Tuesday, July 15th, 2008, 1301 days ago

Microsoft is dead

 

June 25th, 2008

Bill Gates’ web experience: Byzantine, idiotic logic

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:03 am

 

Analyzing IT program management failures with the perfect vision of hindsight often leads the observer through a senseless and convoluted maze of past decisions. Studying the Byzantine and idiotic logic behind many IT failures, one wonders, “How did we get here from there?”

Bill Gates experienced this Tower of Babel when he tried to download two Microsoft consumer products (MovieMaker and Digital Plus Pack).

The seattlepi.com released an internal Microsoft email where Bill described his experience. The email begins with Bill’s summary, emphasizing how program management, the coordinating entity, has failed:

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Bill then details the complexities that prevented him from downloading the software:

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.

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