Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

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 been in this situation in a small company as well. The owner wasn’t managing the company and there was no other manager. So the owner would express his frustration in an all hands meeting “I don’t like x” or “we’re going to do y from now on” but he would not assign the task to anyone, or give ownership. He would come up with some insane new goal but no plan, no equipment, and no one person who’s in charge of making sure the required resources, time and responsibility is assigned. So nothing would change, a month later there would be another meeting, with a middle aged man having a tantrum about why did no one do anything!? Why is no one listening to me?

You might be thinking it’s a good opportunity to accept some responsibility, it might get you a promotion or be a good learning opportunity. Yeah I tried that for a while, if you succeed, congratulations, you now have one new task for which you’re responsible for without any extra compensation or benefit. If you fail? Well guess who’s getting the blame..,

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.

In the end if there are enough incentives(usually money) people would work on those.

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.

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 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.

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)

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..

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

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

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.

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.

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.

? The CEO doesn't do the work, they assume and allocate responsibility.

It's 100% 'on Gates' because he failed to engender the right culture and process for creating the necessary outcomes.

"And do you think the guys on the line are the ones on this email thread?"

Yes, the execs on this thread should be (and probably are) 'on the line' - that's how that works, and it's why they are so reactive .. and finger-pointing.

The fact they are all finger pointing is a really bad sign.

I would not call this success. I would not want to emulate this.

If it wasn’t for corpo contracts, Microsoft would be long dead.

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

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

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.

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

So for everything wrong with Musk there are at least some people who like him, amazingly.

Zuck has no one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates