Bill Gates' email rant at the Usability Team

The Seattle P-I has tracked down an old e-mail from 2003 that Bill Gates sent out to members of the Windows Usability team. The pages-long e-mail message chronicles Gates’ attempt to download Windows Movie Maker. Here are some especially tantalizing tidbits, with the full e-mail message to be found after the jump.

“I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated…

…I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact 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.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?…

…Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state…”


Click through for the entire email.

Associated Link: Gates sends angry e-mail, sounds just like a customer

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