Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.
Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.
I've been around these execs outside of professional settings. All they care about is their status (money) and getting blowjobs from their aides. I am not exaggerating. They do not give a damn about how software should work. The execs with humble beginnings often get sucked into the culture and eventually exhibit the same characteristics as the others within 5-10 years. As they say, dopamine is a hell of a drug.
For sure. This is consistent with how I would expect the TikTok generation to communicate. I would also add that not only does he know nothing about software development, but he knows even less about the basics of using his own computer.
MovieMaker was discontinued in 2017 and replaced by ClipChamp. MS acquired ClipChamp and it was integrated into windows in 2022. So basically closed, will not fix.
Based on how long corporate email chains go (without clearly accountable people), you're 50/50 on waiting for the feature to get fixed versus the feature becoming deprecated in a few years.
I know people rag on Windows programs a lot, but ClipChamp is the worst, most bloated piece of software I have ever used in my life. It's so confusing how bad it is.
I honestly think that "doing nothing" was actually their best outcome. If they had actually been serious about solving it, it would have been something like
Situation: there are 14 competing and incompatible ways to obtain Windows software (owned by 23 different teams)
Ridiculous! We'll come up with a single unified interface
(After 3 years of development and delays) Situation: there are 18 competing and incompatible ways to obtain Windows software (owned by 31 different teams)
As it says at the end, this was evidence at the class action suit "Comes v. Microsoft Corp.", which was eventually settled by Microsoft by paying $180 million, after many years of litigation.
This is a good and bit surprising one. I have a hard time believing the CEO of Palantir has this many generational points I agree with, Zuck too, but I do.
I read through it and had a few things I've flagged in my head - the ego fluffing, repeated usage of "Millennial" to the point of redundancy, and the framing of things in terms of "big picture", but can you elaborate on "deep brainwashing techniques"? I'm genuinely interested. This entire email thread feels a bit surreal to me
Notice how often the keyword repeats. It is not repeated to communicate information, but to communicate affective state.
If you don't understand how it works, imagine the above letter instead said "Trump", and read it again.
Don't focus on what the letter says, instead on how it feels. Actually go and read it again, start to finish. Don't read past this line until you did.
Do you see how each time the keyword repeats, it affects your emotional state just a bit more? Can you start to feel it?
I'm assuming you hate Trump, but if you don't, just pretend you do. Then read the same letter one more time, imagine it said "Trump" instead and that the Republicans, which you really hate, just got re-elected. Do read it one more time.
You must understand that the keyword is repeated for affective impression.
Now read the letter again, one last time, slowly. Pay attention to the keyword, and how you feel each time it repeats. Imagine it said really "Trump", and that you really hate him, and what he did to your government.
The keyword does repeat, but there is no redundancy. It is repeated for affective impression. It only feels surreal because you are emotionally disinvested.
If you actually read the letter over and over, and really imagine how it feels, as if it were of deep concern to you, then you will understand. You seem smart, so I'm sure you will understand.
Musk has ingratiated himself with parts of the political spectrum, or at least had since he later alienated them. I have no idea what his current standing is.
So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.
> For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days.
(Nick Clegg)
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.
> While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation.
My god these people… I didn’t even know you could be that self-absorbed. It’s jarring.
“Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.”
That does not sound like something Bill Gates would say…
The whole thing reads as if it were taken from notes, i.e. a third party is noting everything Gates did during that episode, and then it was refactored into a "From Bill" mail at a later point ..
I often wonder how CEOs and executives fail to notice how obviously broken their products are. This e-mail thread is quite illuminating. Most "work" in there is figuring out who will be blamed for it and why it shouldn't be your team.
My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.
This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.
Given that the way the company worked was the cause of the problem, sending the email company wide would have caused more confusion that solve the problem.
From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.
For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals.
Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).
Exactly. Jack Welsh’s management philosophy just further incentivizes doing what you can to bring everyone else (ie the company) down to make yourself look better.
Ironically, they could have learned from Jack Welsh to separate the product divisions and make redundant teams on each one to solve the ownership issues.
When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
This comic was made a loooooonnnnnnggggg time ago (back when I worked at Facebook). It was actually a great place to work then, but that company no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
Well, except then the person who volunteered to "own website issues" clarified that they meant one specific issue (download links) among the five or so that Gates identified.
