Thoughts on Bill Gate’s E-Mail rant

June 27th, 2008

Recently an email came to light in which Bill Gates complains about trying to download some software from the Microsft website and install it. It’s from 2003 and everyone can identify with trying to do this kind of thing with XP at the time.
The web has taken much glee in gloating about unusable Windows. While this schadenfreude is fun, there is a deeper point here about how businesses fail to execute.
Other Gates complaints can be seen here. As a long time mac user I’m struck by how much insight Bill has here into reality. He understands exactly where Microsoft has failed and where Jobs has succeeded. His view of the download process are exact and he identifies everything you’d want to be fixed.
He’s not stupid or dense – he understands exactly what needs to happen to fix this stuff – and yet it never happened.
That’s the terrifying part – Bill had more absolute control of his company than almost any other enterprise I can think of. He turned the entire organisation on a dime when he wanted to address the Internet and arguably succeeded. His employees are lined up behind him and he had all the cash he needed. Yet he was unable to get this kind of thing fixed.
What does that tell us about modern business. I work at a large (100K+ people) company with much less flexibility than MS has. People often poke fun at it for being slow and unable to change. What does it mean for us if even MS can’t address basic stuff like this.
I think this is endemic in organisations who don’t obsess about it. Apple gets it right because Jobs maniacally insists upon worrying about this stuff; He surrounds himself with people who care about details (the head of iPhone software carries a jewelers loupe around so he can argue about pixel level changes on this interface).
So it’s possible, but you need to care only about that one thing. There is too much effort involved for Bill to follow up about changes to the Moviemaker download – and Bill is one of the most involved CEOs in history. If he can’t get it right, how badly do you think your company is dropping the ball?
Update:
Just read Bob Cringely’s column on Bill leaving. He alludes to this half way in when he talks about Vista and how no-one likes shipping bad products.
There are numerous examples of MS not knowing how bad things are. There’s a story about Steve Balmer (which I can’t find on the interwebs for some reason) trying to fix a neighbors computer and discovering that even the top MS tech guys could not remove all the viruses. A surprise to him but not to anyone else in the world. I can’t imagine that the same was true of Vista. Bill and MS let that out the door partly because they’d convinced themsleves it was good enough. But the delays (years of repeated delays) and the dropping of major features points to a company that knew the product wasn’t ready.
The only person I can think of in Bill’s league is Jack Welch (Potentially Carnegie and Rockerfeller but I know far less about them). I wondor if he had issues like this and how he dealt with them?

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