The internet has been cluttered lately with tributes and articles devoted to Bill Gates and his contributions to the world of computing, on the eve of his retirement from Microsoft.
Out of all of these, one in particular stands out...
Back in 2003, Bill Gates tried to download and install Windows Movie Maker, unsuccessfully, and then sent a whopper of an email rant to the proper department heads.
I chuckled and felt a great sense of satisfaction as I read this, because this is a whole different side of Bill that we have never seen. This is not the smiling Bill you see in all the publicity photos. This is not the Bill you have seen in interviews and videos.
This is "Bill the XP user"...one of us. And he was pissed as all hell, at all the crap he had to go through to download & install an application from Microsoft.com, which in the end, he still wasn't able to do.
This email rant is a priceless gem.
It is the email we all wish we could have written, a million and one times over.
Each and every time that we have blamed and cursed out Bill over the years because of some stupid-ass Windows crap that has annoyed or confused the hell out of us, Bill Gates has been annoyed and confused right along with us, and bitching at the people responsible for the bullshit.
Thanks, Bill. You changed our lives. And I hope, even though you are retiring, that you plan to keep on bitching.
3 comments:
lol, thats a good email, i enjoyed the read, this is the sort of issue i have all the time, stuff that is just WAY more complex than it needs to be.
After reading your post though, 1 thing does leap to mind, that email was 2003? So, its now 5 years on, has anything improved with MS usability? Not that i have seen, in fact with the compatability issues with Vista, you could say its actually got much worse.
What MS should do is release a Windows for average folks that has none of the extra crap thrown in, no 3d crap, no bloated mp3 players, just a slick fast moving simple OS, i would love that, all i want is to be able to quickly install what i need and be able to open applications fast when i need them, and i certainly dont have the time or inclination to move to linux.
They already did. They called it "Windows 98". :-P
The OS was easy to install, configure, and fix when things went wrong.
They even threw in a bonus operating system (DOS) capable of running all kinds of specialized business software, games, and stuff that XP & Vista can't handle.
Children could use it. The mentally challenged could use it. Grandma could use it.
It didn't require a 2+ GHz CPU, 4G of ram, a high end graphics card, or a huge hard drive.
Unfortunately, they decided that people are not allowed to get the most for their money and use what they paid for, for as long as they want or need, and stopped releasing security patches for it.
They left the poor, disabled, elderly, children, schools, and businesses with very costly specialized custom made software, that continue to use it, at the mercy of their unpatched vulnerabilities.
They never even considered offering the people that wanted to continue using it, continued security fixes at a small additional yearly fee. Many people would have jumped at the chance to keep their Win98 safe & secure for an extra $20/year.
But no, Microsoft got greedy and abandoned a large chunk of their userbase, and encouraged all developers to do the same. They have now even gone as far as deliberatly making it impossible for any developer to compile any software to run on Win98, in their latest version of Visual Studio.
The programmer's code could be perfectly compatable and run quite well, but Microsoft makes sure it can't with an unnecessary nag message if a Win98 user tries to run it. (compile that same code in the previous version of VS and it runs fine, without the nag)
I am sure glad I don't use Visual Studio, as a great number of my software users are Win98 users and as long as I have my old P1 and it continues to boot up and run, I have no plans on abandoning them.
They are no less deserving of software than a Vista user, and their money is no less green than anyone else's, and personally I think their shade of green is much prettier.
Gratitude green is a really beautiful color, and even a tiny amount of it is capable of warming your heart as it crosses your palm.
Win98, thats where they made their mistake. They should have given it a more appealing name that wouldnt go out of date, something like Winslick! Personally all i am interested in is speed and usability, i dont want fancy addons, damn, i dont even play music and watch movies on my lappy, in fact i bet i use less than 10% of the features in my XP and those that i do are overly complex and usually go wrong.
The networking feature for example, why is it so complex? Why once its all set up, and with no changes, does it suddenly stop working. Why can't you just have a simple on/off option, when its on it will communicate with all local machines and devices as required, this could be simply password protected, no need for further complication.
Just 1 example of why bloated over complex options are such a pain. Recently i have given up trying to print to the network printer, its so hit and miss, in the end i just ran a cable direct to the printer, annoying and unnessacary perhaps, but certainly far more reliable, and i can now print things when i want to, rather than when XP feels like allowing me.
Still, XP does have its benifits, its not Vista...... :D
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