Well, something like this couldn’t get unnoticed, and i have had a long laugh when i saw it. For me, it is so funny to see a company like Microsoft not using their own products. They admit they suck, no with word, but with actions and that says a lot !!! 
Courtesy of Fail Blog
This is a letter from Bill Gates to his staff back in 2003, where he is feeling what it takes to use his P.O.S. products.
—- Original Message —-
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flameI am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.
Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.
This site is so slow it is unusable.
It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.
These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.
They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.
I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.
So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).
I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.
I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.
In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.
This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?
So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.
So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.
At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.
So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.
The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.
So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.
It is not there.
What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.
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.
But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.
What an absolute mess.
Moviemaker is just not there at all.
So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.
I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.
I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.
I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.
So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.
The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)
When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.
Courtesy of seattlepi
I had to laugh, honestly…….
Even more when i read a few comments that user left on that page:
Looks like Bill got bit by his own monster.
I would have thought his job was to ensure these things get fixed, not just complain about them like the rest of us!
Now he knows why I run Linux. It just works.
The fact that his rant was emailed in early 2003 and the company has continued to make these same mistakes over and over since then is a great indicator of the direction Microsoft is headed: obsolescence. Yes, Microsoft keeps raking in the billions, but not for much longer.
Well, at least they fixed all those problems with Vista…ha, ha, yes, that was a joke!!!
Get a Mac.
The Steve Jobs version:
“If the MovieMaker download site isn’t working by tomorrow at 6 am I will come down there at 6:01 am an choke the living ___ out of all of you.”
This is why I have been using a mac for over twenty years.
This is the reason I gave up on Vista and bought a MacBook. I couldn’t be happier.
Dear Bill,
that’s the job we have to do. Every day …….
Thanks a lot
Someone should tell Billy you can DL it directly from piratebay.org
What can i say……. it made my day.
Look what it shows if you do a search with the keyword: internet explorer on www.urbandictionary.com. I had an awesome laugh.
Download Opera/Mozilla plz.
“Internet Explorer installed spyware on my machine again :\.”
Link here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=internet+explorer
“We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers,”
And I guess Micrososft is going to pay me for the time needed to make this change to all the Websites I have developed for my clients? Screw that, let’s just hope the Meta Tag works as expected since I’m know using it on any new Website since I can’t relay on the Beta version of IE8 and I rather keep working as I used to until Microsoft gets the point and drops IE8 and focuses on making a decent OS in the first place.
“We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers.” Yeah, like this happened with IE7 who still trails behind IE6, unless of course they forced the update on everybody in which case: “a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8.”
Wow Microsoft, like I didn’t waste enough time to make my websites work in your stupid browsers, now I have to go back to all of them so I can make them work in your stupid IE8 release?
Seriously, I don’t think so. Maybe the ” ideal of write once, run anywhere” should’ve been considered early in the game? Some time between IE5 and IE6.
I know is hard to account for every possible error on a piece of widely used software. But when you go to the extent of alerting about “Catastrophic” errors you should sit down and rethink your coding goals.
http://www.shipmentoffail.com/fails/2008/03/catastrophic-failure/
Seriously, WTF? Apparently the new XP Update is out which should fix some stuff, and hopefully don’t break others. But, if you installed IE8 Beta then you will not get this update because apparently Microsoft is not compatible with Microsoft (crazy Vista error anyone?).
It appears that if you install this update, which you won’t get automatically if you have IE8 installed, you won’t be able to uninstall IE8. It seems you need to uninstall IE8 first, then get the update and then install IE8 Beta again.
I mean, how hard is it to make your products compatible with, well… your products??
The reason for the Emulate IE7 button on IE8 is because Microsoft is always behind on what they should do. For instance, you have a crappy browser, IE6 so you decide to force people to update but, and only if, you have a valid version of windows. So obviously a lot of people do not update their browser. Of course Microsoft realizes that this is a mistake and releases IE7 without any genuine check so that everybody can upgrade but there’s still some people that do not want to and we are just left to wonder, why if they force other stupid updates they don’t get everybody to IE7 once and for all.
Now with IE8 coming this year, it looks like IE7 will still be around which means that developers will have to use the IE7 button when testing their websites to make sure it looks correct on both versions and after that, use Multiple IE’s to be able to test on IE6.
Thanks again Microsoft, for making the Web DEveloper life so more interesting.
After testing some websites on IE8 and realizing that some clients are going to call me pretty soon complaining about their website, I decided to give the Suckerfish Dropdowns a try since I use this technique on some of my menus with perfect results on all browsers, IE6 & IE7 included.
First, I went to the Vertical example (most of my menus are vertical so I wanted to give this one a try) and everything seemed normal. Then I decided to test the rollover since all my sites were doing crazy things on this function and this is how IE8 displays it:
Something with the z-index seems to be changed since now the text displays above the rollover, making the menu useless.
Well. at least I know all the crazy behavior I was seeing is not my fault, after all all the hacks that I’ve implemented to make the menu work inside my websites (where I have some other div, classes, scripts etc) were working fine on the previous IE versions.
Here i bring you two tweak tools that will help us customize a little, that evil IE7.
One will allow us to remove the search bar from the upper right of the browser; two options either messing with the registry following the explanation on this link:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/12/remove-search-bar-from-ie-7.html
or downloading a simple application the guys from IntelliAdmin has created, on the download section of the previous link.
The second one will tweak IE7 in diferent ways, like showing or hiding different bars on the evil browser. Two ways again, messing with the registry following the instructions or installing a well created applications developed by the same guys here:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/tweak-your-ie-7-settings.html
This will make our life easier and i do want to thank them for this.
Don’t forget to check their download section for others tweak tools for Windows and company, here:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/Downloads.htm
PD: And if any of them are reading this post, i will like to tell them, that i share the same frustration they have using Windows Vista. I’m this close to throw my PC into my backyard lake.
