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Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker (2003)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- laborcontract 4y agoI miss the days when Bill Gates was considered to be an absolute savage.
- readthenotes1 4y ago[flagged]
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- dsabanin 4y agoThis is pure comedy. Someone needs to put it into BG voice with AI, and make a clip, they'll get a lot of views.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoWhy? Does BG have a particularly interesting or comedic voice? How many people actually know what the guy sounds like. I think it should be done in Gilbert Gottfried's voice.
- shapefrog 4y agoFrom spending too many hours a day using Microsoft products, I always thought Bill Gates was the enemy who made stuff was (personally) intent on making me go insane. It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoIt was a bit of both. For example, while he wanted his stuff to run well on his systems, he preferred that the competitors products run significantly worse - or that they don't run at all.
- lostlogin 4y agoRestarting daily and seemingly thinking that was reasonable.
- shapefrog 4y agoProtip: restarting twice a day - once at start of day and once over lunch reduced the number of crashes and lost work by about 75%. Also might have been holding it wrong.
- lostlogin 4y agoIs this a windows v Mac thing? I can’t remember the last time I restarted (other than a software update). I can’t remember the last crash.
- timbit42 4y agoThis was common when people were still running Win98SE. It wasn't needed on WinNT, Win2K, WinXP...
- shapefrog 4y agoWinXP for me was a voluntary daily restart with the occasional involuntary restart + every 6-9 month reimage from blank to maintain a functional system. Windows 10 is (relatively speaking) a dream, except for sleep and USB devices being a bit stupid sometimes. SSD's and way shorter boot time also makes the inevitable reboot to troubleshoot way less painful than the XP days.
- 4y ago
- fileeditview 4y ago"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." I love that quote. Shows a common problem: devs, architects and managers designing platforms but never asking users how they want to use it. At least the end results indicate that. Edit: a link with actual text of the email, not screenshots divided in Tweets.. https://web.archive.org/web/20210616012008/https://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210616012008/https://blog.seat...
- darkwater 4y agoThen, when someone dares to talk about "personas" or designing UIs to have actual users in mind, developers will rage that it's just bullshit, people playing with crayons instead of doing real work etc etc
- pedro2 4y agoI really doubt the issue is devs. If they don't want to tank their velocity they have to open an issue to fix such problems, which will stay open and never looked at.
- the_other 4y agoI'm a dev. I have asked my product and design colleagues to use personas at my last two roles... and they don't. If I had more traction, I'd get the ads and marketing teams involved too so the models in the ads matched the personas we were designing around. hashtag not all devs hashtag n=1
- darkwater 4y agoObviously it's not all devs, but there is a kind of dev that is exactly like that. Look at the comments on the KDE article [1] that was on the frontpage yesterday. Yes, Linux power-users are for sure a skewed and biased subset of devs BUT they do exist. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390655
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoLink to the HTML page: https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov... Looking forward to read by 2040 how absolutely insane we were to share screenshots of text in a 2x2 layout with continuation in "replies" and login pop-ups on characters-constricted platforms.
- kleiba 4y agoI can tell you the same thing today.
- geek_at 4y agoThe character restricted platform is the main reason why people upload screenshots instead of text. Posting URLs is also not the best idea because users need to leave the site/app to read it which not many people will do and some sites (fb) activeley push down these things in your feed.
- mike_hock 4y agoIt's like a Linus rant.
- yreg 4y agoNot angry enough. I wonder what Steve Jobs would say.
- sph 4y agoYou probably mean it in a negative sense. I am of the opinion that the downfall in usability and consistency of Windows 10+ is because there is no CEO at the top ranting about their experience and asking "what the hell went wrong for this to happen." I bet this is the same thing that is happening at Apple right now, with consistency starting to go downhill post Jobs. The difference between mediocre and outstanding software is a Product Manager at the top that demands a certain level of quality in the final product, and doesn't accept any excuses, though they're willing to accept that a flawed process is what creates a flawed product. I feel I have been repeating this idea in one way or another on this forum because it's still fringe and almost unheard of in the open-source world, if it were not for Torvalds and his uncompromising stance towards not breaking the user-space, ever, lest you face his wrath. There are not enough BDFL in software worth their name.
