the underlying problem.
I agree with you that with Windows 7 Microsoft is doing better. But as you, I also think that they still have not "got" the talent they lost a long time ago of being able to make things easier.
I always thought that it would have been better (from the point of view of technology progress) if Microsoft had split in the 3 sub-companies when they were sued back in the day. That might have helped to streamline the bureaucratic processes within the company.
Philosophically, you can blame Capitalism, at least in the abstract. Every man for himself is why they have these problems, and that is the heart of Capitalism. Because they don't think of society and really only their own rewards, they are oblivious to the experience of their users. Yes, Capitalism is the very essence of the problem, at least our current version of it, which is why the groups with the greatest amount of capital are generally the worst at concern for customers.
When Windows was better than the competition, it was winning in the marketplace. Now Google and Apple are better than the competition, so they are winning in the marketplace.
Capitalism is working just fine.
Unlike Microsoft, by contrast, the DMV has no competition and cannot go bankrupt. That's where things start to get very bad.
It is working, its just far, far from what its users really need. Just like Windows. All about a better user experience and we as leaders are missing the point. Nobody is setting a useful standard, nobody with power is looking at it from the bottom up, which is what separates Apple from Ms when it comes to UI and UX. The president is just like Bill in this situation, essentially considered the leader but without any power to changed flawed ideology.
> When Windows was better than the competition, it was winning in the marketplace. Now Google and Apple are better than the competition, so they are winning in the marketplace.
hm???
this contains at least as much factual errors or imprecisions so gross it could mean anything that there are sentences. That plus the whole MS Windows vs Google comparison makes no sense at all.
Chrome is growing at the expense of IE, Android is crushing Windows Phone, Google Docs forced Windows Office to go online, Google Desktop search is better than Windows Desktop search, and Gmail has taken share from Hotmail and Outlook.
And now Chromebooks at $28/user/month are poised to take a ton of Redmond's other revenue:
Just look at the thread on this email and you'll get the sense of the typical org finger pointing downward spiral.
But look at how Jobs handles something similar: "When you're the janitor, reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."
People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he is in charge of everyone involved.
It's bizarre to see someone who knows he is doing everything wrong and is flailing about to stop it, yet is drowning in money coming from his mistakes.
Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years, surviving off the phenomenal success of early Windows, and it has been fascinating to get peeks inside the conflagration.
I'm a Mac user and I love Office (over OO and iWork).
> as frustrated as anyone else about the problem
It's not "a" problem. It's a large organization with tons of products, and some are more sucky then the rest.
> is completely powerless to stop it
He wasn't the CEO anymore when he wrote this. Also, even if he were the CEO, he can't go in and fix every annoyance himself. He's a leader, he needs people underneath him to do a good job. When they're not, he needs to remind them, that's what this email is.
> is drowning in money coming from his mistakes
If it weren't for Bill Gates, we might not be having this conversation...
> Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years
Have you looked at Win7? It's pretty good. C# 4.0 is much better than Java. Visual Studio kills anything else on the IDE market. Xbox rocks. A friend just got a Win7 phone, and the UI/UX seems to work very well, better than Android, about as good as iOS.
1. Seriously, try iWork ;-). Not only does Pages kick Word's butt, it can sit in the middle of a Word-based workflow (e.g. preserving change tracking).
2. Visual Studio doesn't kill Realbasic (from a tiny developer) or Xcode. Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good.
3. Win7 is a tactical success but a strategic failure.
If you want an end-to-end picture of just how big a hole Microsoft finds itself in, go to http://microsoftstore.com
1. Their back-to-school incentive is a free XBox with each PC sold. Aside from just how big a loss this must represent (given the XBox 360 is, itself, a loss-leader) parents are going to LOVE this. Here's $25k college tuition and you want a computer with a free game console?
2. Because they're selling a weird hodgepodge of third-party products they need to provide things like a "recommend a PC for me given I am this kind of person" tool, and it makes no sense (e.g. I picked "develop with power" and got no results).
3. The chief selling point of the PCs they're selling is "no crapware".
4. Try to figure out their Win7 phone comparison tool.
And this is what happens when Microsoft goes out and deliberately tries to build an imitation Apple Store.
Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs
What is that statement based on? It is an absurd idea. If "more polished" means better code then this statement is just not true.
I just completed an internship in a big technology company and the code produced there (for automation/control in the energy and utilities sector) is quite certainly "more polished" than any iPhone application or whatever else people develop in Xcode (certainly not automation/control applications). And they use, amongst other more specialized tools, Virtual Studio.
Xcode is an IDE with a very small user-base, alone because of the fact that the Mac still has a small user-base within the industry. It probably even still has a small user-base in the developer community (aside from the hipster apps world).
I would love to see some evidence that apps developed in Xcode are usually "more polished" than apps produced in Visual Studio.
And in my personal opinion Visual Studio, especially IntelliSense kicks Xcode's butt every day. And same with MS Office...
Note: I don't use an IDE unless developing in C/C++, C#, Java or Objective-C
I never understand people who think that VS is the greatest IDE. Sure, when I first started using VS2003 having been doing all of my C coding on the command line prior to that point it felt revolutionary and the best thing since sliced bread. Having used every iteration since then for my day job programming C# applications, I actually cannot stand VS. My dev machine is a dual core 3GHz processor with 4GB of RAM. Yet, compiling a reasonably sized project takes an age.
Frequent recompilations which are unnecessary as no code has changed. I can't make a code change while the application is being debugged. The sliding panels really get on my nerves, it's slow to open projects and to close projects. It's difficult to get fine grained control over the build process within the IDE itself. Every single "visual" feature, such as ASPX designer is dog slow to switch into from code view, or back out of. This has been the case with every version of VS and every dev PC I've had for the last four years.
However there are some things which I like about it - it has a good plugin API (Resharper is awesome) and a nice integrated debugger. My biggest issue is that it is a resource hog and incredibly slow.
I've also coded in Xcode and before that Project Builder for even longer than I've been using VS. The lack of published plugin support is annoying in Xcode but that is probably my biggest gripe. I make no comments about the level of "polish" that an IDE allows a user to provide as I don't think the IDE makes a difference. I would however say that I find myself probably twice as productive coding in XCode than I am in VS.
I don't know much about the WYSIWYG parts of VS, I only write textual code.
If your machine is too slow, get more RAM and an SSD. It's your daily tool, it's worth the investment.
"I don't think the IDE makes a difference" - Huh? Then why are we having this discussion =)
I myself spend the vast majority of my time in XCode [writing a database], using VS only to maintain the Windows port and C# client libraries. I find that I'm roughly equally productive in both, but if I had a choice I'd take VS over XCode.
Yes your'e right that the compiler != the IDE. The compile time should be attributed to the compiler, of course, but VS has a habit of invoking the compiler unnecessarily, even if no source has changed.
I don't really use the WYSIWIG aspects either but all aspects of the UI seem slow and cluttered in my experience. And whether or not you and I use those aspects of the IDE is somewhat immaterial. It is called Visual Studio after all and touts the visual designers.
My point regarding the specs of my dev machine were that it is a fairly decent, new machine and the load being placed on it really isn't that high. Comparatively I run XCode on a 4 year old laptop with 2GB RAM, slower disk, slower processor and it is far more responsive. (And FWIW the compiler is faster too, especially now they are using LLVM).
When I say the IDE doesn't make a difference to the level of polish you can apply to an application what I'm trying to say is that if you're writing mostly textual code as I do too, then the IDE doesn't really factor into the polish of the application. Although, I suppose I'm contradicting myself as if I'm more productive in XCode then I have more time available to polish, so there is an indirect relationship there :P
At the end of the day, they're both decent tools and and everyone will have their preference. My comment was really just because a lot of people have started using XCode in recent years, having moved from VS due to the "iPhone effect" and I see an awful lot of comments and posts about how much better VS is, and my experience contradicts that :)
> Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good.
Don't you feel like you're ignoring some very important variables by saying that? For example: Cocoa vs Windows Forms, Cocoa vs WPF, etc?
