This seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. It’s the text of an email sent by Bill Gates to various Microsoft employees about an intensely frustrating experience he had using the company’s own website and products - essentially, user feedback, from user number 1 at Microsoft. Here’s how the email starts out:
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.
Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.
This site is so slow it is unusable.
It sounds just like so many of those experiences we all have with Windows and with Microsoft sites. How great that Bill Gates himself was willing to take his team to task and ask for improvements. Except that the date on this particular email is January 15, 2003. Meaning the team has now had almost five and a half years to solve these problems. But they haven’t. We’re still all having them. Have you tried to buy the home and student edition of OneNote from the Microsoft website lately? I have. It’s not possible. You can buy a boxed version from Amazon, but not from Microsoft.com (or at least I haven’t been able to figure out how). And Windows itself remains as unintuitive an experience as it ever was, with some new annoyances added with Vista.
So what’s the problem? Did the staff get so many of these emails from bgates@microsoft.com that they started ignoring them? Or are they pathologically unable to implement this kind of basic user feedback? Does someone at Microsoft actually believe this all makes sense? Who are they doing their formal user testing with? And can we replace those people with Mac users? How can a company so successful still be so bad at the user experience? How hard would it be to hire a slew of user experience designers to solve these problems?
A while back I was at a Cisco analyst event where a guy who used to work for Apple and Frog Design and now works for Cisco spoke about how they are approaching UI design. He shared several examples of how the Mac OS does things compared with how Windows does things, and they were all obvious big differences and in the vast majority of the cases it was obvious too that the Mac version was better. With all the copying Windows does from Mac OS already, how hard would it be to copy some of the design principles too?
At the time I wrote yesterday’s entry, I hadn’t yet seen the letter from Steve Ballmer to Jerry Yang about the reasons for calling off the deal. It does provide some more detail about exactly what Yahoo! was doing that was preventing the merger from going forward:
Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.
We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number
of reasons[.]
In essence, it was Yahoo!’s pursuit of the search relationship with Google over the last several weeks that put a real spanner in the works. To Microsoft, the whole point of the deal was putting up a stronger competitor to Google in the search marketplace, so cozying up to Google was the last thing Yahoo! should have been doing. So it appears that Yang’s decision to go down this route actually served two purposes - it put Microsoft off, but it also provided a way to improve the financials in Yahoo!’s search business, at least in the short term.
Of course, if you’re a Yahoo! shareholder, you would probably say that you’d have taken Microsoft’s 70% premium over any short-term boost in results and the mere possibility of an improvement in the share price over the medium to long term. Even though Microsoft won’t now pursue a proxy fight to replace the board, shareholders may decide that they want someone running the company who will put their interests first. Employees, on the other hand, and customers, will probably breathe a huge sigh of relief. But Yahoo! still has a long way to go to reassure either set of people.
Apparently, Microsoft is giving up in its pursuit of Yahoo!. (that exclamation mark always makes for some awkward punctuation). Officially, the reason is that:
After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal
This is a little odd, because Microsoft had made no secret of its plans to take the bid hostile if it were rejected, and had gone so far as to select board members for a proxy fight. Backing out now because of what Yahoo! was “demanding” therefore seems a bit suspect. It appears much more likely that Microsoft finally joined the board of Yahoo! and most of the rest of the opinionated world in recognizing that the deal was a bad idea. But it’s taken a surprising amount of humility from Steve Ballmer (not normally the most humble of people) to back out at this point, even if Microsoft is wrapping that humility in another explanation.
There has been speculation about what Microsoft might do if its bid fell through for whatever reason, with one of the most interesting alternatives being that Microsoft would go out and buy a slew of companies with the money it would have spent on Yahoo! I’m not sure it makes sense to spend a ton of money just because it had planned to, but it’s certainly possible that Microsoft could use some of its substantial war-chest to make some more purchases.
However, what Microsoft really needs at this point more than anything else (even and perhaps especially as it acquires more companies) is a change in culture, to move more quickly to embrace new business models, and to begin to make the shift from the offline to the online world in its software business. It needs to learn a few tricks from Yahoo!, Google and others in these areas. Otherwise, the risk is that it continues to fall short in everything it does, doing just enough to be a participant in markets without ever leading them. It’s doubtful that this change will happen anytime soon, but perhaps the Yahoo! failure might turn out to be a cause for re-evaluation at Microsoft.