This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count
1. Leader escalates issue to his team
2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution
3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem
4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan'
5. nothinghappens.jpg
I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg
It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)
The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?
Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.
>"The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?"
Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual effort mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.
Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.
As you get larger there is a fire everyday and ever more competing priorities on which fires get put out.
How much money does movie maker bring Microsoft? Now which executive would want to prioritize movie maker so much that they would directionally alter the company to fix this? Consider the issue that the execs had was fixing all the issues involved a huge number of teams.
Discredit to Bill here but I honestly think he was the only one who had the power to fix this. A Jobs-like figure is the only person with the organizational power and freedom to drive details like this to completion. Anyone else would end up in a power struggle
I drown in support tickets daily that used to go nowhere. Then people started realizing that I knew what I was talking about and not some standard business user. Now I still have to open tickets, but get visibility of the people who know what they’re doing on their end (having been moved up from lowly support to oversee some ticket filling company that doesn’t know crap). We get tom complain to one another how shit is broken, wait mandatory change periods and then get something working by exploiting loopholes because some process was developed and someone put a lot of money behind it.
Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)
I’ve had “Boss I can fix this in one line of code.” situations, but nobody of 6 people wanted to make the call despite involving themselves excessively.
So nothing got done.
So the temperature on the issue went up.
So management whose failure was their own could only think of engaging more managers and processes….
Never ended.
I work at small companies now, less money but I enjoy it more. I just fix things and everyone is happy.
+1 on having the same observation but my conclusion is that the leaders failed first. Fear drives these organizations. The leaders created much of that fear. I have fearlessly (newly hired) taken on large responsibilities. Trust me that most people were right to be fearful and only through luck and good fortune did my responsible actions not bankrupt me or land me in jail, albite by a small margin.
Both will eventually develop a strict hierarchy where you're only accountable to people up the chain of command, not down. There is no way to prevent that because it's a lot easier to keep one person satisfied than a whole team you're supposed to lead, so almost every manager naturally switches to working that way.
The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.
You forgot the part where the leader gets more and more frustrated, it’s like a game of hot potato, if you’re the last one holding the potato when Leader finally cracks, all of it lands on you!
I have been this owner AND this employee, at different times in my career. As the employee, it's as you describe -- having goals described to the team without actual tasks being assigned to individual employees/teams is a recipe for things not getting done. As the owner (especially with a small team) nothing is more aggravating than having employees who sit around waiting to be told exactly what to do, with no real concern for how the company provides value for its customers; employees who think they're underpaid no matter how much they make and therefore do the bare minimum unless they're getting a bonus/raise/promotion.
Yeah I totally get it. In this situation you could see employees burning out because of the lack of management or leadership and the chaos of the company. Like everyone cared at first and tried real hard but eventually almost formed a learnt helpless. The implicit message was don’t try, just do the bare minimum and avoid trouble. We were also paid minimum wage. Many employees were doing unpaid hours as well.
If you provided leadership in your case then I think it’s different
I think the thing that really made it horrible is like I said. The boss would say x needs to happen but would not think through the details, buy the equipment, allocate the time or human resources. Someone still had to work out how to do those things and who was going to do what.
I think you're leaving out a key aspect of the problem: not one of those people had the scope of responsibilities to really fix the issue. There was the website, windows update, and OS team, all being fed by a variety of product teams with marketing and delivery concerns. At root, Bill's problems were a coordination issue spanning half the organization. If you were on that email chain, you wouldn't want ownership either because that herding the rest of the cats towards a comprehensive fix that would probably restructure the whole company.
In my experience it's kinda different. The serious issue that raised by higher up usually means more scope, visibility, bonuses and potential bonuses. Teams usually fights to get the important issues(whichever the higher thinks that's important) as their team's work. The drawback is that it's very possible that multiple teams are fighting for the same pie and resulting in duplicated work.
In the end if there are enough incentives(usually money) people would work on those.
> This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies.
Agreed. Even at companies known for having a great culture and being "different from the rest", the Game of Thrones politics is still there - it's just more hidden and practiced more artfully. I was a senior exec in the biggest BU at just such an F100 valley tech giant for >10 yrs (one level from the CEO). The company actually did have a nicer environment than its peers, no 360 reviews, no 'up or out' mandates, and a vibe genuinely a cut above. While that's al
Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs.
