When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates (devblogs.microsoft.com)

This thing isn't uncommon. You email a CEO and get put into "executive escalation" if you don't seem like a crackpot. I've done that once before and it was useful to cut through the armies of outsourced CSRs that read from a script and refuse to deviate and send you in circles.

It does help if you start your email with your value to the company (i.e., I spent $X over $Y time period at your company)

the blog is full of other ways to trick your support cases while not showing at all you deem yourself superior

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...

They let them speak with Gill Bates instead

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...

LOL, I worked for a Microsoft outsourcer in the late 90's doing Word and then VBA support. I would get this a lot! My stock answer was, " I'll tell him the next time we have lunch, but you know the cheap bastard always makes me pay."

Don’t they have phone service in Little Saint James?

> Of course, the information was never actually passed along to Bill.

HOW DARE YOU!!!

What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company, find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what their email structure looks like (pete.whatever@company.com) and just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner at the time.

Why must we lie to customers?

One can only think if all the customer complaints really went to Bill Gates, how much different Microsoft would be today. They still operate in a world where they think once they build something, people would just use it. CoPilot is the latest example.

Now they can just put them through to BillGPT.

On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a response (in the case of Bezos a legendary ‘?’ forward to the team).

Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.