I’m at the VoiceCon conference in Orlando at the moment, for the third year straight. We spent a few days as a family in the Tampa area before I headed over here, and caught some fun Yankees games at Legends Field.
The conference itself has evolved in interesting ways during the time I’ve been coming. Two years ago, Cisco made its big Unified Communications launch, and caught everyone by surprise. As I spent time with the other IP telephony vendors on that occasion, they were all scrambling to say that they had been doing UC for some time already and did everything Cisco was announcing it would do. But I came away predicting that Cisco’s entry into the market would completely change things - and it did. Their sheer size and marketing muscle took UC from a non-issue to the top of the IPT agenda, and has kept it there since.
A year ago, Microsoft made its big announcement around UC, with Jeff Raikes staking out the company’s vision for UC, and a prediction that the price of the PBX would halve as software-based communications took over from the old hardware-centric model. Between Microsoft and Cisco, the UC hype machine has only accelerated since then.
This morning’s keynotes came from Lou D’Ambrosio of Avaya and Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft. The theme that was common to both of them was what D’Ambrosio described as the “democratization of UC” and Pall described as empowering all users, not just the few. He used the analogy of attempting to reduce global warming by making every Rolls Royce a hybrid to argue that providing UC to a handful of employees was unlikely to transform any business. D’Ambrosio took his electoral metaphor further by sharing clips of the remaining presidential candidates ostensibly endorsing Avaya’s vision for UC - a clever and entertaining move. He also asked the audience which candidate they favored - Obama and McCain got roughly equally loud cheers in this most unscientific of straw polls, while Clinton merited barely a smattering of claps.
The democracy vision feels a little premature. It is true that in the IPT world, although many companies have deployed IP to some extent, most have not deployed it to all users, and therefore extending it to the masses is the next logical step. But UC is still at least one step behind. It hasn’t been deployed at all in most companies, and the first step is very much to establish an aristocracy of UC power users rather than to launch straight into a democracy, to stretch D’Ambrosio’s analogy. Most companies are unconvinced of the merits of UC and the return on investment they will achieve, and so want to try a few pilots and trials, just as they did with IPT. That is where the focus should be today, with democracy following much later.
Pall’s presentation at least provided a compelling argument for why eventually empowering all users with UC was a worthy vision. He talked about the transformative power of UC - both in companies and in people’s lives. To illustrate the latter point he shared the example of a hospital which has used Microsoft’s Roundtable videoconferencing solution to allow a young cancer patient to virtually attend school from his hospital room. He gave IT managers a reason (or several) why enabling UC was more than just switching on a few cool features for some power users, and encouragement to see its full potential. Again, I think the fulfilment is several years away, and this vision should not distract from the reality of the first few tough wins today, but there’s no harm in pinning up the democracy goal as a long-term objective.
Looking forward to more interesting speeches and meetings tomorrow.
Just had an intensely frustrating experience trying to activate a copy of Microsoft Office OneNote. I have been through quite a number of laptops one way or another over the last few months, and thus have reached the maximum number of activations I’m permitted (five). So now, whenever I install this program on a new laptop (as I’ve had to several times on my new MacBook) I am forced to call into the helpdesk (which appears to be in India) and get them to activate it for me.
This involves entering or saying a 54-digit string of numbers before I can even speak to a human being, and then having to repeat some of those numbers to the human being, before they give me a 42-digit string of numbers which I have to type in in order to activate my product.
This latest time I am forced to reactivate because I activated OneNote within the Fusion environment and am now trying to use the same instance of OneNote from within the BootCamp environment. This apparently triggered a “hardware change” which necessitates reactivation (I’m guessing this provision is designed to prevent people copying an installation of the software from one computer to another, which of course I haven’t done - this is actually the very same installation on the same spot on my hard drive).
So I called Microsoft for the third time in a week to activate my product. I find that typing the numbers in is quicker than speaking them, but unfortunately I went too quickly for the system and so it put my through to a human being. He then needed me to speak them to him, but had so much background noise in the call center that he was unable to hear me, so it took ages.
Once we finally completed the process, he asked me what product I was trying to activate. When I told him he told me that their servers (running Windows, no doubt) for activating Office products were down, and would I please call back in half an hour. Unbelievable. Good old Microsoft - a joy to work with from start to finish.