They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.
Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
> My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.
And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".
I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.
It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok.
I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."
> When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
The crazy thing is that it's more likely that most people in Apple are using their own products, versus any of the Android phone manufacturers or within Google, where it's likely a few of them would be using the Apple ecosystem instead.
Many of them are definitely dogfooding it, but it's possible that there's communication or empowerment issues.
There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies.
In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.
I mean, what's the alternative? They wanna keep the salary. The machine rewards political people, not people who pick fights to improve the product. It's a perfect pair.
I think they also suspect/know that Gates won't revisit the issue. The email is a flame as the subject line admits. Gates wasn't going to go back every week for the next six months to track progress.
>In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
This goes right back to the leadership failure on Bill's part. If your company is structurally incapable of producing good products (which Microsoft assuredly is and still was) then it's on you as the CEO to implement the correct structures.
That's literally the purpose of upper management: you create the conditions for success to happen.
> I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them.
Doesn't need to be that large, I worked for a company that ~4500 employees with about 1000 at HQ, that entire email chain looks exactly like what would ensue every time someone at the C-level flagged an issue.
I suspect the reason is much the same, no one wants to be in the hot seat to fix a problem they have no faith they can fix so everyone plays hot potato with the flaming sack of shit until it bursts and lands on someone.
> Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail. (13th Century Persian Proverb)
Also I suspect that there's no real teeth in that angry email.
If the big boss is frustrated by the UX, they might send an angry email or even yell at you in person. If your division doesn't meet its sales projection for the quarter, you might get fired.
If BillG had wanted a company that made good user experiences, he'd have hired (and fired) for that. Sending a pissy email is what you do when you're annoyed but don't actually care enough to do anything about it.
> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess.
Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program.
The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.
One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.
Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.
Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,
Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.
These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.
That's why I like the "managed" model Debian uses. Programs are enforced to comply to the OS standards. If they don't, they either get changed by the Debian maintainers or just not included into the distribution. That's why I can know where things are in my filesystem.
I love how Google looks like an MLP. I suspect their leadership would agree with that portrayal. You can imagine the activation functions: "Will this get me promoted?" "Will this get us bad press?"
Curious why it is so hard to find an owner to the issue. Gates' experience started with the web UI, then I'd expect that the team who owns the microsoft.com or owns the experience. To them there are only two types of bottlenecks: their web pages (usability, JavaScript performance, ways to get backend data, and etc), and their immediate dependencies. So, they drive improvement on both types of the bottlenecks, and the owners of the immediate dependencies recursively handle their own. For instance, the web team will identify that calling the catalog API has a P99 latency of 5 seconds and the network is fine, then they ask the catalog API to improve the API latency. If the catalog team does not do the obvious, the team's manager gets punished.
Of course, I'm being naive here, as I've seen too many companies fail to achieve such basic ownership. So, curious what I have missed. Of if the ownership is not a clean DAG, well, it goes back to Gates, as he was responsible for both the org charts and the company culture.
It wouldn't surprise me that what seems like whole things from the outside are split up even further on the inside of Microsoft. There's probably no single person responsible for microsoft.com (nor was there at the time). Instead the front page is one team, Windows Update (at the time) was yet another team, and sales another, and then there are 5 other teams doing other things, and no single individual or group is responsible for the whole thing. They've all got permission to push things to the website and change whatever just from time immemorial, and not through any defined authority, since that authority doesn't actually exist.
You can still see symptoms of this today. MS will (or at least would) spin up new domains rather than just update microsoft.com, or create newthing.microsoft.com, since both of those require talking to whomever is responsible for the main domain. Even if that person exists, knowing who they are in an org like MS is already a big ask when it's organised the way it is. Meanwhile, buying a new domain likely takes less than an hour, even if you include billing and such.
I found the email to be very humanising, but if I had been a higher up, I would completely agree with you, I would have immediately placed upper management into a room and asked what they are srsly doing about it. There should have been immediately steps being applied people assigned, drastic action taken by the second email.
However I am a nobody without leadership experience at this level. I just do find it perplexing.
