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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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 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
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.
They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :)
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.
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.
I've used QuickTime for that, which has the expected menu items.
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.
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.
"I don't know what it means to "own website issues""
made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?
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.
Read the whole thing and all I saw was zero accountability, zero ownership and zero consequences.
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.
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.
they pivoted a few times since then in terms of what their core product is, though :D
Read it.
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.
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.
Every good business is one MBA away from enshittification.
Wrong Michael Beckerman. Source: I know the TikTok Beckerman, but not the MSFT one.
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.
That must be a different Michael Beckerman. This one was an executive at Microsoft in 2002...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Beckerman graduated in 2001, although it says nothing of any employment at Microsoft on his Wikipedia page... so you might be right?
It specifically says he worked for the US gov during that period, so your comment needs an edit
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.
I love the fact that 2 days after the ceo surfaced basic usability issues there was still no tangible action plan.
It’s insane how much runway a monopoly can buy you.
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.
Can someone in Microsoft confirm my suspicion that this thread is still going and nothing was fixed?
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.
No one from Microsoft will ever confirm, but the status of Windows "OS" says it all.. ;)
>So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated
And it get worse from there. This is funny as hell. Billg eating his own shit.
Unix philosophy: tools should be simple and composable
Windows philosophy: don't get sued by AT&T
> So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated
Based on my interactions with Microsoft support, it makes me feel a little better that I get the same treatment as the CEO.
Culture flows from the top. Bill doesn’t take responsibility in his email, so he’s teaching everyone downstream to pass the buck like he does.
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.
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.
https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...
For all the pontificating, Zuckerberg is disliked more than Musk. According to this 2025 survey: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/19/how-ameri...
Holy crap, Thiel is using deep brainwashing techniques in his mail to Zuck and his people. If you know, you know ..
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 ...
[delayed]
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 was reading through it and figured it had to be AI generated... But ... it's not? This email from billg is unhinged! Hilarious though.
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
The bit about updates not truly being critical if you’re behind a firewall doesn’t age too well lol
This thread should be on the first page of every book on microservices.
Just as an aside, that Amir Majidimehr taking part of the conversation is Amir of audiosciencereview.com fame :)
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.
2023 post, recounting an incident from 2003.
Could it be the reboot thing is legacy code from Windows 1.0? Wait, then Gates himself was at th wheel.
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.
This rigor is also upheld to the ODM too. This is why we like to work with them, we all come out learning a lot at the end of the project.
How did/do you feel about that?
Good. One of the things I loved about my years working at Apple is that everyone I had dealings with really cared about the user experience.
Was the animation objectively bad? like was it bad for the user and he was right or were you wronged?
You don't have to be an asshole to get better quality work. But it's a great way to chase off talented staff that don't need to work with assholes.
“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…
It’s from an email chain published as part of a 2007 lawsuit - so it looks like he did indeed say it.
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 ..
I still reboot my desktop daily lol. I was born anti-tab pro fresh start
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.
This happened under him.
----
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.
Peter Principle.
Reads like Nikita from tonsky.me lol
Interestingly, Gupta didn’t reply at all, despite being named on bill’s original email directly. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/anoop/ He was natural-user-interface director at the time
Protecting his izzat
LOL
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Anyway to know this is real?
You can verify it yourself if you read until the end.