Bill Gates 2003 Email faked by Steve Jobs!
Have you all had a nice, enjoyable read of this?:
Classic Clips: Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft Over XP over at Gizmodo.
It’s replete with a carefully manicured forum of breathlessly drippy Mac fan people (mainly boys) loving every second of Bill Gate’s very eloquent ‘alleged’ feedback memo to the Windows dev arm about the user experience of trying to install Windows Movie Maker. I found it amusing too, but I never believed for a second Gates wrote that mail.
Go and search online, a cursory glance will give you the impression it’s legit – down to the faked interview with Bill where the guy shows him a printed version of the memo, and then Gates shrugs and says he sends emails like that everyday because it’s his job.
Erroneous!
The email was in fact written by Steve Jobs as a favour to Bill. One of the informal clauses of the contract between Apple and MS when MS bought 5% of Apple to help them out of a tight patch, was that Steve was to assist Bill with improving Windows usability. Of course, the shareholders weren’t to know, nor the boards of either company because of the ruckus, as you would expect. According to Steve, it was that or a solid tea-bagging from Bill.
Think about it – if Gates really did have that eloquence when it came to describing an appalling user experience, don’t you think that Windows would have been a whole lot better? Why else would his executive team be so incompetent when it comes to UI? It’s because Bill never gave a rats arse about the UI. He left the UI decisions to a bunch of money grubbing pricks, so self centred they never cared if their stuff makes your life miserable.
You can believe it or not, it makes no difference to me. But re-read it and instead of thinking Gates is telling it, imagine it’s Jobsy dealing with the user experience after a nice fat doober. It then makes perfect sense.