3 ms·

Flip side is the well-known story of when billg actually answered a customer service call: https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/that-time-bill-gates-answered

• gist 9mo ago
  That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering users.
• spudlyo 9mo ago
  I was involved in that particular incident, and wrote about it on HN when the story was making headlines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957936#958365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957936#958365
  • Dilettante_ 9mo ago
    Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then normal employees having to go in and actually do it is very in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your story did not actually come off like this, I just found this a funny interpretation)
    • spudlyo 9mo ago
      Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it knew its master's hands were on the keyboard.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      • Dilettante_ 9mo ago
        My obvious guess is that it was under low load because a lot of people were there watching instead of at their desks using it?
  • em-bee 9mo ago
    that comment should be added to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights except, since the hightlights are sorted by the time of the comment it's not going to be seen by anyone unless they read all comments to the end...