Bill Gates upset with Windows Usability

I saw a link to this yesterday. It seems to me this mail was sent by Bill Gates acting as a ‘typical user’. I’m sure he himself knows exactly what to do, but Joe Average (inside Bill Gates mind) doesn’t have a clue.

Well im sure it’s that kind of attitude that lead Microsoft to be so big, im not a microsoft fan anyway but i do fear that now he’s retired Microsoft might not be the same - whether that’s for better or worse i’m not decided yet.

Great email tho - I’d hate to be on the receiving end of that …

Regards.

Well, I am glad that at least the executive director understands that the usability of windows is horrible. The major difficulty will be to get the programmers understand this as well. The programmers have such a long history at windows and have learned themselves many habits. Like ‘we should put a dialog box here!’
It is hard to change a culture that has existed for a long time.

Maybe Microsoft’s products will gradually become less execrable now that Gates is leaving.

HahA! So even master Bill has troubles with his own software. this letter must be about xp, but i thing the matter has not changed with vista, so lets hope it will be better with windows 7.

Last year, I attended Microsoft Designertopia - an event aimed at launching Windows PFE and the Expression Suite. Part of the agenda was to show the world that Microsoft understands “design.” I sat through a presentation by the head of user experience for Microsoft Europe, in which he described what they’d done for Vista (trashing XP and Win2K as he did so). It was clear that he either had no knowledge of, or no interest in, experience design outside of simply making things look shiny. I don’t think he used the word “usability” in connection to his work at all. This confirmed to all of us at the event that Microsoft had simply hired a bunch of graphic designers and put them in charge of user experience. That bodes very badly for Windows 7 I think.

It seems as though MS doesn’t even listen to it’s creator. If they can’t do that, then what are the chances of them listening to the paying public that detest Vista and want them to continue support for XP. Very little.

For some reason, MS have no longer realised the simple equation that we are customers, customers pay money, money equals turnover/profit. Or an even more simple equation is along the line of supply and demand. The demand for XP is higher than Vista. Is MS on a different planet?

As for you Apple guys, I don’t think I could quite accustom myself to muesli, sandals and Coldplay anytime soon. Even if they aren’t at the same time. And yes, Quorn ‘bacon’ fills me with fear too, so don’t even start there.

That email is great! How do we know if it is genuine though? After reading that, you really appreciate just how frustrating it must be to see senior developers doing silly mistakes and not like Kevin above said: ‘See it from Joe Public’s’ point of view.

Everything on a PC, especially on vista assumes that you already know what you’re doing on a PC. I’m a programmer and when I used vista for the first time, it took me at least 45 seconds to work out how to shut down the computer, not send it to sleep!

He switched to Mac and realized how awful Windows really was