> My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.

And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with".

I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.

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Twirrim 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies.

In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.

I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.

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whstl an hour ago | parent [-]

Yeah. In context the answers make a lot of sense: it’s a dysfunctional company where ownership is non-existent and getting shit done is hard.

This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.

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mike_hearn 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think they also suspect/know that Gates won't revisit the issue. The email is a flame as the subject line admits. Gates wasn't going to go back every week for the next six months to track progress.

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ValentineC an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.

Must be nice being so useless, yet getting paid so much.

Though I guess these people must have been good at politicking to rise so high.

	▲	whstl 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, you're 100% right, but what's the alternative? They wanna keep the salary. The machine rewards political people, not people who pick fights to improve the product. It's a perfect pair. :/

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vjvjvjvjghv 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok.

I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.

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baud147258 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.

Or they do and they don't think it's worth their time and energy to get them fixed. I think they just don't care about their products, unlike Jobs.

	▲	pino83 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."

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ValentineC an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.

The crazy thing is that it's more likely that most people in Apple are using their own products, versus any of the Android phone manufacturers or within Google, where it's likely a few of them would be using the Apple ecosystem instead.

Many of them are definitely dogfooding it, but it's possible that there's communication or empowerment issues.

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noir_lord 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them.

Doesn't need to be that large, I worked for a company that ~4500 employees with about 1000 at HQ, that entire email chain looks exactly like what would ensue every time someone at the C-level flagged an issue.

I suspect the reason is much the same, no one wants to be in the hot seat to fix a problem they have no faith they can fix so everyone plays hot potato with the flaming sack of shit until it bursts and lands on someone.

> Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail. (13th Century Persian Proverb)

	▲	whstl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have worked at MS-sized orgs that are like this, but have also worked at 100 employee startups that are exactly the same. Once bad culture gets to your company, it doesn’t matter the size.
	▲	12_throw_away an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Also I suspect that there's no real teeth in that angry email. If the big boss is frustrated by the UX, they might send an angry email or even yell at you in person. If your division doesn't meet its sales projection for the quarter, you might get fired. If BillG had wanted a company that made good user experiences, he'd have hired (and fired) for that. Sending a pissy email is what you do when you're annoyed but don't actually care enough to do anything about it.