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?"

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?)

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.

The Soviet Union didn't fall, it got merged into Microsoft

> I miss the days of simple executables.

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.

Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.

I don't think I'll ever learn what the folder structure on Linux actually means

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.

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.

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.

> 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)

I have struggle to understand how someone could come to that conclusion, maybe I missed something?

The email is a 'rant'.

It's a 'list of broken stuff'.

It's not:

1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken

2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome

3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address

4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.

5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.

It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.

It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.

He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.

'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.

This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.

A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..

Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.

(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)

I’m not sure why you see this as evidence BillG didn’t understand that to be his job.

As others have pointed out, it's all in the follow-through, and there was no follow-through.

Becuase it was a typical MS user experience. MS was shipping their software on 25+ install floppies. Having an install fail on floppy 19 was a nightmare. Getting a fax modem that shipped with the PC to function could also be a problem MS would blame the vendor and the vendor blamed MS. It’s not like his moviemaker experience was a rare occurrence.

Jobs has been dead for a long time.

And it shows.

He had bad ideas too but was much better at holding the line on good UI (unless the bad idea was his). We haven’t had that in a long time.

Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.

Yes - this is a mind boggling design conceit of Apple that goes back almost 50 years.

They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.

They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.

We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.

I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.

It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.

Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.

"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.

There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.

I've used QuickTime for that, which has the expected menu items.

There's a menu item. I believe it's File > Share > then you choose how (save to disk, email, export to photos app etc).

File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.

The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.

That says more about the US software industry than anything else. You “win” by being hostile to consumers while you lawyer up and bribe the powers that be.

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.

<fighter-planes-with-bulletholes.jpg>

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

they pivoted a few times since then in terms of what their core product is, though :D

Windows MovieMaker remained a nightmare and did indeed die.

The book is simply: acquire monopoly, wield power ruthlessly to keep it. Everything else is orthogonal.

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.

Every good business is one MBA away from enshittification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Beckerman graduated in 2001, although it says nothing of any employment at Microsoft on his Wikipedia page... so you might be right?

This was an email Bill Gates sent in 2003. Not sure you can hold the ‘TikTok generation’ accountable for that.

(This appears to be a reference to https://xkcd.com/927/)

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.

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.

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. We're trying for something different here.

(and particularly not unsubstantive+indignant ones, which are the worst for the kind of discussion we're trying for)

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.

Zuck has no one.

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

This rigor is also upheld to the ODM too. This is why we like to work with them, we all come out learning a lot at the end of the project.

How did/do you feel about that?

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)

It’s also a great way to retain talent that care about working with like minded people.

Because he's trashing a project he himself oversaw for years? And his own judgment and leadership for all those years?

Peter Principle.

LOL

Thank you! I didn’t know what it was. The downvotes suggest I should have.

You know, I did read it. Without the full context, it isn’t entirely clear. I have looked again, and don’t feel it is wrong to come away unsure.