I have struggle to understand how someone could come to that conclusion, maybe I missed something?

The email is a 'rant'.

It's a 'list of broken stuff'.

It's not:

1) identifying underlying first principles of design or UX that have been broken

2) not identifying which parts of the system may have resulted in the negative outcome

3) not reference for either operational or cultural that were braoched or need to be address

4) not at all cognizant of systemic concern at all.

5) didn't allocate responsibility, hint at how to organized a response, what structural issues need to be in place.

It's actually a really bad an embarrassing lack of leadership.

It's basically 'user rant' - not what one would expect from a leader.

He 'made a list of complaints and threw them onto the org.' - who are obviously being 'reactive' and moving in a bit of a frenzy.

'Dear Leader, doesn't like how the picture frames are set in the office! Fire the picture framers, everyone get out your rulers and fix the picture frames'.

This is really common and it happens because people have this magical belief that the 'founder' or 'ceo' has 'special powers and insight' and then issues roll down hill among sycophants and yes men, trying to appease.

A good example of 'leadership' would start out with 'I take responsibility for this', hinting and the possible source of flaws, where in the process those things should have been caught, an attempt for accountability in certain areas (divide the concern), a requirement to convene on this issues and make sure everyone understands what's important. Especially and including the fact that anyone responsible for a product actually has to 'use it' aka dogfooding or else etc etc..

Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.

(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)

Becuase it was a typical MS user experience. MS was shipping their software on 25+ install floppies. Having an install fail on floppy 19 was a nightmare. Getting a fax modem that shipped with the PC to function could also be a problem MS would blame the vendor and the vendor blamed MS. It’s not like his moviemaker experience was a rare occurrence.

Jobs has been dead for a long time.

And it shows.

He had bad ideas too but was much better at holding the line on good UI (unless the bad idea was his). We haven’t had that in a long time.

Apple used to have principled UX before designers got to innovation. There might be an argument that new UIs are better for people with no prior experience... if they did not completely change them once a decade or so.

Yes - this is a mind boggling design conceit of Apple that goes back almost 50 years.

They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.

They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.

We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.

I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.

It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.

Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.

"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.

There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.

I've used QuickTime for that, which has the expected menu items.

There's a menu item. I believe it's File > Share > then you choose how (save to disk, email, export to photos app etc).

File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.

The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.