Bill Gates's “Flame”: How the Microsoft Founder Spent an Hour Fighting to Install Movie Maker

The Internal Tech Emails project, which publishes the corporate correspondence of tech companies drawn from public court records, has pulled from Comes v. Microsoft (2007) one of the most famous internal documents in Microsoft's history — an angry email from Bill Gates dated January 15, 2003, with a telling subject line: “Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame.”

The trigger was Gates's attempt to do something utterly mundane — download Movie Maker and buy the Digital Plus package. What should have taken a couple of minutes stretched out over more than an hour and turned, by his own description, not into a download but into a puzzle.

A chronicle of misery

The Microsoft.com site kept timing out again and again, and when it did load, it responded with delays of several seconds. Search was no help: a query for “moviemaker” returned nothing, and only a tip from colleagues that it had to be typed as “movie maker,” with a space, got things moving. From there the system shunted him off to Windows Update, demanded that he download control components, showed him “scary”-looking dialogs, forced him to download 17 megabytes of “critical” updates and reboot the machine — which caused Gates to lose his entire Outlook state.

He was especially incensed by the list of installed programs — the one place in the system, he said, that made any sense, and which was now cluttered with entries like “Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1…3” and nameless hotfixes bearing cryptic Q-article numbers. Movie Maker itself never showed up in the list at all. The attempt to buy Digital Plus failed as well: the registration form stubbornly wiped out the data he had entered every time he made the slightest error.

Gates summed it up tersely: over an hour of madness, a ruined program list, an awful site — and he never got Movie Maker or the Plus package.

The team's reaction

The email set off an internal thread that was, in places, no less telling than the complaint itself. Managers acknowledged that “Bill's irritation is not without merit,” but then spent several days figuring out who was supposed to “own” the problem, torn between the product team, Windows Update, and marketing. One of the engineers, Jan Mercer, honestly ran down the accumulated woes: WU can't promote new downloads, “critical” updates often aren't critical at all, and the flood of fixes is so heavy that he himself has long since been ignoring them.

Two decades on, this exchange reads like an eternal monument to the gulf between those who design a system and those who use it — even when the user happens to own the company.

Source: Hacker News