I bought a MacBook a week and a half ago and have been playing with it since with a view to making it my main work computer. Since we normally run Windows XP and Microsoft Office, this meant I needed to have some form of access to those Office applications. I already own a copy of Microsoft Office and have found that the Mac versions of the Office applications can be problematic in some cases, including the fact that Entourage is an imperfect substitute for Outlook, so I decided to go the route of adding a Windows OS to the MacBook instead. I read up about the two main virtualisation options - Fusion (from VMware) and Parallels, and eventually decided to go with Fusion, though by all accounts the two are pretty similar in terms of performance and functionality. I also purchased a copy of Vista Home Premium - I was going to have to buy some version of Windows anyway and I had been curious to try out Vista after all the criticism of it since its launch.
So I’ve now been running Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard side by side for a few days, and have a good way to compare the two. Vista’s performance has been impaired by the fact that I’ve been running it on a virtual machine instead of as a booting OS, so the “Aero” graphics features of Vista have been missing in action because Fusion doesn’t allow the Vista virtual machine full access to my graphics capabilities. In addition, I’ve had network connectivity issues and also a relatively recent problem with windows minimising and maximising at random while I’m working in them.These things aside, Vista hasn’t been that bad. The constant security nagging is easily my biggest beef (you click on an application or a component of Control Panel and are asked whether you want to continue, every time - didn’t I just say that’s what I wanted to do?), as well as being told periodically that I need permission (what permission? from whom? and how the heck do I get it?) to move a file from point A to point B on the hard drive, within the Windows environment.
These are serious flaws, and from what I can tell (see below) they’re not solvable, even outside the Fusion environment. There are some changes from XP and other previous editions in terms of naming (the word “My” is dropped from Documents, Videos, Music, Downloads etc.), structure (the Start Menu is now kept in place rather than expanding to the right as you drill down into the folder structure) and functionality (Vista has built-in Contacts, Calendar and Mail applications). So there’s the usual learning curve that you have with a new OS, but none of these things is either dramatically difficult to get to grips with or dramatically more useful than the old way of doing things. You get the sense that Microsoft has learned from Apple that new releases need new cool stuff, but they’ve tinkered at the edges with things that don’t really matter instead of really making the experience truly better.
The new Mac OS, on the other hand, feels like an incremental improvement, but a real one in certain ways, over Tiger. The search function is better, the whole Time Machine concept is a good one, although I don’t have a separate hard drive large enough to test it, the iLife applications are better than in the previous iteration, and overall it feels like the OS has moved forward in small but measurable ways. The whole option of running two operating systems on the same machine is, of course, a huge bonus too, and includes the built-in Boot Camp option of running either OS from bootup as well as the Fusion and Parallels paid-for virtualisation options.
Today, I installed Vista again, this time using Boot Camp. I had been frustrated with the limitations on Vista’s new features imposed by running it in the Fusion environment, but also by the nagging network connectivity and other problems I was experiencing. I now have the full functionality of Vista (Aero included) in the Boot Camp version, and will likely delete the original Fusion virtualisation and replace it with a virtualisation of the Boot Camp version (which will still be crippled but will work well enough for the most part when I don’t want to go Windows-only).
It’s been an interesting exercise in comparing and contrasting the Windows and Apple experiences. Apple really seems to have improved things, while Microsoft seems merely to have changed things, including in some cases for the worse, although mostly in an indifferent direction. However, the mere fact that I’m virtually forced still to use Windows and Microsoft applications because they are the standard at work is the biggest reason why Microsoft survives and thrives despite all this. It works well enough and, for now at least, it’s still dominant.
Following on from my post about Wordpress being down a few days ago, Pingdom has put out some statistics on downtime for various social networks in 2008 so far:
Interesting that Yahoo! 360 does best, while Windows Live Spaces is second worst - which would be more likely to follow the other should the merger go through? Given that Microsoft’s propensity for “downtime” extends into the offline world with the frequent crashes of its desktop operating systems and software, that seems a hard trend to buck, but who knows?
Blanket coverage everywhere this week of the Yahoo! Microsoft saga, and specifically on Yahoo!’s rejection of the offer this morning. Lots of coverage too of Yahoo!’s perceived alternatives, which include outsourcing search to Google, merging with AOL or News Corp, or being bought out by private equity funds.