But it didn’t. And Microsoft is worth $3.5 trillion. So maybe actually everyone should take a leaf out of the Microsoft book.
When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
It’s the only OS available for most computers. Sort no one cares about Linux or a BSD. Normal people only know Linux and Mac and you can’t get MacOS with your non-Mac.
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
Survivorship bias is a thing no? Microsoft succeeded despite their organizational flaws. Microsoft produced an insanely backwards-compatible[1] OS despite flawed overall strategy and lack of decisive leadership. Doesn't mean everyone should take a leaf out of their book.
I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
It made me cringe about three emails post-Bill because I recognized exactly what was happening. My first job was in a company past its glory days and couldn't adapt to the mobile-firstness of the smartphone era. They, too, had "product devs" whose sole job, as far as I could tell, was to forward emails to and from the right department/partner. It was even more egregious than MS---most of the emails forwarded were just "Hi sysads. The request below from engineering is authorized." or "Hi Engineering, see reply from $PARTNER below".
The company died a relatively quick death, spurned on by the Conglomerate Mothership. Thankfully I recognized the signs and jumped ship as soon as they were on borrowed time.
[1] I wouldn't know personally as I daily drive Linux but that _was_ the conceit of why you'd choose Windows. I won't be surprised if this one solid invariant that Windows could offer has changed lately.
> I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
Yeah, that’s basically what I mean. Dilbert made real.
Really? You’ve got this guy Dave Fester on there saying he was going to own the website issues and was coordinating everything to do with how the products surfaced on the web. That seemed like pretty clear accountability and ownership to me. What do you want? Some more performative mea culpas?
Point wasn't about fixing the exact issues, the point was how it even got that bad. Of course the easiest route to comprehending the complaint by Bill is to immediately fix the specified issues, making Bill a simple QA instead of concerned leader.
I think accountability would involve trying to understand how it got that bad, and figuring out a new process for preventing it from happening again. Though I'm sure that never happened.
In my humble opinion, some of the blame has to land on Bill himself as he has the full power and agency to build a style of management in his company that would've prevented this from happening. Instead he just scolded a bunch of senior execs who usually find a way to just delegate some work to tuck away any visible issues and go on with their merry lives.
The reason why Apple won is Steve Jobs cared about quality and was an asshole about it and the inertia from that after his death has not entirely decayed yet.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.
Yes. When I was working at Apple, I was developing some animation stuff for Pages. I came in to work one day, and my build was broken completely. Turned out that Roger Rosner had demonstrated this animation feature to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs hated it, and before then end of the evening the code had been stripped from the Pages build.
You also don't need to live in a fluffy cotton candy world where everyone pretends to be nice. A CEO needs to be able to directly tell people they're doing a bad job and give out consequences for it. Wrapping the same feedback in fluffy feelings oriented language is a different kind of abusiveness (and why I hate California)
A CEO doesn't have to scream or use insults to tell people they're doing a bad job. Both Linus and Steve loved to make people feel bad, which is completely unnecessary to convey work productivity or give an ultimatum.
Even today Microsoft can't get their shit together on a decent user experience. Tried to use Azure since I needed to code sign a binary on Github. My two previous accounts setup on Azure errored out with obscure errors and there was no way to fix them. I had to create a new account just to sign up for Azure Artifact Signing (which is now waiting for Microsoft to approve - no updates in a week). I don't know how anyone figures any of this out without reading pages of documentation. I honestly believe that no one actually cares about their products or user experience at Microsoft.
I will give Bill this, he does know how to play a typical user. Yeah, MS has some shenanigans (putting it mildly) in its birth and climb, but it was obvious from that that he was a relatively competent nerd, programmer etc., and that he was trying to paint the thought process of someone trying to put together family videos not "hurr, where this go, what this do?" like a Neanderthal.
Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.
Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)
I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.
The logical outcome of an escalation like this is that there is no single threaded leader for this user experience, the org charts are wrong, and one or more sr. leaders are culpable. But no one wants to hear that.
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[ 13.8 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadAnd it get worse from there. This is funny as hell. Billg eating his own shit.
Windows philosophy: don't get sued by AT&T
> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?
----
Favorite part is Gates' opinion of the entire Windows project:
"Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up."
