Bill Gates Ain't So Bad (But Windows Still Is…)

I was reading an article in Newsweek that reminded me Bill Gates "left" Microsoft earlier this year. Of course, he isn't really leaving - and much too big a deal has been made about his "departure." He will still remain Chairman of the Board and when he is in town he will reportedly spend one day a week in the office.

But he will be scaling back his involvement with the company to focus more on his philanthropic efforts, which you can't tell by his prominence in Microsoft's new ad campaign. Which leads me to the topic of this post, Bill Gates Ain't So Bad (But Windows Still Is…)

Of course, it is easy to play the nice guy when you have more money than just about anybody else on the planet (depending on whose statistics you check) - and I don't want to take anything away from that. But Bill Gates has been portrayed at times as some kind of money-grubbing ogre who shipped shoddy products, but through marketing chutzpah was able to capture a monopolistic critical mass of the world's computer users.

Here's the thing: like Apple, Microsoft became very big, very fast. Just like an ocean liner, the captain might steer the ship, but he is not totally responsible for running it. In fact, over the years Bill Gates has shown he not only cares a great deal about the products his company ships, but also many of the frustrations of Windows users everywhere.

There is a gem of an email that was made public during the US Government's antitrust case against Microsoft. You can read the entire email thread here (PDF, 5 pages). The juicy part starts on page 3 in an email where Bill Gates describes in blow-by-blow detail his frustration in attempting to purchase and install MovieMaker from the company's own web site. In the original email he details not just his frustration with finding and buying MovieMaker, but with the process he had to endure with Windows just to get to where he thought it might be installing.

In the email thread, one of Microsoft's employees immediately starts to minimize the issue by saying "Bill's situation is worse then [sic] my personal experience…," and another says "nor am I yet sure the best way to handle the complex mess of coordinating between product teams,…" and then it goes on with each of the stakeholders in the issue restating how complex the issue is, but no one stepping up to take ownership.

I think this is a pretty good glimpse of how Windows got where it is today. You have a lot of competent, talented people writing code and building processes in their own teams, but no one has thought about the "connective tissue" that is needed to make the entire system work together. Try as he might, Bill Gates (or his successor, Steve Balmer) can only steer the ship so much. When you are dead in the water, steering won't do any good.

Apple went down this path too, before Steve Jobs returned to the helm. But it was not Steve Jobs who got Apple back on course - it was Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO before Steve Jobs took over for his current stint. I was working for Apple at the time and I remember sitting in an employee meeting where he discussed how he was consolidating Apple's hardware and software engineering efforts. Instead of 4 different logic boards, there would be 2: one for desktops and one for laptops. Instead of going to 3 different places in the system to address networking issues, there would be one, etc.

In a way, Gil Amelio was as much the father of the iMac as anyone. The first "Bondi Blue" iMac had a logic board that was practically interchangeable with the company's laptop computer. While the iMac definitely owes its success to Jonathan Ives and his design team at Apple that gave the it a distinctive look, and to Steve Jobs' uncanny ability to market directly to people's sensibilities, it was Amelio that set the ball in motion. Who knows what might have happened had he not taken that one step to reduce costs by making their manufacturing processes more efficient.

Even Bill Gates recognizes Steve Jobs' genius, btw. In another email from the antitrust trial, gates said "Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things." In that one email, Bill Gates encapsulated most of what is wrong at Microsoft: the lack of ability to focus in on a few things that count. Unfortunately, that is what many companies lack - even some of the smaller ones with whom I have been associated. Many people call it "the vision thing."

So Apple makes well-designed stuff. We all know that. So why is Windows still so bad? Why are people dropping Vista to go back to XP? Because the parts do not work well together. It is as simple as that. Just like the email thread I referenced above illustrates, the various pieces of Microsoft are not designed to fit together. They are encouraged to run as efficient, autonomous units instead of become part of a colony - and this organizational philosophy becomes obvious in the way the different products the company offers - and even the different pieces of its flagship Windows operating system - are put together.

So I congratulate Bill Gates on the massive fortune he has gained, and for his willingness to make the world a better place with a large portion of that wealth. But, for the simple reasons I have reported here, I still don't do Windows.