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Comment by shapefrog | Hacker News Reader

From spending too many hours a day using Microsoft products, I always thought Bill Gates was the enemy who made stuff was (personally) intent on making me go insane.

It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.

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You have to have worked at a large corporation to understand how every employee recognises a problem, agrees what the solution would be, but a combination of the dilution of responsibility, people moving around all the time, humongous frictions to making any change (endless meetings and committees, policies against moving any finger in the wrong way, processes requiring endless paperwork), and managers focusing on the priority the boss cares about at the expense of anything else, makes that not only a solution is not adopted but the company will keep sailing in the wrong direction until it the problem blows out.

At Microsoft I think the most spectacular example was Windows 8, where I understand everyone internally acknowledged it was a shit product, I heard the guy introducing windows 8 (and who ran the project) had been told he would be fired before he got on stage, but they still went ahead.

He may not be malicious, but has conditioned himself to accept bizarre troubleshooting steps as part of nominal Windows day-to-day usage. He said "I restart every day" as if this were a normal condition.

I recently started using Windows heavily and am shocked at how much software cannot survive multiple launches without restarting, USB devices just deciding they won't connect until you restart, etc. And don't get me started on Windows unable to put a computer to sleep without every program shitting the bed or just totally inconsistent behavior. I know I'm still getting used to the platform but I feel like Windows users are so traumatized by learning this system that they think other systems are equally belligerent and mentally taxing.

Just wait till you get to deal with developers and sysadmins of Windows boxes, who's first and usually only troubleshooting step is to reboot the system.

> He said "I restart every day" as if this were a normal condition.

To be fair, I think that 20 years ago most people shut down their computers when they weren't using them for more than a couple of hours, and most definitely at night. (Also, I believe that he meant that he "starts up" his computer every day, rather than "rebooting"/"restarting")

It was a bit of both. For example, while he wanted his stuff to run well on his systems, he preferred that the competitors products run significantly worse - or that they don't run at all.

Restarting daily and seemingly thinking that was reasonable.

Protip: restarting twice a day - once at start of day and once over lunch reduced the number of crashes and lost work by about 75%.

Also might have been holding it wrong.

Is this a windows v Mac thing? I can’t remember the last time I restarted (other than a software update). I can’t remember the last crash.

This was common when people were still running Win98SE. It wasn't needed on WinNT, Win2K, WinXP...

WinXP for me was a voluntary daily restart with the occasional involuntary restart + every 6-9 month reimage from blank to maintain a functional system.

Windows 10 is (relatively speaking) a dream, except for sleep and USB devices being a bit stupid sometimes. SSD's and way shorter boot time also makes the inevitable reboot to troubleshoot way less painful than the XP days.

> It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.

Except that the results of his management don't say that at all. As far as I can tell nothing happened after this incident. A lot of Microsoft products still have terrible user experiences. Notable outliers are (kind of) the Office apps, especially for macOS (side note: impressive job of keeping backwards compatibility while also modernizing the UX!). Except for Teams, of course.

> Notable outliers are (kind of) the Office apps

We must be living in different realms. My work windows experience was entirely Windows + Outlook + Excel + Word. 2000-2010's was horrible - daily crashes, lost work even with auto save, odd formatting artifacts that would vanish with ye olde power off / power on debugging step.

> the results of his management

Maybe he was just a terrible manager, maybe the corporation was just dysfunctional (those two might be the same thing).

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