They also know it's shit, they're just gaslighting you.
Stopped halfway through thinking "Damn, this Mike Beckerman is a piece of work. Doesn't understand English grammar let alone software development."
Looked him up...
>Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok.
Not surprising at all.
The issue was determined to be a documentation issue and was assigned to that group to add a knowledge base article with additional information.
It’s insane how much runway a monopoly can buy you.
https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...
Consider the following example, read this letter while paying close attention: https://xcancel.com/PierrePoilievre/status/18835154856582268...
Notice how often the keyword repeats. It is not repeated to communicate information, but to communicate affective state.
If you don't understand how it works, imagine the above letter instead said "Trump", and read it again.
Don't focus on what the letter says, instead on how it feels. Actually go and read it again, start to finish. Don't read past this line until you did.
Do you see how each time the keyword repeats, it affects your emotional state just a bit more? Can you start to feel it?
I'm assuming you hate Trump, but if you don't, just pretend you do. Then read the same letter one more time, imagine it said "Trump" instead and that the Republicans, which you really hate, just got re-elected. Do read it one more time.
You must understand that the keyword is repeated for affective impression.
Now read the letter again, one last time, slowly. Pay attention to the keyword, and how you feel each time it repeats. Imagine it said really "Trump", and that you really hate him, and what he did to your government.
The keyword does repeat, but there is no redundancy. It is repeated for affective impression. It only feels surreal because you are emotionally disinvested.
If you actually read the letter over and over, and really imagine how it feels, as if it were of deep concern to you, then you will understand. You seem smart, so I'm sure you will understand.
The keyword is repeated for affective impression.
So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.
Zuck has no one.
For better or worse. Right. It is incredible that one can list those five words and say that with a straight face.
> While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation.
My god these people… I didn’t even know you could be that self-absorbed. It’s jarring.
That does not sound like something Bill Gates would say…
Because he doesn’t talk like this in public? I promise you no big executives talk the same in public as they do internally.
This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.
made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?
Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).
When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
Instantly reminded me of this especially apt comic:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJfRwHWYAI0_yt?format=jpg
[1] Also available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg
It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)
Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.
Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual effort mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.
How much money does movie maker bring Microsoft? Now which executive would want to prioritize movie maker so much that they would directionally alter the company to fix this? Consider the issue that the execs had was fixing all the issues involved a huge number of teams.
Discredit to Bill here but I honestly think he was the only one who had the power to fix this. A Jobs-like figure is the only person with the organizational power and freedom to drive details like this to completion. Anyone else would end up in a power struggle
Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)
So nothing got done.
So the temperature on the issue went up.
So management whose failure was their own could only think of engaging more managers and processes….
Never ended.
I work at small companies now, less money but I enjoy it more. I just fix things and everyone is happy.
The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.
If you provided leadership in your case then I think it’s different
I think the thing that really made it horrible is like I said. The boss would say x needs to happen but would not think through the details, buy the equipment, allocate the time or human resources. Someone still had to work out how to do those things and who was going to do what.
In the end if there are enough incentives(usually money) people would work on those.
Agreed. Even at companies known for having a great culture and being "different from the rest", the Game of Thrones politics is still there - it's just more hidden and practiced more artfully. I was a senior exec in the biggest BU at just such an F100 valley tech giant for >10 yrs (one level from the CEO). The company actually did have a nicer environment than its peers, no 360 reviews, no 'up or out' mandates, and a vibe genuinely a cut above. While that's al
They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.
Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".
I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.
I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
Or they do and they don't think it's worth their time and energy to get them fixed. I think they just don't care about their products, unlike Jobs.
The crazy thing is that it's more likely that most people in Apple are using their own products, versus any of the Android phone manufacturers or within Google, where it's likely a few of them would be using the Apple ecosystem instead.
Many of them are definitely dogfooding it, but it's possible that there's communication or empowerment issues.
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/02/28/friday-magic-how-to-make...
Yeah, I wonder what's going on within the macOS division, but then again Liquid glAss is a thing.
In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.
I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.
This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.
Must be nice being so useless, yet getting paid so much.
Though I guess these people must have been good at politicking to rise so high.
