Getting Out While the Going Is Good
John Gruber says
From: Bill Gates I 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. His staff was so pathetic, to call them useless would be an insult to useless people. Bill Gates: welcome to hell and here’s your accordion.But whether Gates would have done a better job than Ballmer is a different question than whether Ballmer has done a good job. Apple’s growth this past decade can largely be accounted for with two words: iPod and iPhone. Microsoft wanted in on both those markets, and got smoked. That’s on Ballmer.
I think what it really comes down to is that Microsoft is and was ungovernable. Gates is not blind or stupid, and perhaps Ballmer is not either (which would make him a flagrant liar), but if you look at these internal emails published by the Seattle Times, you can see that even Bill Gates could not get traction with Microsoft management to make things better:http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/141821.aspHere is a short excerpt, and note it does not get better:
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 flame
