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?