No, because I'm actually saying the reverse of what you think I'm saying. I believe Cocoa tends to operate below the level of typical Windows APIs -- low enough to have complete control over the UX but high enough to make things that ought to be easy, easy.
Windows tends to be friendly for lousy developers (typical systems integrators, of whom I have a great deal of experience). At a very low level it doesn't make much of a difference -- good coders will deal with the hand they are given.
I think you can make a case for selection bias in that Mac development (the old Mac OS toolbox now called "Carbon" and Cocoa today) is too difficult for hacks which filters out a lot of the crap that people who can cobble together junk using Visual Basic or whatever. (There used to be a website devoted to really awful Mac apps, most of which were built using Realbasic, but lousy Realbasic apps are cross-platform :-) )
> the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs.
There may be some sort of selection bias here: Mac users are much more sensitive to polish than Windows (or Linux) devs - they have chosen a Mac over a Dell and paid more for it. I am happy with console apps, as long as they do what I need them to, and my Atom-based Acer netbook supplies about 99% of my computing needs.
With the exception of Keynote, Numbers and Pages have not behaved well for me when given large documents. Numbers in particular struggled with datasets that Excel would handle very easily. I would rather use Google docs than bother with Pages / Numbers.
I'm certainly no advocate of Numbers. Pages I use for pretty demanding stuff and I've had no problems. Word has problems editing a simple letter, but it certainly may scale to very large documents better than Pages -- but if you're doing that kind of thing, I'd recommend Framemaker.
>>but even if they havent, someone other company would've done so.
This is a hypothetical statement and there are n different ways our world could have diverged. Better not to speculate on how things could have moved forward.
In any case, it didn't look it was a natural progression of technology before Windows became popular as the preferred OS for a personal computer.
>>> If it weren't for Bill Gates, we might not be having this conversation...
>> but even if they havent, someone other company would've done so.
> Better not to speculate on how things could have moved forward.
It is impossible not to speculate. The GGP is just speculating in the opposite direction as the GP. We simply must back our speculation with reasons. Personally, I like the GP's reasoning.
It's easy to make claims about branches of history that never occurred. It seems like an absurd scenario where computers weren't widely adopted, but it's not really so absurd if you think about it.
I do not think anyone is suggesting that he goes in and fixed it himself, but it is up to him to ensure there are processes in place to make sure this does not happen.
The Xbox is a piece of shite from a hardware standpoint. It comes with an insanely huge power brick that could be a medium-power game console in its own right given its size and weight; the hard disk clip doesn't work and of course there's Mr. RROD.
Why did it win? The same reason why anything from Microsoft wins: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
This mail is from 3 years after Gates stepped down as CEO. I think you are trying to use this to reaffirm your personal beliefs about MSFT, rather than use this form your beliefs about the company. You seem to think that because MSFT made Gates a ton of money, the company should be perfect. The fact that you find it bizarre for a founder to be actively involved in his company's products and working to highlight areas needing improvement is, frankley, bizarre.
> People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he is in charge of everyone involved.
You're focusing on the negative and forgetting the positive. Yes, Windows can be counter-intuitive, but it has enabled millions of people in the world to be more productive. This is why most of the planet is using Windows.
> Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years
A lot of companies would love to be able to live for that long (and by the way, it's more like 30+ years).
Yes, you will be right at some point in the future, Microsoft will fall. It doesn't seem to be in the near future, though, considering their recent blow out quarters.
I'm a Mac user myself, but come on, let's be fair here.
>Yes, Windows can be counter-intuitive, but it has enabled millions of people in the world to be more productive. This is why most of the planet is using Windows.
Personal computers have enabled people to be productive, not Windows. And, the reason most people use Windows is largely for reasons other than the merits of the software.
He basically said something like - I don't know why people think that the email is something weird or unique. This is my job and I do it all the time.
My personal take - I actually blame Bill for this. The real cause of the situation is how things had been allowed to drift to this stage over several years and Windows versions. I'd put the responsibility on Bill, as CSA and ex-CEO, to have stopped this, rather than send flame mail one late night. Also, if you see the follow-up email threads, none of the VPs or GMs were empowered to make end to end changes either