Bill Gate Retire Today

Founder of Microsoft going to retire today. People is more important than company. As bill gate step down, we will see what is the change in this giant company.

On 2003, bill gate send an email to his team complain about the user friendliness of it software development. Detail as below,

"I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues,” says Gates in a 2003 email.

Gates wanted download Moviemaker and buy the Digital Plus pack, so he, “went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.”

And, “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"

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 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?)

This seem to be happen to me on Nokia Music download website. Nokia try to take over Itune by open market on those country that apple not yet reach. Nokia want to attack those "NON-IPOD" user by offering MP3 download straight to the PC. When I try to buffer a song from it website. It fail and when I wanna to test a preview. It force me to register an account. Nevertheless, Apple do force us install it ITUNE before all the zero timing buffer music and video come to the picture. At least it give me what I expect. Even I try to download a movie trailer in HD format which have 102MB size. It only took me less that 10 second to download into my MAC.

Time is limited for everyone. What ever way can reduce time consume. User will stick to that way. Software engineer always tend to go on their way of format which forget who is the one using the software.