- europeanguy 4y agoThanks for sharing. Has the situation improved? I don't know. Fortunately I only touch windows at work in order to launch VirtualBox
- Seanambers 4y agoFeels like windows has regressed since Windows 7. Usability wise its gotten way worse. I guess the top was windows 2000, XP, Vista(after some time) windows 7. Microsoft actually shipped a windows version(win8) which had a touch first interface this got installed on millions(billions?) of desktop computers and nobody liked it. It's insane to think about.
- klabb3 4y ago> Feels like windows has regressed since Windows 7. Ah, but fortunately Microsoft has realized this so there’s a way to access the control panel from the previous version. Every time you click “advanced” you get transported 1 window releases back in time, like a Russian doll. When in doubt, open minesweeper.
- dplgk 4y agoWindows 2000 was perfect. Super fast, minimal UI, rarely crashed.
- rezonant 4y agoHas it improved in 20 years? Yeah.
- alkonaut 4y agoSomewhat, yes. They at least have an embryo of a working store now for example. So for the things that microsoft package that do work through the store, that's at least quite functional.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> So for the things that microsoft package that do work through the store, that's at least quite functional. However, they are shown among third-party apps, a lot of which are scams or low-quality. For all the flaws that Microsoft.com has, I wouldn't expect to find scams or malware on their downloads page.
- forgotmypw17 4y agoAlternatively, you could have pirated it: Download a zip file, extract it, and run the installer inside.
- mh-cx 4y agoTitle is missing "(2003)".
- incanus77 4y agoAnd you wonder why the Mac really started to make inroads at about this time.
- smetj 4y agoAnd in 2022 literally still a status quo ...
- shp0ngle 4y agoNote that this is from Windows XP era, which nowadays people look with nostalgic glasses as "golden age" of Windows.
- speedgoose 4y agoOh yes, I remember it as the operating system with a toy style, that struggled to redraw windows under load or even move the mouse cursor. It was a huge difference compared to Mac OS X.
- M95D 4y agoYes, I remeber when a busy system would show a hour-glass mouse cursor to tell you it's busy, instead of just freezing and not reacting to any clicks. I also remember the title bar "this program is not responding". All gone now. It's still better than Linux where keys gets "stuck" repeating and the mouse freezes too.
- shp0ngle 4y agooh that’s the famous out-of-memory issue that nobody seems to care about and the stock reply is “buy more RAM”
- yread 4y agoTo be fair linux at that time tended to hard freeze (as in cursor wouldn't move at all in X) if you ran out your disk quota
- Nextgrid 4y agoThis just shows how bad the current shit-show has become if we prefer the shit-show from 20 years ago.
- anakaine 4y agoThe current state is world's better than where it was, well, at least Win10 is. Win11 is still a mystery to me. Unsupported hardware etc.
- nhinck 4y agoIt is absolutely mind blowing that windows update was thought to be the platform where you should download apps. I guess it shouldn't really surprise me given that they are still making the same mistake 20 years later.
- thombat 4y agoWhen this mail first came to light all I could think was "I wish my CEO was spending his Friday nights trying to use and understand our product, and providing critical feedback and ass-kickings as appropriate". Instead of driving our product (mobile Comms) to be better our senior management were using BlackBerries. Little says "walk away" to potential customers better than receiving mails that end with "Sent from my (competing device)"
- itvision 4y agoIt's funny in 2004 he mentioned that filesystem and registry are a mess. In Windows 11 they are an absolute mess. Thousands upon thousands of files/directories scattered all around the system.
- pedro2 4y agoHave you ever used Windows Vista? It is still a mess nowadays, but it has been polished - deduplication for WinSxS, search bar for Registry.
- solarkraft 4y agoImagine his look if he tried other parts of Windows. They're absolute experts at making user hostile solutions. Either their UX people hate UX or their programmers (/programming managers) completely ignore them or do the opposite of what they say out of spite. It really feels like they hate users.
- mukundmr 4y agoOne of the more annoying things with Windows for me is when when Windows Update fails stating that KBxyz failed to install. It is a nightmare to find the right version of the updater from Microsoft's website. In my case, the particular update didn't have a standalone updater. Instructions like the ones provided at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-download-and-install-windows-10-cumulative-updates-manually https://www.windowscentral.com/how-download-and-install-wind... are a life saver, but how does an end user work their way through this? Linux and macOS handle updates more gracefully.