Gates memo shows user frustrationChairman scared by 'crapped up' softwareBy Nick Farrell: Thursday, 26 June 2008, 9:29 AMClick here to find out more!AN ANCIENT EMAIL has turned up which shows King William Gates III, of Redmond, ripping into the design of Microsoft's website.King Billy, who is about to abdicate this week, is ripping into his design and programming staff for over his personal experience when trying to download and install Windows Moviemaker in the electronic proclamation.Bill was disappointed at how Windows Usability had been going backwards and the program management groups didn't deal with usability.He said he was trying to download Moviemaker and buy the Digital Plus pack, so he went to Microsoft.com (you'd think he could get a free copy). The first five times he used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after a long delay he got it to come up.Gates moaned that the site was so slow it was unusable and it was difficult to find file names."I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no Moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing."In the end he emailed a developer to ask where the Moviemaker download was and it turned out that "using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated".Billy was told to go to the main page search button and type movie maker – which was not even the name of the software."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."The install took six minutes and the machine was slow while it did it. Bill could not understand what the software was doing during those six minutes after the download had already finished."It told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time? The software insisted so he did that, but it meant completely getting rid of all his Outlook state."So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker. So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP!"Then he got cross, saying that someone had "decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable". He meant the file system and the registry. "The program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up."He said that after more than an hour of craziness and making his programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website he still had not run Moviemaker and got the plus package.Gates said:" 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?)".
