Bill Gates

Well, so 100% it is, but they were trying to talk about it like it wasn't. So I watched the launch announcement for this too. They kind of have to. they can't really say like nobody should upgrade to this. So they come out, first of all, it's Bill Gates again in 2006, six years after Steve Ballmer has become CEO.

Well, so 100% it is, but they were trying to talk about it like it wasn't. So I watched the launch announcement for this too. They kind of have to. they can't really say like nobody should upgrade to this. So they come out, first of all, it's Bill Gates again in 2006, six years after Steve Ballmer has become CEO.

My opinion on this is they clearly had no idea what to talk about in the keynote because the one feature that I can kind of really remember as a flagship feature is that

My opinion on this is they clearly had no idea what to talk about in the keynote because the one feature that I can kind of really remember as a flagship feature is that

alt tab switcher that was 3d that kept bringing the windows closer and closer and closer to you you know they've got the widgets they've got the sidebar it's arrow they had one feature that people hated there was a revolt called user access control which the theory makes sense protecting users from running malicious blah blah blah but in practice it would just overwhelm you with dialogue boxes all the time and everyone's just trying to figure out how do i turn off the dialogue boxes

alt tab switcher that was 3d that kept bringing the windows closer and closer and closer to you you know they've got the widgets they've got the sidebar it's arrow they had one feature that people hated there was a revolt called user access control which the theory makes sense protecting users from running malicious blah blah blah but in practice it would just overwhelm you with dialogue boxes all the time and everyone's just trying to figure out how do i turn off the dialogue boxes

So they're standing up there at the keynote. The whole thing, the marketing message is the wow starts now. Oh, boy.

So they're standing up there at the keynote. The whole thing, the marketing message is the wow starts now. Oh, boy.

Just brutal. This was kind of the Windows culture at its worst. I worked in Office, so I have a bias here when I was at Microsoft, but they weren't super ship date driven, whereas Office would set a ship date three years in advance and then they would hit it exactly. Office had all these really robust...

Just brutal. This was kind of the Windows culture at its worst. I worked in Office, so I have a bias here when I was at Microsoft, but they weren't super ship date driven, whereas Office would set a ship date three years in advance and then they would hit it exactly. Office had all these really robust...

procedures for shipping, you know, a triage process, an escalation process, a zero bug bounce. Everything was run in this dev test PM triads. The excuse was this general guise that this is too hard to use your processes. Like we're doing alchemy over here. And because we're doing systems level programming, none of your software development principles work on us. And so...

procedures for shipping, you know, a triage process, an escalation process, a zero bug bounce. Everything was run in this dev test PM triads. The excuse was this general guise that this is too hard to use your processes. Like we're doing alchemy over here. And because we're doing systems level programming, none of your software development principles work on us. And so...

Ultimately, this was the failure mode of a process that really did work for a while, really did enable technical genius, really did enable solving hard computer science problems. And this is effectively the company smoking their own supply and just believing they were smarter than everyone else. And what consumers wanted didn't matter.

Ultimately, this was the failure mode of a process that really did work for a while, really did enable technical genius, really did enable solving hard computer science problems. And this is effectively the company smoking their own supply and just believing they were smarter than everyone else. And what consumers wanted didn't matter.

And if they could come up with some hallucinated, cool, technical thing, then that is what they should spend years doing and fighting about and then force into the market. And the market just didn't take it one bit.

And if they could come up with some hallucinated, cool, technical thing, then that is what they should spend years doing and fighting about and then force into the market. And the market just didn't take it one bit.

Wow. Oh, I didn't know that's where Brian went. Interesting.

Wow. Oh, I didn't know that's where Brian went. Interesting.

And if he's only spending his time on technical decisions, you need some introduction into that feedback loop, some governor on how deep to go in re-architecting Windows for re-architecting Windows' sake.

And if he's only spending his time on technical decisions, you need some introduction into that feedback loop, some governor on how deep to go in re-architecting Windows for re-architecting Windows' sake.