TOO TOO good. I LOVE it. Here’s an “epic” e-mail Bill Gates sent to some of his top people a couple of years ago, complaining about the decrepitude of Windows. No surprise there. We’ve all been fighting with Windows for years, and yet it seems that Uncle Bill had only just realized his flagship product is Crap 7.0 as late as 2003. Take a look (comments interspersed), and while you do–imagine this e-mail was sent just yesterday. Not much has changed since Bill sent this email.

—- Original Message —-

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

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.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

Dude, Bill, this is why Google creamed you in the search war. Seriously, ever searched Live for something and then searched Google for it? The FIRST thing I do when installing a fresh Windows load is to change the default search provider in IE7 to Google.

In fact, I often find links to Microsoft downloads and patches FASTER USING GOOGLE than using Microsoft.com.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. [...]

Sorry, that just sounds like Bill Clinton. Is Amir his distant cousin?

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?

Agreed. Take your cues from Apple, Billy Boy. Smooth, easy, and QA’d like crazy.

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.

Two words: Trustworthy Computing. ‘member that?

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?

Bill Gates reboots his computer every night. LAWL. Sorry to sound like such a Mac fanboy, but I seriously CAN’T REMEMBER the last time I rebooted my Powerbook. (I do reboot Parallels almost daily, though.)

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Updale again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

Oof, Bill, you’re the man. I mean you are the MICROSOFT MAN! Why aren’t you running Vista yet, you bad boy you? (I said pretend the email was from yesterday, calm down people.)

[...]

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Welcome to my world. Microsoft has made many consultants like myself a lot of money because we know how to decode all those KB cross-references. Bill–maybe you should start an I.T. consulting firm like I did! Figure out how to find the “right patch” and you might just make a good employee here at Best Technology Strategy. OK, enough cocky. Back to the email.

[...]I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

He sounds like one of my (elderly) clients with a bad case of discount web shopping-site spyware. Bill, what sites have you been visiting that have been taking advantage of your client-side script host? Come on, hang in there buddy.

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?)

Yeah, Microsoft.com is a terrible web site. So is Live Search. So was MSN. It’s a pattern. For two examples of search done right, see Google and (ahem) Spotlight. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Sharepoint, see WordPress. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Office Communications Server, see Trixbox. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Windows Mobile, check out the iPhone. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Vista, see Leopard. Oh and not to mention Movie Maker versus iMovie. The list goes on.

Yes, Bill, I’m glad you realize that usability matters. Let’s hope your successors share your attitude.