p2pnet news | Products:- As the world knows, Microsoft supremo Bill Gates is slated to permanently relinquish his iron grip on Microsoft this coming Friday to devote the remainder of his life to doing good works.

He’ll be leaving the company to the tender mercies of Steve Ballmer.

With that in mind, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of Gates’ home-town newspapers, is devoting page space to a retrospective “to give a clear picture of the Microsoft co-founder’s role inside the company, as a gauge of the impact his departure will have”.

“I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues,” says Gates in a 2003 email.

Gates wanted download Moviemaker and buy the Digital Plus pack, so he, “went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.”

And, “The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.”

There follows a long rant about his problems, including >>>

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

And >>>

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

The email goes on. And on. And on until finally, Gates writes:

“So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

“The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

“When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.”

And at the bottom of the Intelligencer post,”When we were concluding our interview last week, I showed Gates a printout of the e-mail and asked if he ever got Movie Maker to work,” says the author of the piece, Todd Bishop, adding:

“Gates noted that Microsoft plans to include Movie Maker as part of Windows Live, so people will get the program when they download that online package. The company isn’t confirming that officially yet, but it’s not a complete surprise. See this Wikipedia entry and this related post on LiveSide.net.

“As for the message, Gates smiled and said, ‘There’s not a day that I don’t send a piece of e-mail … like that piece of e-mail. That’s my job’.”

There you go

(PS – Great pic of Bill. Does anyone know who made it?)

. .Stumble It!

Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Sometimes, software isn’t so magical. Even for Bill Gates, June 24, 2008

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 4:51 am and is filed under Product News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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