This goes right back to the leadership failure on Bill's part. If your company is structurally incapable of producing good products (which Microsoft assuredly is and still was) then it's on you as the CEO to implement the correct structures.
That's literally the purpose of upper management: you create the conditions for success to happen.
Doesn't need to be that large, I worked for a company that ~4500 employees with about 1000 at HQ, that entire email chain looks exactly like what would ensue every time someone at the C-level flagged an issue.
I suspect the reason is much the same, no one wants to be in the hot seat to fix a problem they have no faith they can fix so everyone plays hot potato with the flaming sack of shit until it bursts and lands on someone.
> Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail. (13th Century Persian Proverb)
Once bad culture gets to your company, it doesn’t matter the size.
If the big boss is frustrated by the UX, they might send an angry email or even yell at you in person. If your division doesn't meet its sales projection for the quarter, you might get fired.
If BillG had wanted a company that made good user experiences, he'd have hired (and fired) for that. Sending a pissy email is what you do when you're annoyed but don't actually care enough to do anything about it.
> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program.
I miss the days of simple executables.
Every day I drop 1k lines of Python code and replace with go. Will be fully go soon!
One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.
Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.
Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,
Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.
These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.
And linked libraries are interface mapped into memory at certain names. I think that's an awesome improvement.
Did I just dream up loading a mouse driver and MSCDEX in DOS?
https://bonkersworld.net/img/2011-06-27_organizational_chart...
Of course, I'm being naive here, as I've seen too many companies fail to achieve such basic ownership. So, curious what I have missed. Of if the ownership is not a clean DAG, well, it goes back to Gates, as he was responsible for both the org charts and the company culture.
You can still see symptoms of this today. MS will (or at least would) spin up new domains rather than just update microsoft.com, or create newthing.microsoft.com, since both of those require talking to whomever is responsible for the main domain. Even if that person exists, knowing who they are in an org like MS is already a big ask when it's organised the way it is. Meanwhile, buying a new domain likely takes less than an hour, even if you include billing and such.
That’s how great products die or become a nightmare. Every team keeps on passing the ball to other team and nothing gets fixed or done or improved.
However I am a nobody without leadership experience at this level. I just do find it perplexing.
When something is on fire, pass the buck to other people and stand around saying “that thing is on fire… wouldn’t it be great if someone called the fire brigade? I have the number here. One of you guys, give them a call.”
And we all know Microsoft caters hard to enterprise and Apple almost seems to give them the middle finger on purpose. So all those big companies only buy MS.
Add in the giant base of existing software, especially line of business/custom stuff, and MS is safe for a long time, no matter how bad they are.
Survivorship bias is a thing no? Microsoft succeeded despite their organizational flaws. Microsoft produced an insanely backwards-compatible[1] OS despite flawed overall strategy and lack of decisive leadership. Doesn't mean everyone should take a leaf out of their book.
I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.
It made me cringe about three emails post-Bill because I recognized exactly what was happening. My first job was in a company past its glory days and couldn't adapt to the mobile-firstness of the smartphone era. They, too, had "product devs" whose sole job, as far as I could tell, was to forward emails to and from the right department/partner. It was even more egregious than MS---most of the emails forwarded were just "Hi sysads. The request below from engineering is authorized." or "Hi Engineering, see reply from $PARTNER below".
The company died a relatively quick death, spurned on by the Conglomerate Mothership. Thankfully I recognized the signs and jumped ship as soon as they were on borrowed time.
[1] I wouldn't know personally as I daily drive Linux but that _was_ the conceit of why you'd choose Windows. I won't be surprised if this one solid invariant that Windows could offer has changed lately.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qgMKq2aOeEg
Yeah, that’s basically what I mean. Dilbert made real.
The book is simply: acquire monopoly, wield power ruthlessly to keep it. Everything else is orthogonal.
If it wasn’t for corpo contracts, Microsoft would be long dead.
I think accountability would involve trying to understand how it got that bad, and figuring out a new process for preventing it from happening again. Though I'm sure that never happened.
In my humble opinion, some of the blame has to land on Bill himself as he has the full power and agency to build a style of management in his company that would've prevented this from happening. Instead he just scolded a bunch of senior execs who usually find a way to just delegate some work to tuck away any visible issues and go on with their merry lives.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.
Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.
(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)