At this point it’s beginning to look like Yahoo! is adopting an “anyone but Microsoft” strategy, in much the way some voters were described to be keen to vote for “anyone but Bush” in the 2004 elections. But the problem with that strategy, in politics as well as business, is that there’s no guarantee the alternatives are any better. The kind of blindness that comes from making negative decisions - not to do something rather than to do something - can lead to worse decisions than the very thing they’re trying to avoid.
No-one in their right mind believes merging with AOL is the answer (AOL Time Warner is of course itself the ultimate example of why such mega-mergers are a terrible idea), and no-one really believes News Corp is interested. Outsourcing search to Google would only provide a temporary benefit in terms of revenues but wouldn’t solve any of the long-term structural issues at Yahoo!. Perhaps the perception of giving Microsoft one in the eye is the biggest attraction to that strategy, but of course that goes back to my original premise.
The fact is, we all know Microsoft taking over Yahoo! will be a disaster in many ways - especially for employees of the acquired company. But it’s not at all clear that any of the alternatives are any better, and certainly many shareholders reasonably believe that this is their best hope of getting out of the current mess at Yahoo! with a reasonable price for their shares.
Yang & Co. have demonstrated that they’re not able to turn the business around, treading too gingerly at a time when the company needs some major changes. There is - I think - a close parallel here with Gary Forsee’s last few months at Sprint: the man who had been behind much of its success in previous years was unable to remove himself far enough from the strategy of yesterday to make the right moves for today and tomorrow. Yang is arguably too similar to Semel in this way, and of course has an even longer history with the company than Semel did. Yahoo! needs a Dan Hesse type who’s far enough removed from Yahoo!’s recent history to be able to make the tough choices and really make a difference. But all this is likely too late at this point. Microsoft’s latest salvo suggests it’s not going to back down and offer the higher price Yahoo! is suggesting it should, but leaves the door open with the following sentence, which may of course merely be threatening a more hostile approach over the heads of the board and directly to shareholders:
Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.
Ultimately, though, Yahoo! is fighting a losing battle in seeking alternatives where none really exist. The last hope is for Yang to make a convincing plea to shareholders, detailing his plan for turning the business around and providing clear milestones and metrics he wants to be measured by, as a way of buying more time. But he arguably already bungled that chance in the call which took place immediately before the offer was received. Much as Yang and the rest of the Yahoos might want anyone but Microsoft, it’s hard to imagine their future resting with anyone but Microsoft at this point.
Well, after months of speculation it’s finally happened - Microsoft has made an offer for Yahoo!. From the official press release and the letter to the Yahoo! board enclosed in it, it’s clear that discussions have been going on since late 2006, but that in early 2007 the Yahoo! board shut Microsoft down since it believed it was better off going it alone with its new strategy.
In the end, of course, the company’s fortunes have worsened rather than improved, and so Microsoft is back with what can only be described as a seriously aggressive offer - both in terms of the 62% premium on Yahoo!’s share price and the tone of the letter. It lectures Yahoo!’s board on the woeful state the company is in, its dire prospects, and without naming Google explicitly, makes clear that the only way the two companies can make headway against it is by becoming a single company. The big question is whether Yang feels any differently from Semel (whose departure from the board yesterday now seems likely to have been in part a response to - or the removal of the final barrier to) this acquisition.
Perhaps this also explains Yang’s less aggressive than forecast moves on the job front this week - in anticipation of this deal (which no doubt was signalled in advance through informal channels by Microsoft), he may have decided he was better off keeping Yahoo! together until it was clear where its future lay. At a 62% premium it would be hard to argue that anything other than accepting the offer would be in the best interests of shareholders, who are unlikely to see that kind of growth in the share price anytime soon. Whether it’s in the best interests of customers, employees or the other assets the company has is another question entirely.
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About me
I’m Jan Dawson, and I spend so much time reading and thinking about technology that if I didn’t have a place to let it all out I’d probably explode. Hence this blog. Go here for more about me.
All views expressed here are mine and not those of any employer or other group to which I belong.
The conference itself has evolved in interesting ways during the time I’ve been coming. Two years ago, Cisco made its 
Just had an intensely frustrating experience trying to activate a copy of Microsoft Office 
So I’ve now been running Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard side by side for a few days, and have a good way to compare the two. Vista’s performance has been impaired by the fact that I’ve been running it on a virtual machine instead of as a booting OS, so the “
